The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  Every form of entertainment, just like every art, has its enfant terrible. Tennis is no exception. Tennis is a sport that aspiring professionals begin before the age of ten and leaves you isolated to deal with four opponents at once—your opponent, the ball, the net, and yourself—with your parents watching, the other player’s parents watching, too many other people watching or too few. It’s also a sport that draws you away from other sports, eventually. While football players also can play basketball and run track, young tennis players pursuing a life in the game have to choose tennis exclusively to get in the required reps and open up their schedule for the required travel. Then there’s the obvious issue of tennis often not being a sport that an elite tennis player has chosen but a sport that has been chosen for them. Unfortunately, too many parents love to live out their failed fantasies of tennis excellence through their children. Some of these parents simply weren’t any good at it, or weren’t good enough, or discovered the game late, and reason that if their child gets up at the crack of dawn and hits hundreds of balls each day instead of going to school, then that child will be a great tennis player because it’s that easy, and although the parent didn’t do that, if he or she or they had a little more luck on their side, someone to really push them, they would most definitely have been a great tennis player. For some parents, it’s the easiest way to imagine climbing a social rung or two or twenty-two. And for some others, those whose social life centers on a tennis club, the top-dog status of the child is the top-dog status of the parent. Add to this the cost of things: strings, shoes, a coach, court fees, travel. Add to this the centripetal force of tennis culture, that the life is so particular, the pathway to being a professional is so narrow, its wall impermeable not for others who want to seep in but for those who might want to seep out—and the world becomes by and large a cluster of repeated conditions and symptoms: the Tennis Parent and the Brat being at the top of the list.

  So the elephant in the room concerning what people think about Nick Kyrgios when he …

  • Barely goes through the motions during an opponent’s service game after already having been cited for on-court obscenity and racket smashing in earlier matches at Wimbledon in 2015, one year after his incredible debut there.

  • Tells Stan Wawrinka in 2015 at Toronto during a changeover that Kyrgios’s good friend and fellow tennis player Thanasi Kokkinakis had “banged [Wawrinka’s] girlfriend,” leading to a fine and a long suspension.

  • Blatantly gives a match away at the Shanghai Masters to Mischa Zverev in an impossible-to-imagine time of forty-eight minutes, so that he received another fine.

  • Indulges in a gratuitous fit of racket-smashing here.

  • Offers journalists nuggets such as “I played eighteen matches last year and probably tanked eight of them, but I’m still ranked in the top twenty.”

  • Indulges in a gratuitous fit of racket-smashing there.

  • Rarely, if ever, passes on the opportunity to express his ambivalence about the sport.

  • Lets loose a full-volume buckshot of expletives at himself, spectators, ball kids, whomever …

  Kyrgios is clearly bored. He’s not bored when he plays Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, or Murray. Adrenaline, opportunity, and pride run through the veins then. But aside from that? He loves basketball, he’s passionate about it. He ended up being better at tennis. Let’s leave his parents out of this and say that tennis chose him. He hates to train and he hates to travel, the alpha and omega of being an elite tennis player; but let’s just say that tennis chose him. He and tennis are at odds. And he lashes out at it. There’s not much in the way of sympathy or empathy that comes his way from people who have paid to see a proper match and, let’s be honest, aren’t inclined to root for him anyway because he is brown, and recalcitrant is not what the people who pay top dollar for a Grand Slam or Masters 1000 in search of a tennis experience are looking for. Foolish but not stupid, he must sense this, because it looks like he carries this dark cloud often to the court with him. Therefore, instead of being antagonized, he chooses to be the antagonist. He made himself unlikable before most of the world had a chance to choose whether to like or dislike him.

  Most of this is too obvious to have had, for the moment, any other outcome. The thing is, and here’s the elephant in the room, we’ve seen this before. Tennis has had more enfants terribles, bad apples, and brats than you can count. Just off the top of my head, there’s been Pancho Gonzales, Dennis Ralston (who was coached by Gonzales), Ilie (“Nasty”) Năstase, Cliff Richey, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Marat Safin, Ernests Gulbis, Viktor Troicki, Bernard Tomic—and those were the ones who were good enough to stick around and actually win matches. Richey never won a Grand Slam, but he won twenty-eight singles titles while suffering from alcoholism and depression. Bad behavior is so ingrained in what tennis is that there’s even a mockumentary about it: Aaron Williams as played by Andy Samberg in HBO’s 7 Days in Hell. Williams’s look is early Agassi—he was a player who most clearly wore, literally, his antagonism—but the character is an amalgam, he is the golem of tennis’s long history of fucking children up.

  Therefore, Nick Kyrgios is boring.

  Not the player, the player who plays: he’s brilliant. And the behavior, honestly, who am I to judge? There is the rare exception in professional tennis, but let’s face it, most of these people had their childhoods hijacked. They say the right things about it, about their parent-coach who monitors where they go and what they eat, they say their dream has been to be number one in the world since they were a child.

  —Etc.

  —Etc.

  These are, of course, the right things to say. And the right things to say are often the things you don’t end up hearing, because you, as the listener, neither care nor believe them. When a player’s parent was a coach and the older sibling also plays, you don’t care that the player says he or she has always wanted to be a tennis player; you care that they don’t say anything but that. So when Gulbis, for example, says to L’Équipe, “I respect Roger, Rafa, Novak, and Murray but, for me, all four of them are boring players. Their interviews are boring. Honestly, they are crap. I often go on YouTube to watch the interviews. With tennis, I quickly stop. It is a joke,” he’s going rogue in a way that the commentariat has no use for other than to say that he’s an asshole and therein their mission is accomplished. There are not many roles in tennis; really only the top twenty players out of a few thousand professionals are even noticed or recognizable at any given time. And if there are so few roles in tennis, you can see how someone like Kyrgios would find himself trapped. He has the game to easily be the best player of his generation, he has abused the presumed successor of that role, Sascha Zverev, repeatedly and impiously. Ironically, he has the game for the role of gentleman champion. But he clearly doesn’t want to have anything to do with that. At all. Not at the moment, at least. Tennis greatness seems to be to Kyrgios the equivalent of someone born to surf inheriting a stepfather’s manufacturing plant. It’s there if he wants it, but … nah, bro.

  So he acts out. He doesn’t want to be there most of the time. He doesn’t like tennis. And he probably doesn’t like you, because you like tennis. Not only do you like tennis, but you’ve paid money to come watch him play tennis, and he’s already told you he doesn’t want to be there, so if anyone’s the moron, it’s you. He’s pissed off at best, bored at worst; and soon enough you will be, too. Iron sharpening iron.

  You and Nick. He’s bored, you’re pissed; he’s pissed, you’re bored. The rather important difference is that Nick is a kid invested in the vicissitudes of his life, the existential plight of being Nick Kyrgios. But he’s a kid in his early twenties, meaning he thinks he’s an adult. He thinks he’s lived, so he knows things; but also that he needs to live so that he knows things. You are an actual adult, meaning you’re old in some manner so that when you say you’re old it’s met with silence. And you want your relationship with Nick to be like it is with mo
st of the players on the circuit—it’s a marriage: you love it, or you fake it, or you get the fuck out.

  Nick neither loves it nor fakes it nor gets the fuck out.

  He shows up again and again with the same bullshit, which is meaningful to him because it’s the part of his life that he can’t get back, that feels like it will exist apart from all of the other parts, which is something you sense when you’re young but because you’re young you tend to act on that sense stupidly. This is the beauty and the utter horror of being young.

  But, unlike Nick, you actually like tennis and have watched it all your life. Nick is unique to Nick, but you’ve seen Nick before. Countless times. Nick bores you. And worse, Nick’s tennis-hindered sense of existential dread bores you. I know what you want to say to him: Come on, Nick, snap out of it, I get it, sometimes it sucks, but you’ve got an A++ game, you’ve split your two games against Roger, you’ve won two of five against Rafa (and two of the others were on clay), you’ve beaten Novak both times you’ve played him, Murray’s swept you in five matches, but come on, man, more of that, please, just practice and stay fit (Federer hates to practice, too), just practice and stay fit, beat who’s in front of you, and everything else, happiness, the meaning of it all, even more riches, all of it will take care of itself. Just ball out, man, please, this is getting old, Nick, I know it’s your life, but this isn’t even original, it’s just typical tennis stuff, and you want to be better than that, right? Right, so …

  You want to hand him Agassi’s autobiography, Open. And I have it on good authority that he hasn’t read it. You think he might realize that thirty years ago it was the same old thing. And that NBA players don’t get to rebel by sulking because there’s the bench waiting for their asses if they do. Nick gives you the Fisher-Price My First Tantrum version of it all. Which he can, because he’s alone. There’s no one to bench him. No teammate to disappoint. In fact, he’s said more than once that he thrives in team tennis situations like the Davis Cup and the Laver Cup because the level of personal responsibility extends to teammates, and he doesn’t want to let them down. At some point, likely when he was quite young, he scanned the crowd of a match he was playing in and realized that they were not his teammates and never would be. Federer has made hay off of the crowd. Nadal, too, in a different, more visceral way. Murray knows which few crowds are his (Wimbledon, London) and locks in on them. Djokovic panders incessantly with post-match witticisms, impersonations, physical comedy, and a wincingly forced post-victory routine he does with (or to) the crowd. I can imagine Nick not wanting any of these options, as he doesn’t have Federer’s learned reserve, Nadal’s fountains of energy, Murray’s one-of-us pipeline to the people, or Djokovic’s inherent need to be loved. So he passes.

  At the heart of it all, Nick does what Nick does because he can get away with it. After Shanghai, Malaysia Airlines dropped him as a sponsor. Kids don’t buy plane tickets. He’s still sponsored by the headphone company Beats, Nike, and the racket equipment company Yonex: three companies that thrive right in the sweet spot of the young, who are sold less on excellence than on the idea of rebellion, especially the safe tempest-in-a-teacup type of rebellion that’s long been part and parcel of the game of tennis. He never strikes me as someone who doesn’t want to grow older and wiser, he strikes me as someone who doesn’t want it to be tennis that makes him grow older and wiser.

  Autumn is around the corner. It’s always closer than it seems when we’re in the thick of Wimbledon. There will be one last Grand Slam in 2017, and Kyrgios will show up in New York—a city ready to understand him like none other on the circuit—and he will lose in the first round to fellow Australian, 235th-ranked John Millman. He’ll pick up a code violation for cursing and receive his fair share of visits from the medical trainer. After his exit he’ll explain that he’s been suffering from right-arm stiffness, that his arm would go numb whenever he hits his serve. Allergic to being coached and having gone without a coach since 2015, Kyrgios is asked if he’s going to continue with the arrangement he’s had since May with former world number four Sébastien Grosjean. “I don’t know, honestly,” he sighs. “I’m not good enough for him. You know, he’s very dedicated. He’s an unbelievable coach. He probably deserves a player that is more dedicated than I am. There are players out there that are more dedicated, that want to get better, that strive to get better every day, the one-percenters. I’m not that guy.”

  By the beginning of the 2018 season Kyrgios will again be on the circuit without a coach—and he’ll start the year winning Brisbane.

  PART FOUR Fall

  THE U.S. OPEN

  D.C. is done.

  Montreal is done.

  The small clay-court tournaments in Båstad, Umag, Hamburg, Gstaad, and Kitzbühel, the ones that linger on the calendar long after the clay season has ended, are all done.

  Cincinnati is done.

  Winston-Salem, too.

  It’s late August. The 2017 season is thirty-four weeks old—and, my, how things have changed.

  The passing weeks and the momentum of the months have given clarity and an unexpected form to the year.

  After Wimbledon, an Atlanta, then a Los Cabos: the circuit surges forward. Welcome to the second half of the season’s second act—the less romantic, more pragmatic part of year, when the names of cell phone companies, insurance companies, and banks are superimposed on one tournament venue after another, causing courts that already look strikingly similar to sound so as well. In 2016, the 250 tournament in scenic Los Cabos debuted, having doubled down with a bank and a media chain in its choice of name: Abierto Mexicano de Tenis Mifel presentado por Cinemex. Wikipedia just called it the Los Cabos Open.

  The truth is that even the big fish in this group—the Citi Open in D.C., the Coupe Rogers/Rogers Cup in Montreal/Toronto, the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati—fight for our attention amid the spiking heat. The venues fill, but if I’m not around a tennis court the tournaments tend not to come up in conversation, which is a shame, but also the cost of the overwhelming attention that the four Grand Slams bring upon themselves. And so, I usually spend a month or so swimming in a summer fog of these matches waiting for and wondering about the next major. The wait for the U.S. Open can feel interminable. I tide myself over with these other tournaments. And as I have grown older I have learned to love them, too. They are prologues to the U.S. Open, when only late summer remains and, after blazing a trail through more heat and humidity than a person is supposed to bear, the circuit descends upon New York.

  With each name etched on a trophy, tournament after tournament after tournament, the long season shortens, leaving a little of itself behind at each place. The tour changes that much more from the dream it once was to the reality it now is and will forever after be. Where once there was a hunch, now there’s history; where once there was a feeling, now there’s fact. There is no fake news, only what has happened. And what has happened is that for the first time this year, after eight months of circling the globe, the circuit can see in the late-summer haze of the Manhattan skyline not just the sun but an ending.

  Seven of the nine Masters 1000s are past.

  A player can never get them back. A fan can never get them back. The Australian Open and the French, Miami, and Monaco, all of those matches from earlier in the year—the Indian Wellses, Istanbuls, and Eastbournes—were pushing us forward. What happens, then, when there’s less and less space ahead to push forward into?

  Three of the four Grand Slams are gone.

  What happens when there are fewer and fewer pieces of the puzzle? What happens when you can see what the puzzle is—that it will absolutely be either one thing or the other—and you can even see, despite the gaps, the completeness of it? The year 2017 started with an air of inevitability around the Murray-Djokovic rivalry; it was to be the pivot around which everything on the men’s tour turned. Now, in retrospect, the Australian Open wasn’t just one of the great surprises of recent tennis history, it was one of the most
important tournaments in tennis history as well. Had Federer and Nadal appeared in the Melbourne final in their thirties and then returned to their respective forms of the past few years, the Australian Open would have remained spectacle and iconic entertainment. But the way in which the two of them dominated the 2017 season after Melbourne has changed that Grand Slam from a memento to a moment of significant change. It gave us the first sight into a future we didn’t see coming, even though it was happening right before our eyes. We confused it with the past: Rafa and Roger, like Venus and Serena, dusted off for one final go-around, golden parachutes strapped to their backs.