It was the early 1980s. The setting was Marin County, an affluent Northern California community. Faith, distracted by the disintegration of her marriage to George Dunlap, had forgotten that she’d arranged to have a tennis court built on her property. But there at her door was the hunky contractor, Frank Henderson. Inevitably, Faith and Frank commenced a romance. To celebrate the completion of Frank’s work, Faith held a party—at which point George drove his car through the court, completely destroying it. This happened in Shoot the Moon, a 1982 film starring Diane Keaton and Albert Finney as the estranged couple.
What, by 1982, had tennis come to symbolize? Affluence? Indulgence? Anger?
Only five years earlier, tennis had been the yenta in another film starring Keaton. In one of the decade’s signature works, 1977’s Annie Hall, Keaton had met her love interest Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) on a tennis court.
Woody Allen read the zeitgeist better than he read The New York Review of Books. In 1971, seven tennis tournaments aired on TV. Five years later, that figure was 70. A Harris survey taken mid-decade revealed that tennis’ popularity as a spectator sport was exceeded only by football, baseball, and basketball. Americans Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, and Arthur Ashe became crossover icons. Thoroughly in the mix were Australians Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Evonne Goolagong; Sweden’s Bjorn Bjorg; and Romanian Ilie Nastase. Other supernovas burst later in the decade: pigtailed Tracy Austin, tempestuous John McEnroe, and an outspoken lefty who’d defected, Martina Navratilova.