Tennis is simultaneously ripe for and antithetical to highlights. A single, gossamer drop shot or supersonic serve makes a wonderful clip; a wonderful clip cannot do justice to the tactical and athletic currents of momentum that wax and wane over 2, 3, 4, and 5 sets. A staggering thirty-shot rally is a highlight that might change a match indelibly; it might have no bearing on the result at all.
Blessèd, then, be the US Open's TikTok, which thrives on this tension between sport and spectacle. It picks a side, going all in on spectacle; creating narrative and order not from the structure of its sport, but the use of trending sounds, viral formats, and cutting captions.
It makes this ball boy a bigger star than Roger Federer; it makes celebrations (cellys) outweigh the match they're hyping; it even manages to make US talent Ben Shelton's absolutely swagless dial-up phone routine an iota less cringe. It throws out the internal logic of a tennis match in favor of the features of the platform—but still adds snippets of informative commentary that would make TV pundits blush, for its end-of-day recaps. It also casts the limelight generously, in a sport where power, economics, and attention are staggeringly top-heavy. Not everyone can be a walking highlight reel or part of the Big Three, but anyone might drop in a ludicrous tweener, or deadpan plug their social media in an interview, however vanishing their appearance at Flushing Meadows.
Flicking through the grand slam's feed, you can swipe from a Jelena Ostapenko side-eye, to Coco Gauff winning a point after falling over halfway through a rally, to Novak Djokovic singing the Beastie Boys, with the practiced dismissiveness of a pro putting the previous point behind them. And when these videos surface in the curated chaos of the For You page, they don't invite any consideration of their metanarrative—and with it, the consideration that this actually isn't a great medium for consuming the narrative of tennis—because they've disappeared into a day-in-the-life of some spoiled French bulldogs before the thought can even form.
It probably helps that the sport is in a complicated relationship with other platforms. Tennis Twitter doesn't have the player interaction or high drama of NBA Twitter, except when Casper Ruud uses a press conference to label almost everyone on it clueless, or when Club Leftist Tennis tweets literally anything. Former coach of Serena Williams, Patrick Mouratoglou, can dispense as many Reels full of iffy advice as he likes. But it's YouTube—the one platform, aside from Sky, ESPN, or other broadcasters with proprietary highlights, that could offer a useful product to fans—that has been left sprawling like a player getting ragdolled by Carlos Alcaraz.
It's weird, because longer form video better captures ebb and flow, charting the way micro-battles unfurl into a war. YouTube succeeds here when the US Open's channel uploads full matches or extended highlights. But the standard recaps clock in at just under three minutes, and some give over thirty seconds—one sixth of their running time—to two serves that don't even go in the court or happen on key points. Five-set thrillers are reduced to great leaps, with not even a cursory attempt to show how momentum shifts; in a routine win, there's no clue as to how one player has dominated the other.
Ultimately, watching a grand slam on TikTok is nothing like watching tennis.
This is still decontexualization and hypercompression of tennis: treating an individual point as detached from the whole. But without the positive context collapse of the TikTok algorithm and the remixing potential of the platform, it's just a few tennis points strewn together, desperately searching for a game, set, or match to contain them. A match highlights package spending 30 seconds on one inconsequential double fault is tedious; a 30-second TikTok spent on one double fault, with the embarrassed grimace of the crying-laughing and skull emojis, is beautiful.
Ultimately, watching a grand slam on TikTok is nothing like watching tennis. Sometimes, the clip can tell the story—a splitscreen of Novak Djokovic mimicking Ben Shelton's celebration actually did ice-cold justice to the way the Serb's pinpoint stubbornness took down the American, with the humbling ease of a larger cartoon character holding a smaller attacker at arm's length. It can't capture Daniil Medvedev's masterful inversion of a cataclysmically bad style match-up against Carlos Alcaraz, or the ebb and flow of a titanic final, like Coco Gauff's stunning comeback victory over Aryna Sabalenka for her first Grand Slam title. Instead, it's repackaging tennis in a way that goes against the nature of the sport itself, but, like Gauff, who just wanted to go on TikTok when her semi-final was interrupted by a climate protest, it's increasingly hard to just scroll past.