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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love Nick Kyrgios.
Now, before you take up your torches and pitchforks and start harassing my children on Instagram, let’s be honest for a minute.
Just a minute, mind. I quite understand that for the sporting public to be honest for an extended period of time about the fact that they possess a deep psychological need for badly-behaved sportspeople, and that without them their enjoyment of their chosen sport would be deeply diminished, as much of their pleasure derives directly from a feeling of moral superiority, would mean the complete dismantling of the emotional architecture of sporting fandom and the destruction of our longstanding way of life.
But let’s be honest for a minute: don’t you love him just a little bit too?
Don’t you love a guy who so nakedly displays, mid-match, the bleeding obvious: that professional tennis is stupidly difficult and incredibly tiring and the longer you stay out on the court the more annoyed you’re going to get?
Don’t you love a guy who faces the media pack and refuses to pretend he doesn’t hate every one of their guts? Don’t you love a guy who is as willing to tell you how much he hates his job as any one of your friends, defying the unjust convention that just because your job takes place on a tennis court in front of a global audience of millions, you have to act like you love going to work?
Most people who actually like their jobs are morons anyway – and if you love your job even while crashing to embarrassing defeats at your home grand slam tournament, you may be somewhat detached from reality.
I mean, you can say, “Oh god, I am so fed up with these spoilt tennis brats and their appalling behaviour” as much as you like: but if you were really the type to be “fed up” with this sort of thing, you’d have abandoned all interest in tennis six months into John McEnroe’s first season.
McEnroe himself, of course, has carved out a lucrative career publicly castigating anyone who acts like John McEnroe, and good luck to him – his words could never be as newsworthy if they weren’t so hypocritical, and he’s to be congratulated for playing the long game.
But come on, when McEnroe was playing, it was brilliant to have him around, effing and blinding and undermining the authority of match officials and mistreating his racquet. Not that you wanted every player to be like McEnroe, but you wanted one or two about the place.
How else would you gauge the grace and dignity of all the others? More importantly, how else would you determine your own inner goodness?
We take more from our tennis brats than we ever could from our tennis saints. All Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal have ever done, besides thrill us with the preternatural mastery of the art of tennis, is make us feel hopelessly inadequate. It’s not enough that they remind us of how physically uncoordinated we are, they have to go and exceed all our expectations for charm and decency as well.
Now, your Nick Kyrgios, your John McEnroe, and to a lesser extent your Bernard Tomic: they’re a different breed.
When we watch them play, we still know that we could never in a million years match them for athletic ability or hand-eye coordination, but there’s immense consolation in the knowledge that were we out on court – even with our utter ineptitude – we would be behaving in a much more mature and generous manner, towards opponents, officials, ballboys, spectators and press.
We are better people than Nick Kyrgios, and if it weren’t for Nick Kyrgios, we would never know that. Think of him as your racist grandfather: if he wasn’t at Christmas lunch, you’d spend the whole day worrying that you were the most racist member of the family.
In Freudian terms, Kyrgios is the id of tennis, just as Federer is the superego, and the ego is probably someone dull like Andy Murray. But you need all of them to make up a healthy psyche. Thank God for Nick Kyrgios – without him tennis would truly lose its mind.