Hollywood has often looked to sports for inspiration. Be it the never-say-die underdogs in “Hoosiers” and “Rocky,” the championship pedigrees of “Ali” and “Remember the Titans” or the ragtag madness of “Slap Shot” and “Major League,” practically every sport has enjoyed its indelible moment on the big screen.

Except for tennis, a sport still waiting for its close-up. “There should be much more good movies about tennis,” said Agnieszka Radwanska, the Polish player who was a semifinalist at Wimbledon in July and who will be playing for the ninth year at the United States Open, which starts in Queens on Monday. “But there’s not. I’m surprised by that.”

It’s not as if tennis is an obscure sport: The Tennis Industry Association says 18 million Americans played it last year, and millions of television viewers watch Grand Slam tournaments like the Open (though the numbers pale in comparison with those for football and basketball). Yet the movies are scarce. Sure, there’s “Strangers on a Train,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller in which Farley Granger played a tennis star. But the sport was tangential to the plot, much as it has been for more recent films featuring tennis players like “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) and “Match Point,” from 2005.

Perhaps the only serious effort in this century to portray pro tennis on the big screen was “Wimbledon” (2004), a romantic comedy starring Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany set against the backdrop of the sport’s most famous tournament.