Like few other sports as physically demanding, tennis compels its participants to talk — often and at great length.
After every match, in near-identical interview rooms, facing an interchangeable array of reporters armed with much the same questions as last time, the player responds.
Stars and battlers alike, if they are smart, develop a stock range of responses. The anodyne patter fulfils a contractual obligation, gets them out of those bleak cubes as quickly as possible and back to hotel rooms where they can process what they're actually thinking, if anything.
Nick Kyrgios has always been considered different. Per his matches themselves, the theory goes, in his media conferences you never know what you'll get. And sure, few other players have interview-room highlight clips as entertaining as their playing ones.
He can be charismatic and cheeky. He can also be petulant and cruel, although who can honestly say they don't enjoy seeing a journalist squirm? Occasionally, Kyrgios is genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny.
But when you consume enough of it, you see that it is just a different form of patter: the rote sarcasm, the contrived airing of personal beefs, the novelty props — basketball jerseys, trays of sushi, etc — he uses to direct conversation away from tennis, which is a dilemma for Kyrgios because he finds few topics more boring yet knows that things can go even worse for him when the journalists start talking about everything else.
"Everything else" has been redefined in the past week at Wimbledon. At the beginning of the tournament, everything else included but was not limited to: Kyrgios shouting insults, Kyrgios wearing a hat that offended some very strange and disingenuous people, Kyrgios wearing shoes that surely didn't offend anyone but were thrown in the mix regardless, Kyrgios being "cretinous", Kyrgios perhaps being worthy of deportation, and so on.
Reading that stuff, you assumed there are people who gather up all their petty grievances with modern life and focus the resultant rage on Kyrgios, like he is responsible for $6 pistachio milk lattes, whatever is happening on TikTok and our collective inability to remember the password for that fourth streaming service where all the good shows are geoblocked and you can only watch The Commish.
Divided opinions
A few days ago, a reasonable person might have felt sorry for Kyrgios, notwithstanding the role he plays in his own problems and the riches he earns from being so messy and dramatic. He might be the Frankenstein's monster of the hot-take industry but in perverse ways, he is also its beneficiary.
And there were strident defences mounted in his name, too: that his charity works absolve him of guilt elsewhere, that the media's image of him is a caricature, that humility is an outmoded concept, that one Kyrgios opponent, Stefanos Tsitsipas, had behaved even worse than the Australian, so Kyrgios wasn't really that bad after all, was he?
Most strangely, Kyrgios's scattergun outspokenness had him bracketed with the deeply principled Tommie Smith, who "was celebrated when he won the gold in the 1968 Olympics but was condemned for protesting for civil rights," a national celebration presumably having occurred in the time between Smith crossing the line and ascending the podium.
As bore-offs go, it was a five-set tiebreaker between familiar and tediously unoriginal opponents. We in the media do not like admitting this about a popular topic but in the case of Kyrgios, it's got to be said out loud: it's all SO. DAMNED. BORING.
At that point of the bore-off, a friend who enjoys watching Kyrgios play and wants him to go all the way at Wimbledon — and who'd weighed up all of the excruciating commentary provided from both sides of the Kyrgios divide — emailed with a summary that at first seemed a bit dramatic but now feels prophetic: "I'm left to wish he simply didn't exist."
Soon after, news broke that Kyrgios had been summonsed to appear in court in relation to an assault charge. In a stroke, every word spilled on Kyrgios in the previous week, every insane ideal projected upon him, seemed even more worthless.
A collective sense of shame was felt if not spoken. Fans and defenders winced. Those of us who've written of Kyrgios as an unfairly persecuted scamp with sublime athletic gifts cringed a little more than usual about things we'd written in the past.
Tonight, Kyrgios was to face Rafael Nadal in the Wimbledon semifinal but injury has ruled out the Spaniard. By default, the Australian advances to his first grand slam final — a strange and mildly unsatisfying path towards the Holy Grail Kyrgios has never allowed himself to openly covet. A question that is rarely asked of Kyrgios, nor of his haters and apologists, is now more pertinent than ever: what really matters?
Not the things he says to umpires and opponents, surely — none worse than the behaviour one could witness from red-faced parents hanging over the fence at virtually any junior football game this weekend. Certainly not the things he wears, or what his prominence in our culture "says" about this or that.
Not even winning, for we can be assured that if he does, many will say he has not done so in the right way, and others, much more convincingly, that his victory is provisionally tainted.
Sport is a matter of fundamental importance to many Australians and there is certainly no shame in that. If nothing else, the reactions Kyrgios has drawn over the years remind us that many Australians have embedded in them some highly refined if awkwardly expressed sense of sportsmanship and fair play — one that Kyrgios has always breached.
But at a point, we must accept that we are all participants in the problem. We all get worked up: maybe not about the hat, but perhaps about the reaction to the hat, or the reaction to the reaction to the hat, or something else entirely. We love and hate the Kyrgios love and hate.
The nutty Kyrgios op-eds are commissioned because nearly everyone has an opinion on him and we read them in extraordinary numbers, which is also the reason why you rarely read serious analyses of Kyrgios's game: a far smaller audience exists for explanations of his athletic brilliance than does for the confirmation of biases and narrowly-defined viewpoints. Our eyes are easily diverted from the ball, which is less embarrassing when it's merely a ball.
For almost a decade now, Kyrgios has walked into interview rooms and been asked to judge himself, sometimes admitting his guilt. And us? We know that winning is never the only thing, but we should also admit that the alternative to guilt is not necessarily innocence.
