IN HONOR OF THE US OPEN, LET’S REVISIT THE SEXY, SWEATY GENIUS OF “CHALLENGERS”

The 2026 US Open is here, which means New York is about to spend several weeks pretending we all understand what a break point is. For me, what makes the US Open especially interesting is it gives me an excuse to revisit Challengers.

Ironically Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes got the idea for the movie while watching the 2018 US Open final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, fascinated by the rule preventing players from openly communicating with their coaches during a match. He started wondering what might happen if someone on court desperately needed to communicate something much bigger than tennis.

Apparently the answer was Zendaya, marital warfare, one extremely loaded churro, and two emotionally repressed men spending thirteen years fighting over someone who's fighting for something bigger than them both.

SPOILERS FOR "CHALLENGERS" FROM THIS POINT

How often does this happen? Going after the same girl?

Two years later, Challengers remains near-perfect.

It’s horny, sweaty, petty, stylish, a little ridiculous, and completely uninterested in behaving itself. Luca Guadagnino took a sport built around two people standing on opposite sides of a net and turned it into a movie about three people who desperately need to maybe try therapy.

Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy whose career ends after a catastrophic knee injury. Years later, she’s coaching—and married to—Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a champion she enters in a low-level Challenger event in New Rochelle to help him rebuild his confidence.

Unfortunately for everyone, Art’s former best friend Patrick Zweig (resident internet boyfriend Josh O'Connor) is also there: broke, playing in the tournament too, and, inconveniently, Tashi’s ex.

And that's technically the plot.

But Challengers is no more interested in who wins the tournament than Tashi is interested in pretending any of these people matter. The movie’s real sport is desire.

From the second teenage Art and Patrick see Tashi play, they’re cooked. She’s everything they want to be. Focused. Ferocious. Certain. She talks about tennis like a religious experience, describing those rare matches where two players are so locked into each other that they disappear and only the game remains.

Art and Patrick hear this and immediately decide they should compete to hook up with her. The famous hotel-room scene that follows is the movie handing us its entire point before we fully understand it. Tashi gets Art and Patrick kissing her, then each other, then sits back to watch what she started. The scene became shorthand for Challengers’ supposed love triangle, but “triangle” undersells it.

Everybody wants everybody. Yet nobody knows what anybody is really competing for.

They think they’re competing for Tashi. Tashi, meanwhile, only has eyes for tennis.

That’s the true genius of Challengers: for all the sex, jealousy and extremely charged snack consumption, Tashi’s biggest love story isn’t with either man. It’s with the game. Which is what makes what happens next so brutal.

At Stanford, Tashi already has the Nike deal, the hype, the future. Then one bad landing wrecks her knee and, in seconds, all of it is gone.

She was supposed to be the star. Instead, she has to watch. And Tashi Duncan isn't built for passive observation. So she finds other ways to stay close to the thing she lost.

I Want You To Be My Coach.

Here’s the thing: these two little white boys? They love Tashi telling them what to do. They always have. They love Tashi whipping them into a confused little frenzy. And her loss of tennis doesn’t change that for them. Only for her.

So she goes for Patrick first. He’s wildly talented and allergic to being coached, which naturally makes Tashi want to coach him even more. She sees the player he could be if he would just stop being Patrick for five consecutive minutes. She tries to shape his game. He resents her trying to tell him how to play. They fight. And soon afterward her injury effectively ends both her career and their relationship.

Art's next. Art is different. Art listens. He lets Tashi shape his game, and together they build the career she can no longer have herself: Grand Slam titles, endorsements, money, prestige. She becomes his coach, his wife, the mother of his child.

And when we meet Tashi in the present day, by any normal measure, she's won. Sitting in the stands at the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger in New Rochelle, she looks like elite tennis personified: Cartier on the wrist, shirt dress crisp, Aston Martin deal secured. She has power. A superstar husband. A daughter who likes Spider-Verse. She's advanced spectacularly in the world thanks to her own brain and Art’s body—and, every so often, Patrick’s body, but we’ll get to that.

But none of those wins are hers.

After all, what is Tashi’s relentless pursuit of power and achievement if not a thirteen-year attempt to outrun one awful truth: her life has been a tragedy, and some part of her is terrified she’ll never actually overcome it.

That may be the biggest difference between Tashi and Art. Art's spent most of his life just wanting Tashi. Now he has her. Tashi, however, wants to win. And she wants to play good fucking tennis. A gorgeous house, a successful marriage and generational wealth are all very nice, sure, but for her they can never replace the high of absolutely smoking somebody on a tennis court.

And now Art wants out.

He tells Tashi he’s ready to retire, and later we see him asleep beside their daughter — a tiny preview of the life waiting for him when tennis is over. Doting father. Probably well rested. Sounds pretty good.

But what does Tashi get out of the deal?

The man she has spent years turning into a champion is ready to walk away from the thing she'd give almost anything to still be able to do. To Tashi, he might as well be announcing he’s joining a pickleball league.

Which is also why Patrick showing up again is such a nightmare.

His professional life is currently being held together by motel Wi-Fi, loose change and audacity, but he’s still playing. He’s still chasing the game even though the game has given him almost nothing back. As a result, Patrick reminds Tashi of the raw, unpredictable version of tennis she loved before everything went wrong. And because Challengers refuses to let anybody process a feeling normally, all of this gets expressed through sex.

Or, more often, almost-sex.

For a movie that developed a reputation for being outrageously horny, very little actually happens. Instead we get sweat. Thighs. Tashi staring from the stands. And two dudes, one churro.

Even when Tashi and Patrick finally sleep together again, it comes with a proposition first: throw the match. She needs Art to win badly enough to ask her ex to deliberately lose to her husband. Patrick, being Patrick, can't simply say yes or no like a normal person, so naturally the conversation ends in adultery. I mean, why have a straightforward conversation when you can turn it into a psychosexual hostage negotiation.

This is a game about winning the points that matter.

Over the course of Challengers, Tashi cheats on her fiancé with his ex–best friend while wearing said fiancé’s dead grandmother’s ring. Years later, she cheats on her now-husband with the same ex–best friend in front of a billboard featuring her husband’s 20-foot-tall face, moments after spitting in said ex’s face and not long after cuddling with him in the backseat of the Honda he lives in. And all of this happens because she’s trying to convince him to throw a tennis match so her exhausted husband will keep playing tennis.

Even in Chanel espadrilles and a $2 million bob, there comes a point when you have to ask: maybe Tashi ain’t shit?

But I have to disagree.

There’s that famous line, often attributed to Oscar Wilde but perhaps best delivered by Janelle Monáe: Everything is about sex except sex, which is about power.

Oscar Wilde never met Tashi Duncan.

For Tashi, everything is about tennis. Even sex.

During the final match, Patrick lets Art know what happened with Tashi using an old serving signal between them: the same one he used years earlier to confirm he’d slept with her the first time. Art understands immediately. Tashi doesn’t. And suddenly, finally, the men stop playing polite and start playing each other.

The rally becomes violent and ecstatic. Art flies toward the net. Patrick catches him. For a split second, the former best friends are practically embracing above the court, grinning like they’ve remembered something about themselves that neither has been able to access for years.

And Tashi loses her fucking mind. Tashi’s entire story has been about trying to get back inside the game. Spending years coaching, scheming and controlling her way toward the feeling she lost when her knee hit that court. And then, for one rally, she gets it. For those few seconds, she isn’t watching two men fight over her. She’s watching tennis. Good fucking tennis.

Tennis may never recover.