“But who wins the match?!” That will likely be the question on every moviegoer’s lips as they leave Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty, funny tennis drama Challengers. The film climaxes with a winner-takes-all final between Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) on the hard courts of New Rochelle, New York. As an audience, we’re unusually invested in the result of this match: If journeyman Patrick wins, he’s guaranteed a spot in the U.S. Open. If multi–Grand Slam–winning Art wins, he might kick-start his career revival. But really these two old friends are playing for honor and, it seems, for the heart of Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, Art’s wife and coach, the mercurial Tashi (Zendaya). In a way, they all win, because for the first time in years, they finally lose themselves in the pure beauty of tennis, but in another, more crucial way: Who wins the match?!
The final point we see, in the third-set tiebreaker, ends in a … very unusual way. I play and watch a lot of tennis and I can confidently say I have never seen a similar event in another tennis match. But frustratingly, we never get to learn how the film’s tennis umpire (played by the unflappable Darnell Appling, Zendaya’s longtime assistant) calls the point, and the whole sequence appears constructed to leave the question up in the air. Still, I wanted to know how an actual tennis umpire would rule on a play like this, so I telephoned David Hanzes, section chair of officials for the U.S. Tennis Association’s Eastern Division. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity—and, obviously, contains major spoilers. (David hasn’t yet seen the movie but said he didn’t mind hearing how it ends.)
Dan Kois: Tell me how long you’ve been a tennis official.
David Hanzes: I’ve been officiating for about 20 years.
What kinds of matches do you umpire?
A little of everything. Junior events, college, high school. I’ve done pro work. I’ve worked the U.S. Open.
Have you been in the chair for a tournament final? What’s that like?
Certainly there’s a little bit of pressure that’s involved there. You want to do your best to ensure the match is played in the fairest conditions to both players on the court. You have to be very focused, alert, paying attention to what’s going on, and in control of the match.
OK, let me lay out the situation at the end of Challengers. We’re in the third set of a three-set match between Patrick and Art. It’s a challenger tournament final. Patrick is a journeyman; Art is a tennis star. The match has had some very unusual things happen already. There’s been an underhand serve, some discipline issues, some profanity across the net. As an umpire, what do you do to defuse a situation where players are very personally antagonistic to each other?
You need to know when to step in and when to let things ride. You want to be the first to react to a situation, and react so it doesn’t escalate. At the professional level, we’re a little more lenient than in a junior or college event. Sometimes a warning or a soft caution is appropriate to control what we call borderline behavior.
Once the third-set score is tied, six games to six, they go to a tiebreak. Art serves the first point of the tiebreaker. They end up exchanging volleys in the frontcourt, and Patrick pops one up almost directly over the net.
OK.
Let me try to draw as clear of a picture as I can. Art soars into the air for the overhead. He leaps so aggressively that he flies over the net and lands on top of Patrick.
[Laughs]
You’re the umpire. How do you score this point?!
First of all, the player is not allowed to reach over the net to hit the ball. The ball has to come over the net before he strikes it.
So if Art slams the ball before it crosses the net, he loses the point. We don’t quite see exactly where the ball is, but let’s say for the sake of argument that he makes contact on his side of the net but his momentum carries him all the way over to the other side.
There’s also a rule that you cannot go over into the other player’s side while the point is still in play. And you can’t touch your opponent. The question would be: Where is the ball when he makes contact with his opponent?
We don’t see where it goes, but it’s a huge overhead smash, straight down.
It would probably bounce pretty high up in the air.
So probably it hasn’t bounced a second time, or flown out of the court, or anything else that would end the point, before Art lands on Patrick.
In that case Art would lose the point.
Now we have no idea which one of them will win the match, right? Because this is only the first point of the tiebreaker. How do tiebreakers work?
It’s a 7-point tiebreak. Now Patrick is up, 1–0. The first player to 7 points, by two, wins the third set and thus the match.
Is it possible that you might make this a disciplinary issue? Art doesn’t exactly attack Patrick, but it does seem a little extreme. He’s already gotten a warning and been docked a point. If you were the umpire, would you penalize him another point, or even the whole tiebreaker, for doing that?
Based on the way you explained it to me, I would not. Hey, it’s part of the game. Players play hard! They run wide, they run into the net, they jump across the net sometimes.
They do?
Sure, sometimes. Just so it wasn’t aggressive, like bounding and going over with his fist toward his opponent.
No, they hug.
It’s sort of the same as if someone puts up a weak lob and their opponent smashes it and it hits the other player. That’s just part of the game. They need to get out of the way—or not put up a weak lob.
Does it matter to you, as an umpire, if one of them slept with the other one’s wife last night?
[Laughs] Well, it certainly should not. We try to be fair when we go in. I’ve never had that happen before. But I have had players who’ve had bad reputations, or who I’ve disciplined the day before, and I always try to leave that out of my mind. Every match is new, and everyone should start with a clean slate.
