Both divas in their own right, the keening fans of Novak Djokovic convincingly beat the followers of Serena Williams to the first emotional overspill at this year’s US Open.
Djokovic, declining to be vaccinated, succumbed to the US travel regulations, while Williams is expecting to shortly give way to the toughest opponent of her career, advancing years.
Already one plotline has run its course with the other ready to go, Williams saying goodbye to the game at her home event. Hopefully, there will be dancing men in tuxedos and top hats and a giant staircase.
In New York the prospect of a winner in defending champion Daniil Medvedev would expect to bring out the biggest and loudest patriots. A Russian player holding the US Open Championship Trophy. Nice optics. But for pure spectacle this week few are looking further than the man with the backwards hat and perma-sulk, who endured two weeks of examination in the Wimbledon petri dish.
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Far from being licensed psychologists, many make it their business to masquerade as such and in July Wimbledon’s seven-match investigation into the coping mechanisms of Nick Kyrgios through the idiom of profanity has left us with an open case.
The US Open, which begins today, again takes up the enduring tennis question of insufferable prat or tortured genius.
A number of developments have added to the catalogue of Kyrgios curiosities, not least of all his Wimbledon outburst earning a defamation suit.
‘She’s drunk out of her mind in the front row and comes in in the middle of the game’
— Nick Kyrgios
Many will recall flames leaping from self-combusting ears in the royal box where eight-year-old Prince George sat with his parents, while Kyrgios reeled off a screed of cuss when he dropped serve to Djokovic in the final.
Standing under the Royal pod, he turned to where the team were sitting and verbally culled his entire support network.
“Do you not f**king care or what?” he screamed. Obedient and in unison they stood up for the scolding like a line of bold children waiting for the headmaster’s thrashing. Prior to that Kyrgios was heard complaining to the umpire about a spectator.
“She’s drunk out of her mind in the front row and comes in in the middle of the game. I’m playing the Wimbledon final against probably one of the best players of all time. I don’t need someone absolutely smashed talking to me point in, point out,” he said, adding that the woman “looks like she’s had about 700 drinks, bro”.
Anna Palus claims to have had two drinks and is suing Kyrgios for defamation after she was briefly removed from the court. The irony is she was supporting the Australian, not the Serb.
It is much of what makes Kyrgios such an appetisingly X-rated subject for television. With the courts rigged for sound, each grievance, profanity and exchange with line judges, umpires, spectators and himself are sweetly recorded.
And for live entertainment, at Flushing Meadows, fans are ever more cocked to engage with players than the buttoned-up Wimbledon set.
Kyrgios knows it, plays it, his outbursts straying into the realms of performance art as he interacts directly with the audience in space and time.
His under-arm serves, which are seen as sneaky, add more shade to a combustible personality defined by distracted chaos and non-conformity. His gratuitous tweeners, when he returns the ball by hitting it between his legs, are seen as disrespectful and freighted with needless risk.
He hit a tweener from the backcourt against Liam Broady in the first round of this year’s Australian open. Broady was fractionally bewildered by the outrageous clowning, which gave Kyrgios the opportunity to hit a winner off the next ball.
The crowd exploding with delight triggered another round of behavioural and personality assessments.
If superstars are made by people going to watch matches to have their expectations fulfilled, then Kyrgios, ranked at 26 in the world, has elevated himself to a position alongside Rafa Nadal, Roger Federer and Djokovic without having won a Grand Slam.
The Wimbledon final was dubbed tennis’s problem solver meets its problem child as people wondered how the trainwreck stayed on the rails. But they refuse to look away
That doesn’t stop him from recognising the nefarious image he has created or prevent him from playing the victim because of it. When Djokovic hit a ball towards a line judge at the 2020 US Open and struck him on the throat, he was immediately disqualified and fined $250,000.
Kyrgios, who once declared Djokovic a “tool”, afterwards took to Twitter. “Swap me for Jokers incident. ‘Accidentally hitting the ball kid in the throat’ how many years would I be banned for?”
Moot point. But with disrupters, there are always bum notes too.
In July Stefanos Tsitsipas, after aiming a ball at Kyrgios during their match, described him as having an “evil side”.
Fellow Australian Pat Cash, a BBC analyst piled in. “He’s brought tennis to the lowest level I can see as far as gamesmanship, cheating, manipulation, abuse, aggressive behaviour to umpires, to linesmen,” said Cash.
The Wimbledon final was dubbed tennis’s problem solver meets its problem child as people wondered how the trainwreck stayed on the rails. But they refuse to look away.
The sport has its rapscallion, its scoundrel, its slouching antihero, who will meet his bro, Thanasi Kokkinakis, in a first-round Aussie blockbuster on Tuesday.
They, the Special Ks, won the doubles title at this year’s Australian Open. Heartstrings and personal conflict again stirring in the soul. The only way Kyrgios will ever have it.
