Wimbledon season is here in all its glory: the white uniforms, the strawberries and cream, the thwack of tennis rackets hitting balls over the net.
It’s an idyllic image, but in reality the world of tennis (as with most professional sports) is more cut-throat than this. Players train for years to make it into the big leagues; most don’t manage it. And aside from injury, stress, and burnout, there’s another more insidious danger to contend with: when it comes to your coach, how close is too close? As the new Prime Video show Fifteen-Love shows, the lines can be distressingly blurred.
Fifteen Love begins its story five years ago. Seventeen-year-old tennis ace Justine Pierce (Ella Lily Hyland) is getting ready for the semi-finals of the French Open; hyped up by her coach Glenn (Aidan Turner), she moves in and kisses him on the mouth. He pushes her away roughly.
Wait, what? Still reeling from that, we then watch Justine enter the court and start to play, but something’s wrong. Bruising creeps up her wrist; she howls in pain. Five minutes later, Justine loses the match, and then her entire career, when it transpires the injury was a severe bone fracture.
Smash cut to the present day. Time has not been kind to Justine, who is now a sports physiotherapist at her old sporting academy, Longwood. Glenn, for his part, is a superstar tennis coach – but that all comes crashing down when he returns to Longwood and Justine accuses him of sexual assault.
Put like that, it’s a classic he said/she said story, but writer Hania Elkington doesn’t make things that clear-cut. Justine’s mental instability is brought up numerous times by her mother and friends: she’s never been the same since crashing and burning out of the French Open. She spends her nights bingeing on alcohol and her days resentfully turning up late for work. From the off, the police are sceptical about her claims.
Glenn, for his part, is a tad creepy, sure, but he’s got a cast-iron alibi… at least, so he says. Plus, he’s internationally famous! And fame, as we know, can help to cover up a multitude of sins.
Even before the bombshell is dropped, things are tense. Numerous scenes from the past are played and then played back from another person’s perspective, creating a shifting kaleidoscope of truths and half-truths that slowly turn the heat up on Glenn and reveal that perhaps he’s not as innocent as he seems. Hyland, for her part, is magnificent as the troubled Justine: her eyes pierce right through the TV screen and hold you there like a fish on a line.
Turner is equally good, playing his usual brand of good-looking heartthrob but this time dialling up the sleaze to 11. No striding mournfully across Cornish cliffs for Glenn; instead, he’s reduced to increasingly frantic schmoozing, back-slapping and denials as he attempts to sink Justine’s allegations once and for all, creating a toxic game of one-upmanship.
As becomes more and more obvious, the tiny, interconnected world of tennis is also the perfect breeding ground for potential wrongdoing. Young prodigies are tutored one-on-one from a young age by their coaches; long days on the road without parental supervision create grey areas where transgressions could conceivably happen. And as the police tell a disbelieving Justine in episode two, the legal loophole allowing sports coaches to have sex with 16- and 17-year olds in their care was only closed in 2021.
In all, it’s a scalding indictment of a culture where money often matters more than the young stars earning it – and it’s best illustrated by the way tennis’s elite close ranks around Glenn. In the world of Fifteen-Love, scandal is to be covered up at all costs.
The end result is a fascinating, disheartening piece of television. At the end of the day, who’s really telling the truth? Actually, it doesn’t matter. For the inhabitants of Fifteen-Love, winning is the most important thing, regardless of who’s in the right.
