Cut Nick Kyrgios Some Slack - If You Built the Boy Up, You Can't Then Cut Him Down

In the wake of his combustible second round Wimbledon victory over Juan Monaco , let's pause to reflect on how the media view young Australian Nick Kyrgios.

"No fear and a golden arm", a "free spirit and irresistible power" says Kevin Mitchell in these pages. "Game and confidence-wise, Kyrgios has it all" say others . Even Prime Minister Tony Abbott weighed in: "Australia couldn't be prouder of you". (Kyrgios Wins but Courts Controversy)

The only catch? All these quotes come from a year ago, when Kyrgios' blistering serve and rifled forehands were enough to impress us, before anyone had found the time to pick at the seams on his Nike shirts and before he'd been around long enough to take issue with authority figures in the way that youngsters tend to.

And now apparently, the tide has turned. (Wimbledon Heat Leaves Bernard Tomic Dizzy)

"Unfortunately being himself continues to rile fans who are fed up with his on-court antics," say the Sydney Morning Herald this week. "Now he has to decide how he wants to be remembered."

Got that? A 20-year-old with barely a year in the international spotlight needs to pay close attention to his legacy. (Heather Watson Defies Death Threats to Shine)

"I'm starting to feel like Nick Kyrgios is - and there's no delicate way of putting this - a bit of a tool," went another opinion column before Kyrgios had even laid racquet on ball this week.

A year ago the world didn't mind when this kid crashed the party because it all just looked like a hell of a lot of fun. Novelty now exhausted, Kyrgios is being relentlessly bashed over the head with all of the same personality traits that made his rise so compelling and enjoyable, that made it possible in the first place.

A particular point of interest is the hiding he receives on account of the bling, the swagger and the hip-hop posturing. But besides an actual rapper, surely there's no professional endeavor more suited to the brash individualism of the hip-hop star than a solo sport like tennis?

Think about it; you've got no teammates; you're followed around the world by an entourage; people pay you absurd amounts of money to use their products as ostentatiously as possible; nobody really begrudges you obscene levels of wealth and a rebel streak actually helps in that sense.

Rich and famous sports people like Kyrgios are actually the only people on earth who should act like rappers. Not even rappers should act as much like rappers as sportspeople do. With the assistance of a decent producer and autotune, anyone could release a hip-hop single - but only a miniscule percentage of human beings can regularly spear 210kmph aces into the ribs of line judges.

Nick Kyrgios and his on-court behaviour has been making the headlines

© AFP

Kyrgios' on-court behaviour and insubordination towards officials in both his games at Wimbledon so far hasn't been too flash, that's for certain. The only problem is that we're talking about a fairly standard pitfall of youth and inexperience suffered by many of the best players.

There's now countless case studies telling us that being a bit of a prat at Kyrgios' age is no hurdle to either success or lasting fame - or have we so quickly forgotten early-era Lleyton Hewitt, or heaven forbid, even the early moments of he-that-is-above-reproach, Roger Federer?

If Australia should actually engage in genuine national debate about Kyrgios and his potential legacy then surely a decent amount of attention should be paid to the huge interest he's generating for the sport of tennis.

Make no mistake, every sport in Australia is engaged in a war for the attention of consumers and participants, battling not just each other but rapid societal shifts and cheaper, easier and frankly better entertainment options, ones that don't involve sitting in the baking sun for 8 hours.

What place would tennis - a sport of no great fit to modern childhood life with its hours upon hours of solitary, glamourless training sessions - continue to hold in the imagination of children were a path not lit by a personality as engaging and symbolic of the times as Kyrgios?

As you read this he's probably responding to one of those kids' tweets or Instagram comments. If the fact that Kyrgios favours the basketball world inhabited by LeBron James over tennis says anything, it's that he's probably more in tune with the interests of the average teenager than most sporting pundits seem to be.

In actual fact, the closer Kyrgios' behaviour and style matches that of the pop-cultural touchstones of the time - the LeBron's and Kanye's - the greater the chance that the sport remains relevant to kids. And rather than driving a wedge between himself and Australians, shouldn't the admission that he doesn't particularly like his job actually bond both parties in one of life's universal sorrows?

That Kyrgios isn't in love with tennis at his age should actually qualify as the least surprising thing in the world given the sacrifices players make to get to the top, with all those chunks of missed childhood and hours in departure lounges. He seems to view tennis as merely the medium through which he can achieve stardom, but that itself is still a compelling incentive for him to achieve great things.

Here's something else that no-one wants to acknowledge about a player so supremely talented: even the derailed or mediocre career path that's being touted as a possibility if Kyrgios doesn't cut the histrionics wouldn't actually be that bad. If he spends a decade reaching the fourth round of Grand Slams he'll still receive more solo prime-time TV coverage than almost any athlete in Australia.

That's the worst case scenario. He'd remain among the most marketable Australian sportspeople, towering over us on billboards selling underpants. Maybe he'll 'just' be a new generation Joe Wilfried Tsonga, always pushing the best but never quite matching them. If he does, he'll still be outdoing all bar a couple of players in the last 40 years of Australian men's tennis. Again, that looks like a worst case scenario.

Didn't we all watch far too much Chris Guccione and Wayne Arthurs to genuinely dislike this kid? The procession of no-hopers that bridged Lleyton Hewitt's peak and this new 'Special K' era in Australian men's tennis are just too fresh in the mind.

Tennis players don't spend long on that dizzying, glorious 'up', when everything suddenly seems possible and anything could happen from one minute to the next. To fritter that away arguing about Kyrgios' terrible hair and teenage tantrums would be a shame.

A lot of what the Kyrgios discussion comes down to is the circular and highly distorted flow of opinion between social and traditional media, which now unfortunately replaces such quaint concepts as sober news reporting, expert analysis and the opinion of people actually qualified to make judgments.

Looking to this human centipede of phoney consensus we get in place of those things, we're told that 'people' are sick of Kyrgios, that they've already 'had it up to here' with his petulance. Maybe a fair few of those people genuinely do dislike Kyrgios but then a huge amount of the same people also consider Sam Stosur - Australia's only Grand Slam singles winner in a decade - a hopeless choker.

Sometimes you really can't trust people.

But it feels as though this will be the fate of Australian men's tennis into the next decade; supremely talented kids, often second-generation migrants, having seven shades of shit kicked out of them for not pressing their linen like Roy Emerson and conforming to a narrow set of outdated cultural expectations.

England's identity crisis is manifested through its football team, Australia's now through Bernard Tomic's lap dances and Nick Kyrgios' diamond stud earrings.

This is a great pity, because if sport should achieve anything it's to take us outside ourselves and introduce us to people we're not, people we could never be. At best they surprise us, shock us, delight us and sometimes even repulse us.

Nick Kyrgios can do that in the space of a single point. If I was kid discovering tennis for the first time, I think I'd want 'in' on that.