The most shocking moment of the 2024 psychosexual tennis film Challengers is not the traumatic knee injury, any frame from the quasi-sex scenes, or the passionate rally with which the movie concludes. It’s the reveal that one of the characters, American ATP tennis player Art Donaldson, has won the French Open twice, a stat so foreign to US men we must have a sequel simply for Donaldson to explain how he found success on clay.
No American man has lifted the trophy – or even made the semi-finals – on the Parisian clay courts since Andre Agassi did so in 1999. And at the time of Challengers’ release, no American man had made the quarter-finals since (bet you won’t guess this one) Agassi in 2003. American women have a storied history on clay – Chris Evert’s seven Roland-Garros titles and 125-match winning streak on the surface are legend; Serena Williams won Roland-Garros three times; Coco Gauff goes deep there every year and is back in the semi-finals this time – but the men, outside a brief burst in the 1980s and 1990s, have had little luck in the Open era. The 21st-century union between American men and Parisian clay courts is, somehow, more distant and fraught than Art’s relationship with his wife, Tashi, in Challengers.
