Break Point (series) on Netflix: A brilliant look into the harsh realities of tennis

While I do not really keep up with tennis nor would I consider myself a fan I am usually intrigued by sport documentaries.

At some point in our lives we have seen players apparently losing their damn minds on the court and this goes back a really long ways. With Jon McEnroe's "You can NOT be serious" outbursts in the 80's to the almost regular occurance of modern players shouting at refs, smashing rackets, and even shouting at fans, the stress of this game is pretty obvious. On the other side though I kind of look at these people as being rich prima donnas that aren't really deserving of sympathy. I suppose that is really easy to do when you look at someone that plays a sport that many people use to relax and they get paid millions of dollars for it.

This very well-made documentary takes a hard look at the inside of tennis and how most of the participants don't actually make tons of money and how stressful it can be for the top players. As they say multiple times in this series, you get used to losing... everyone who goes to these events is going to lose except for one person.

When you consider this, and the fact that these people have worked very hard for their entire lives, perhaps it becomes a bit more understandable how so many of these stars end up quitting, even in the primes.

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one thing that I believe most people are going to need to know before they go into this is to not allow the first episode scare you off from watching the rest of them. I say this because I nearly did. I am extremely sick of Netflix turning almost anything that they release into some sort of political or social issue agenda, most notably how Netflix series seem to ALWAYS find a way to turn anything into some sort of lesson about racism.

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They nearly chased me away from watching what is overall a VERY GOOD series by focusing on Nick Kyrgios in the first episode. While they mostly focus on his rise as the "bad boy of tennis" they just can't help themselves by weaving in accusations of lifelong racism that he faced based on his skin color and the fact that his mother is Malaysian. They don't even mention the fact that his mother was a member of the Malaysian Royal Family because that wouldn't add much credibility to their story of Nick growing up and succeeding despite all odds being against him.

It's kind of annoying that he would even be featured because his inclusion, let alone an entire episode dedicated to him almost exclusively doesn't make sense when you consider that he isn't even ranked in the top 100 globally.

Just let that be a warning to NOT give up on this series because of episode 1. I think that if you are annoyed by Netflix always weaving some sort of social issue brainwashing into all of their programming I would recommend that you simply skip episode 1 altogether because the rest of them, as far as I can tell, are not like that.

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one of the major things that I really appreciate about this series is that they were filming while the events they focus on were happening and there is no way that they possibly could have known what the outcomes would have been. In many instances, the person that they are following crashes out pretty early in the tournament in question. Therefore, we have to imagine that Netflix was actually following many of the competitors in an effort to get the perspective of winners and losers and of course, in any tournament the losers are going to dramatically outnumber the winners.

The pace of this show is fast and never boring because they don't get too bogged down in interviews and will switch back and forth with stock footage, current (at the time they were filming it) tournament footage, as well as interviews with the greats of the sport past and present.

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They give near equal time to the men and women's division and this is fine in tennis since the pressure is immense regardless. Netflix conveniently never addresses the fact that women get the same payouts as the men do, even though in most tournaments that men are required to play best of 5 sets, whereas the women almost always play best of 3.

I learned a lot about how incredibly stressful being a tennis pro can be and now I have a lot more respect for the athletes than I did before. I naively presumed that all of these people were just spoiled millionaires throwing fits on TV when if you truly dig into it the way that Netflix did on this one, the lives of these athletes are much more stressful than almost any other athlete's.

Should I watch it?

I'm not really even a fan of most sports and rarely watch tennis. Considering this, the fact that I found this series to be extremely binge worthy say a lot about how it is put together. I found it informative, exhilarating, and just a lot of fun. It's also kind of funny that 8 of the people they focus on have fallen victim to the "Netflix curse" and were eliminated "early" from the Australian Open, which was going on when this was dropped on Netflix.

It's a really good show. Probably one of the best if not THE best documentary series available on Netflix right now. Get out there and watch it while you can!