On demand: "Love Means Zero"

From Showtime's documentary arm, a portrait of a tricky subject. 2017's Love Means Zero sees filmmaker Jason Kohn profiling Nick Bollettieri, founding father of the Nick Bollettieri Academy, the institution that came to exert an iron grip on the pro tennis circuit in the late Eighties and Nineties, thanks to such stars as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Mary Pierce, Maria Sharapova and, as Bollettieri puts it, "my Serena and Venus" (which will come as news to Richard Williams). He's not a monster, but from an early stage in Kohn's film, it becomes apparent that Bollettieri was an exacting taskmaster, possessed of the ruthless singlemindedness that tends to identify and make champions in pro sports. Kohn speaks to a clutch of the name players, but also those who were left to drift away and forgotten about, like tennis balls knocked over a fence or hedge; several of these players are heard to testify that they were made to feel special, like a son or daughter, then abandoned at a formative moment once Bollettieri and his coaches determined they weren't quite what the Academy was seeking. The selection process comes over as tough, perhaps necessary, but above all else poorly handled, from an interpersonal perspective: the most damning evidence Kohn introduces into the record is that even Agassi - the Academy's erratic golden boy, to the extent that Bollettieri was seen and heard to take his side when he faced fellow Academy find Courier in the French Open quarterfinals of 1989 - refused the filmmaker's request for an interview. (He will be amply represented nonetheless, both in evocative archive footage - awful late Eighties mullets and all - and, more poignantly, in the form of a letter he wrote to Bollettieri in his 2009 memoir Open.)

What follows is one of the few sports docs that owes a pronounced rhetorical debt to the combative Errol Morris; you start to feel the camera itself becoming a net. Kohn isolates Bollettieri among the ruins of one of the resorts that were left to crumble after his declaration of bankruptcy; the director lobs up a probing question or three; and Bollettieri - weathered, RFK raspy, prone to alternating between the first and third person and overusing the dated hipster slang "baby" - insistently smashes answers back. This was all in the past, Jason; I don't dwell on such things; I move on, as you should. It's presumably what he told his charges whenever they lost their serve, but around about the point Bollettieri lets slip he's been married eight times, or when one of his erstwhile prodigies opens up about an eating disorder she developed, you start to wonder just how much collateral damage one man can bring about in his quest for success. Certainly Agassi, a player made in his coach's image - a flamboyant, devil-may-care hustler, burning through endorsement deal after endorsement deal - kept getting found out at the highest level, whether by the focused, matter-of-fact Courier, the machine-like Pete Sampras, or the shithousery of Boris Becker in his sleaze era. (Becker gets ushered on to recall how he once psyched out his opponent by openly flirting with Agassi's then-wife Brooke Shields from the very centre of Wimbledon's Centre Court.) We might even question the Bollettieri definition of success. The business model here seems hazy if not outright dubious, framing players not as individuals but ambassadors for the Academy, and recycling prize money to provide scholarships for aspirant champions; late on, Kohn reveals that Bollettieri was eventually outmanoeuvred behind the scenes by one of his savvier employees. The film's subject, who died in 2022, remains defiant to the last, blurting out "I just react! Nick just does it!", like some Nike-swooshed embodiment of the American id. You conclude Bollettieri would have been great to watch as a player, forever on the attack. His flaw as a businessman, and as a human being, is that he simply had no B game.

Love Means Zero is now streaming via NOW TV.