With the 2024 US Open just around the corner, it’s a great time for tennis nerds like myself to look back at recent tennis history and examine the impact of the 2020 US Open, one of the most historic Grand Slam tournaments of all time. It was the first major international sporting event to be held after the worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and certainly the biggest media event of any kind held in New York City after the outbreak at that point in time. It was also notable for the ways in which the athletes used their platforms to spread awareness of social justice causes. Love, 2020 recaps much of that abbreviated year in tennis, and it’s a highly admirable documentary for its willingness to question some of the decisions made, and also for featuring doubles and wheelchair tennis players making a global impact.
Many high-level players are interviewed here, including but not limited to Americans Frances Tiafoe, Kristie Ahn, and Bradley Klahn, Indian doubles champion Rohan Bopanna, and wheelchair tennis stars Diede de Groot, Yui Kamiji, and Stéphane Houdet. Though the structure of the film does follow a typical sort of talking-head formula, if the subject matter interests you, you will never be bored. A rhythm is established fairly early on, taking us swiftly from the beginning of 2020 with the Australian Open into New York City’s early struggles with the virus. As smaller tournaments in the tennis world are canceled, the sport looks toward the NBA bubble as a potential model for how the US Open could be played safely. Still, with no crowd, an element of magic is lost. Ultimately, players and staff banded together to put on what became an outstanding couple weeks of tennis, and a statement for the sports world in general.
One of the ways the documentary interrogates the event critically is by asking whether it was appropriate for well-paid athletes to be flown from around the world to New York at a time when so many were struggling and transportation was scarce. In addition, the film asks whether it was right for an event such as the US Open to be put on at that time, given the amount of testing kits and other such supplies needed when the event itself was not vital. As both the film and its interviewees seem to acknowledge, there are no easy answers to these questions. Like everyone else in 2020, everyone involved on the ground level seemed to be trying to do their highest sense of right.
Of course, COVID-19 wasn’t the only social issue on the US Open’s plate in 2020. Apparently, special accommodations had to be made for athletes such as Frances Tiafoe and Naomi Osaka to wear gear printed with victims’ names and slogans associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. The fact that at this late date, tennis’ governing bodies did not automatically allow these kinds of things on principle is absurd. As the film so rightly points out, tennis is perhaps the greatest example of an international sport with an international activist and political reach. There has always been a tension between this history and the stuffy, elitist vibes the sport has accrued over the decades that makes tennis as historically fascinating as it is viscerally entertaining. That tension is at the heart of what Love, 2020 explores.
For a tennis fanatic like myself, Love, 2020 doesn’t say anything new in a broad sense, but between its behind-the-scenes narrative arc and its effort to put the sport in a historical context, it may win over some new fans. I want the audience for the sport to always keep growing, because I genuinely love it. How baseball fans feel about bases loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth moments is how I feel about a tiebreak in the fifth set. | George Napper
Love, 2020 is now available on Amazon Prime Video
