Before becoming Chandler Bing and one of the most recognisable actors of his generation, Matthew Perry was not just a guy who loved sport. In Canada, he was known as a strong, promising junior tennis player. He grew up in Ottawa, trained almost obsessively and, by his own recollection, spent close to ten hours a day on court. Tennis was not a hobby for him, nor a backdrop. It was the central pursuit of his childhood — the discipline in which he wanted to make something of himself.
And his results were very real. Perry was among the strongest Canadian juniors: he ranked inside the country’s top 20 in singles and top 10 in doubles. By the age of 13, he was already the No. 2 junior in Ottawa. In other words, this was not some flattering legend retrofitted to the fame of the actor who brought to life one of the funniest characters in television history. Matthew had a serious junior career with results that stood out.
Perry’s love of tennis began very early: he first picked up a racket at the age of four. Later, he explained that at that stage of his life he desperately needed to win and to feel successful, and tennis gave him exactly that feeling: a clear goal, fierce competition and an intelligible language of achievement. In his case, sporting character was no less important a part of his personality than the comic talent the world would later discover.
The turning point came at 15, when Perry moved from Ottawa to Los Angeles to live with his father. There, he quickly ran into a different level of competition and realised that his Canadian success, however serious, no longer looked like a ticket to the professional game against the backdrop of California’s tennis scene. In an interview with Men’s Health, he recalled that he had been a very good player in Ottawa and had a national ranking in Canada, but in Los Angeles, in his own words, they were simply killing him on court. That was when he understood he would not make a living from tennis, and turned toward acting instead.
Internally, though, he never really left tennis behind. Even after becoming a star of FRIENDS, Perry remained a man of the tennis world for decades: he regularly attended major tournaments, was a visible presence at the US Open, supported Jennifer Capriati and other players, took part in charity matches and, in the early 2000s, appeared in exhibition events alongside Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. Tennis media described Matthew as a “tennis superfan.”
Perry was not only a tennis fan. He passionately supported the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and was devoted to baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays. A love of sport runs like a thread through Matthew’s defining work — FRIENDS. His character Chandler Bing plays football and baseball, goes to Rangers and Knicks games. And Joey and Chandler’s apartment is full of sporting references. Just take the foosball table, where the guys would regularly lose to Monica. But one of the show’s most interesting artefacts is the Soviet “Boxing Kangaroo” poster. The creators hid objects and inscriptions in the background that would catch the eye of viewers from different cultures and nationalities. For Russian viewers, FRIENDS tucked away several Russian-language posters.
So it is hardly surprising that the sports-themed one was hung exactly where Chandler Bing lived. Still, despite all that multisport enthusiasm, tennis was his first real love. He never became an ATP professional, but the sport he loved never disappeared from his biography. It is just that, at some point, one grand stage in his life gave way to another.
