An ugly development in tennis crowd behaviour emerged yesterday when Serbian and Croatian ‘fans’ violently clashed at Melbourne Park on day one of the Australian Open.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will multicultural Australia thrash out its differences each January in our tennis stadiums? In fact, boisterous ethnically-driven support at tennis matches in Australia is not a new phenomenon. And, several times, the boundaries of acceptable behaviour have been severely tested.
In the 1990s Swedish tennis fans, with their faces painted blue and yellow, made plenty of noise as they supported the production line of top Swedish players through the Australian open. Then Lleyton Hewitt hit the scene and we witnessed the emergence of the Fanatics. Loud? Very. Annoying? To some.
Last year the incredible run of the crowd-pleasing Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis drew a blue and white army of vocal Greeks. Perhaps it was opportunism after Greece’s amazing European Cup football win. Whatever the reason, Baghdatis’s supporters made their patriotism known in a highly audible way.
The Greek supporters’ crew have been out in force again this year, bringing the house down at Sydney Olympic Park when Baghdatis lost in a thriller to Spain’s Carlos Moya. They were loud and pushed the boundaries of acceptable tennis crowd behaviour. Somehow, however, they managed to pull back whenever it looked like they might cross the line.
It is more probable that the line was crossed during the women’s final in Sydney between Kim Clijsters and Jelena Jankovic, with Serbian supporters of Jankovic booing Clijsters at times. And, yesterday, in scenes more reminiscent of the now defunct National Soccer League, old ethnic differences have surfaced in the unlikely setting of Melbourne Park.
Racial divides and political tensions seem completely out of place in the deeply traditional and etiquette-conscious sport of tennis. However, a scan over the recent history of tennis crowd behaviour in Australia should show that, as surprising and upsetting as yesterday’s scenes were, they were nothing more than a manifestation of a situation that tennis events in Australia have been heading towards for more than a decade.
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