Joyce Glasser reviews Super Seniors (AKA Silver Servers) June 17, 2024, 97 mins. On digital platforms. “Winning never gets old” is the logline of Dan Lobb’s enjoyable sports documentary that follows four tennis hopefuls to an international championship tournament. The play on the word “old” is the thing. The thrill of winning is still as sweet for 95-year-old Ukrainian amateur Leonid Stanislavskyi, who has yet to experience it, as it is for 85-year-old Floridian King Van Nostrand, who admits, ‘I don’t lose very often.’ King, a former maths teacher, has always been sporty and competitive, and his children inherited this penchant. But tennis will always be associated with tragedy. In 1984 his son John, a professional tennis player travelling with his tennis partner, was killed in a car accident in Mexico City. In Paris, former model and fashion boutique owner Etty Marouani was encouraged to take up tennis by her son and second husband of fifty years. She has since surpassed them both. For former NBA pro John Powless, 87, who towers over the competition at 6’5”, tennis is also a family affair. During the 1950s he and his father succeeded in conquering the national clay court U.S. Father and Son championships five years running. And then played with his own children. Though he has lived alone for twenty years, John is kept busy with his own tennis club in Madison, Wisconsin. Widowed Leonid was an engineer who worked on Soviet fighter planes used to combat the Nazis. Travel was almost impossible during Soviet occupation. At the time of filming, he is living in a cramped, third floor walk-up in Kharkiv – his home of 60 years. On the circuit, Leonid meets people from all over the world and socialises, whereas in Kharkiv, he’s lonely as all his friends have died. But if he’s short of friends, Leonid is unique in having a sponsor, Yuri. Yuri tells us that Leonid had two dreams: to earn money in an international competition and to meet Roger Federer. Yuri doubts that the first dream is ever going to come true, but “the second is easy” and we see Leonid at Wimbledon meeting Federer in a group of other plays who tower above him. Lobb gets the ball rolling with a group of adorable five-year olds having their first tennis lessons. When asked to guess the age of the oldest tennis player, Benji, sounding unconvinced, offers age 25 and Tabitha guesses 21. Enzo says, ‘I got a grandmother who could play tennis.’ But on reflection, he shakes his head: ‘Na, she’s too old.’ Which just goes to show that everything is relative. King smiles, ‘when I’m on the tennis court, I feel fifty again’ although even that might be higher than Enzo can count. And when he was fifty, King, who takes his hearing-aid out to play, didn’t struggle to hear the umpire. Etty Marouani is happy to say she started playing at 42 but refuses to divulge her age. Etty’s son David tells us, ‘she doesn’t like old people at all.’ For John Powless, ‘age is a state of mind.’ With the exception of his bi-weekly chemo sessions for cancer, John is at his club at 6:30 every morning coaching tennis. (John died just before the tournament). But for Leonid, the fact that the oldest category is “85 and over” puts him at a disadvantage when compared with the youngsters like King. In fact, there are no competitors his age, meaning he is destined to confront a younger man. (Note, thanks to pressure from the likes of Leonid, the ITF is adding a 90+ category) After introducing the players, we follow the Ukrainian, the two Americans and the French women, (shame there isn’t a Brit) on their respective journeys to the 40th ITF Seniors World Team and Individual Championships of 2021, held in Umag, Croatia. It’s not a direct journey and for all the players, there are matches to play en route. For Leonid, it’s Amsterdam where we see him sightseeing. He says, ‘I’d like to visit France, Germany and Italy, too.’ Ample time is given to the competitions to size up the players and to a costly logistics error for Leonid, a confusion exacerbated by language. Although there are conflicting statistics, according to Lobb, 585 seniors from 41 countries completed 858 matches in Umag. It’s bigger than Wimbledon! And though (spoiler alert) Leonid does not triumph in Umag, after the Soviet invasion he became a celebrity, wearing the Ukrainian colours on the circuit. At 97, he was immortalised in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest competitive tennis player.
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