Like few other physically demanding sports, tennis requires its participants to talk – often and at length.
After each match, in almost identical interview rooms, facing an interchangeable group of journalists armed with the same questions as the last time, the player answers.
Stars and fighters alike, if they are smart, develop a range of predefined responses. The innocuous speech fulfills a contractual obligation, gets them out of those dark cubes as quickly as possible and back into hotel rooms where they can process what, if anything, they are really thinking.
Nick Kyrgios has always been considered different. In theory, you never know what’s going to happen in his press conferences. And of course, few other players have interview room highlights as entertaining as those from their matches.
He can be charismatic and cheeky. He can also be capricious and cruel, but who can honestly say they don’t enjoy watching a journalist squirm? Sometimes, Kyrgios is genuinely funny and makes you die laughing.
But when you consume enough of it, you see that it’s just a different form of bullshit: the routine sarcasm, the artificial diffusion of personal feuds, the fancy props – basketball jerseys, sushi platters, etc. – that he uses to divert the conversation away from tennis, which is a dilemma for Kyrgios because he finds few subjects more boring but knows that things can get even worse for him when journalists start talking about everything else.
“Everything else” was redefined last week at Wimbledon. At the start of the tournament, everything else included, but was not limited to: Kyrgios shouting insults, Kyrgios wearing a hat that offended some very strange and dishonest people, Kyrgios wearing shoes that probably didn’t offend anyone but were thrown into the mix anyway, Kyrgios being a “moron,” Kyrgios possibly deserving deportation, and so on.
Reading this, you assumed there were people out there who were gathering all their petty grievances about modern life and focusing the resulting rage on Kyrgios, as if he were responsible for $6 pistachio lattes, everything on TikTok, and our collective inability to remember the password to that fourth streaming service where all the good shows are geo-blocked and you can only watch The Commish.
Mixed opinions
A few days ago, a reasonable person might have felt sorry for Kyrgios, despite the role he plays in his own troubles and the riches he makes from being so messy and dramatic. He may be the Frankenstein monster of the hot-shot industry, but in a perverse way, he is also its beneficiary.
And there were also strident defenses on his behalf: that his charitable work absolved him of any guilt elsewhere, that the media’s image of him was a caricature, that humility was an outdated concept, that an opponent of Kyrgios, Stefanos Tsitsipas, had behaved even worse than the Australianso Kyrgios wasn’t so bad after all, was he?
Kyrgios (left) survived a heated third-round match against Stefanos Tsitsipas. (Getty Images/TPN: Frey)
The strangest thing is that Kyrgios’ outspokenness has lumped him in with the principled Tommie Smith, who “was celebrated when he won gold at the 1968 Olympics but was condemned for protesting for civil rights,” a national celebration that likely occurred between the time Smith crossed the finish line and the time he stood on the podium.
As boring matches go, this was a five-set tiebreak between familiar, boring opponents. We in the media don’t like to admit that about a popular topic, but in Kyrgios’ case, it has to be said loud and clear: This is so. Damn. Boring.
At that point, a friend who loves watching Kyrgios play and wants him to go all the way at Wimbledon — and who has weighed all the atrocious commentary provided on both sides of the Kyrgios divide — emailed me with a summary that at first seemed a bit dramatic but now seems prophetic: “I can only wish he didn’t exist.”
Shortly after, news broke that Kyrgios had been summoned to appear in court on an assault chargeSuddenly, every word spoken about Kyrgios in the previous week, every insane ideal projected onto him, seemed even more pointless.
A sense of collective shame was felt, even if it was not expressed. Fans and defenders grimaced. Those of us who wrote about Kyrgios as an unjustly persecuted scoundrel with sublime athletic gifts grimaced a little more than usual at things we had written in the past.
Tonight, Kyrgios was set to face Rafael Nadal in the Wimbledon semi-finals, but injury sidelined the Spaniard. The Australian forfeits his place in his first Grand Slam final, a strange and slightly unsatisfying path to the Holy Grail that Kyrgios has never allowed himself to openly covet. A question rarely asked of Kyrgios, or of his detractors and apologists, is now more pertinent than ever: What really matters?
Kyrgios will play his first Grand Slam final on Sunday. (Getty Images: Frey)
It’s certainly not what he says to referees and opponents, nor is it worse than the behavior one might see from angry, red-faced parents leaning over the fence at any youth football game this weekend. It’s certainly not what he wears, nor what his notoriety in our culture “says” about this or that.
Not even to win, because we can be sure that if he does, many will say that he did not do it in the right way, and others, much more convincingly, that his victory is temporarily tainted.
Sport is a matter of fundamental importance to many Australians and there is certainly no shame in that. The reactions to Kyrgios over the years remind us that many Australians have a very refined, if poorly expressed, sense of sportsmanship and fair play that Kyrgios has consistently transgressed.
But at some point we have to accept that we are all part of the problem. We all get upset: maybe not about the hat, but maybe about the reaction to the hat, or the reaction to the reaction to the hat, or something else entirely. We love and hate the love and hate of Kyrgios.
The wacky op-eds about Kyrgios are commissioned because almost everyone has an opinion about him, and we read them in extraordinary numbers, which is also why we rarely read serious analyses of Kyrgios’s game: a much smaller audience exists for explanations of his athletic talent than for confirmation of narrowly defined biases and viewpoints. Our eyes are easily averted from the ball, which is less distracting when it is simply a ball.
For nearly a decade, Kyrgios has been walking into interview rooms and being asked to judge himself, sometimes admitting guilt. What about us? We know that winning is never the only thing that matters, but we also have to admit that the alternative to guilt is not necessarily innocence.
