there was no reason to apologize for a shot taken at Rafael during a Wimbledon encounter because “I wanted to hit him square in the chest.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Self-centeredness? An overblown ego? Little interest in facts? Turning rudeness into a trademark? Ignorance into a virtue? Being raucous for the sake of it? Celebrating chauvinism? Playing the victim? That’s right, it’s all very Trumpian and characteristic of the far right of today.
The saddest thing about it? Instead of leaving the likes of Kyrgios to their online echo chambers, mainstream media eagerly provides a platform for them and their “controversies.” Just like they helped turn a maniac into a successful presidential candidate, they are giving credibility to Kyrgios’s blows of hot air, suggesting that he has legitimate stakes in the offensive nonsense he is spouting. But he doesn’t. Kyrgios does not make arguments, only noise. He doesn’t respond to critics either. Instead, he’ll claim that he’s being bullied or that social media has too much power. Go figure. Nonetheless, both the BBC, ESPN, Eurosport, and other prominent media networks have hired Kyrgios as an expert commentator. He is one of the featured players in the Netflix series Break Point, and during the US Open he was allowed to do on-court interviews.
Should Kyrgios be banned from all these activities, as some demand? People can hire the commentators they want, I suppose. But in this case they certainly have to accept responsibility for normalizing a culture that we thought we’d left behind. Do they care? Probably not. Ratings outweigh all else.
People who like Kyrgios often state that he “doesn’t give a fuck” and “says what he thinks.” To some, he is “real,” a “rebel.” I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that, today, we’re confronted with such mind-boggling standards also in the world of sports. It is devastating all the same.
Gabriel Kuhn is the author of Playing as If the World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Social Activism in Sports (2015) and Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety (2017).