“I don’t know if he’s a good bad guy or a bad good guy.” Welcome to trying to understand Nick Kyrgios, Martina Navratilova, it’s a conundrum Australia has been wrestling with for years.
“YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ME,” Kyrgios tweeted in reply, and considering how much energy has been expended trying to figure out the most kaleidoscopic figure in Australian sport, perhaps we never will, not really. Perhaps we never should. Perhaps he is simply the wall onto which we can all graffiti our preconceptions; poor sod.
Nicholas Kyrgios
(@NickKyrgios)YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ME.
His profile makes him a totem of the culture war. In him you can find whatever you’re looking for. He is confirmation bias incarnate on court and off.
The 25-year-old has been hurled back into the maelstrom of public debate during the first week of an Australian Open that he has been almost single-handedly responsible for energising. His second and third round matches whipped spectators into a frenzy inside John Cain Arena and made the Melbourne Park precinct buzz.
His supporters could be broadly categorised as young, non-traditional tennis fans, but they are not starry eyed school-age naifs. As Russell Jackson observed for the ABC, “Kyrgios is a more important figure to millennials, the oldest of whom are now 40 … What thirty-somethings see in Kyrgios, I think, is both their idealised and actual selves.” Elsewhere the rage tweets came thick and fast from folk unable to digest the run-ins with authority or the toll the home court advantage takes on his opponents.
The logical reasoning for both the pro and anti camps is sound. The Martina Maxim holds.
Part of the challenge Kyrgios apologists have in winning people around is the negativity bias. “There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable,” Nathalia Gjersoe writes. Kyrgios’s career has never been short of memorable, emotive incidents with negative consequences. Even in pulsating contests like those against Ugo Humbert and Dominic Thiem there’s low-hanging fruit for critics, from the swearing and racquet smashing, to the showboating and berating of chair umpires.
“In general, it takes about four good things to overcome one bad thing,” John Tierney posits about the negativity bias on the Freakonomics podcast. “Now, that’s a rule of thumb. It doesn’t apply to every kind of thing, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind.” So not only are we having to balance the good with the bad, we’re having to do it fourfold.
Kyrgios’s career, especially his enfant terrible phase, was highly publicised, and for years finding four or more good deeds to outweigh each of those negatives was a fool’s errand. The best anybody could hope for was to chalk it off to growing pains and wait for the butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis.
But more recently, the positives are easier to identify. His response to the NSW bushfire appeal marked him out as a caring, engaged citizen. His investment in his foundation is more than easy PR and comes with a mission statement that rivals any of his status for authenticity. “For the first time, I feel like there is a reason for what I am doing,” he states. “Tennis is a great life – we are well paid and the perks are pretty good – but it can feel empty if you’re just doing it for the money. I now know what it’s all for. When I work on the NK Foundation and our Melbourne facility, I cast my mind forward to all the disadvantaged kids I will be helping. I’m playing for them now.” Last year he volunteered to deliver food to Canberrans in need.
On court, he’s flourished at events like the ATP Cup and Laver Cup where the collegiate atmosphere channels his impishness and provides buffers to the meltdowns. It is up to us to decide which pieces of evidence to consider and how much weight they each should carry, and whether, eventually, the negativity bias can be overcome.
Five-and-a-half years ago, Channel Nine’s Today show aired an interview with Dawn Fraser, during which the Olympian suggested Kyrgios, and fellow Australian tennis player Bernard Tomic, should “go back to where their parents came from”. Fast forward to a few days ago and the same program featured a discussion involving hosts Brooke Boney, Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon. Kyrgios was complimented for the “fire” he showed in his performance against Humbert, where his repeat confrontations with the chair umpire were presented favourably, and the segment ended “long live the king”.