Tennis, Sportsmanship, and the Emotions of Victory or Defeat (October 31, 2022, the severed branch -- written at a monastery in Prague)
How can sportsmanship matter when a championship is on the line?
Tiafoe vs Rublev, 2022 US Open Men’s Quarter Finals (photo my own)
As of just over a year ago, I am a fanatical tennis fan. On a fateful day that September, my sister-in-law invited me and my wife to go with her one afternoon to the US Open. It was a tournament whose name I thought was exclusive to golf. I’d heard of Wimbledon before, and it all seemed quite fancy. Major tennis tournaments were like distant and remote events, attended by constitutional monarchists and international celebrities. But now I was being told that the whole time I’d been living in New York, there was a major tennis tournament just off the subway with tickets selling for thirty dollars. Sure, why not? Let’s go! As so often happens in stories about newfound love, I went without any real sense of the transformations my soul would incur. When I arrived, my first determination was that I needed a beer. Alcohol promptly injected in the early afternoon (or was it the late morning?), I soon found myself sitting with my companions at a match between the Russian Daniil Medvedev and the Dutchman Botic van de Zandschulp.
I liked that name. Van de Zandschulp. Very noble. I didn’t know all that much about Dutchmen, but that one sounded like an authentic Nederlander. Besides, I went to Groningen once when I was 20, so didn’t I have a claim to some form of sportsdom Dutchhood? “I’m rooting for the random Dutch guy,” I wrote as the caption to the group selfie I posted on Instagram. But as I went through the motions of clapping and cheering and hooting inappropriately, I swiftly realized that I had no idea what the rules to tennis were. I didn’t even understand the basics of the scoring system.
Perplexed, I squinted with confusion at the various numbers on the scoreboard. All those lines on the court - what did they mean? It was thrilling, like I’d arrived for the first time in Japan and I was sitting at a bar slurping down ramen. My sister-in-law, having played in college, began explaining the regulations and vocabulary to me. With the awe of a linguist spending the month with people speaking a language once thought to be extinct, I wondered at the meaning of supposedly elementary terms like “advantage,” “deuce,” “let,” and “fault.” It would take me several months to fully comprehend the difference between a “rally” and a “volley. “Wow, that was a long volley,” I often said after a long rally. Nevertheless, the basics of the rules and scoring system were clear enough to me by the end of the Medvedev match, whom I soon found myself adoring and who would go on to win the US Open that year. I like Russian, I thought. The Russian accent in English, the literature, the history, the language, the alphabet. I just love it. I switched allegiance to Daniil as the Dutchman fell behind. I became one of his devoted fans when he gave his on-court victory interview, my first time encountering this intriguing tennis tradition.
But it was during the next match, between the Canadian Leylah Fernandez and the Ukrainian Elina Svitolina, when I was swept away by emotions unlike any I’d ever felt at a Bernie rally. It was a new kind of aesthetic intensity which progressive politicians could never provide. 2021 was the year when the teenagers, the Brit Emma Raducanu and Fernandez, were upsetting some of the most successful players. The 18-year-old Fernandez had defeated the number-three-ranked Naomi Osaka. I learned later that the US Open crowd, always wild and ruthless, had dramatically turned against Osaka, cheering relentlessly for Fernandez, even though the New York crowd had long been ardent Osaka votaries. New York was supposed to be Osaka’s turf, but the crowd betrayed her like it was nothing, perhaps simply for the fun of it. I liked that. That’s how live sports should be. Raw, unforgiving, merciless. And in the match against the number-five-ranked Svitolina, Fernandez continued to command a fanatical level of New York crowd support. I slipped right into it, my whole being beset with the mob mentality, just as if I were marching in a protest mindlessly repeating whatever chant the person with a megaphone told me to say. Perhaps I’d only just learned about her existence, but I nevertheless felt a burning desire to see Fernie emerge victorious, and I relished the sensation of the crowd swallowing up the independence of my intellect.
The match was tremendously close, and Fernie was near defeat several times. The untimed nature of tennis is an element which sets it apart. There can be numerous sudden death moments throughout a match, repeated instances where everything is on the line. Watching our beloved Fernie repeatedly receive and give serves in these situations, I found myself leaning forward in my seat as if the Detroit Lions had finally gone to the Super Bowl and they were about to blow it. Whenever she succeeded, we rose from our seats screaming hysterically. The frustrated line judge had to tell us and the rest of the audience to “please! please! please be quiet!” Fuck the judge, I thought, though I meekly obeyed in the end. Not because I believed in my duty to be respectful, but because the crowd which governed my behavior went quiet. And Fernie, carried forward by the surging emotions of our hive hormones, endured through the pressure. Nearly crushed, she improbably came back during the third set. She defeated Svitolina in a tie breaker heavy with suspense and consequence, and from that point forward, I was a fanatical Fernie fan. What a rush! I couldn’t believe I’d once given all that money to Bernie when I could have been spending it on tickets to US Open matches, and I shifted my attention from politicians to tennis players.
A friend once told me that live sports is a superior form of entertainment because no one - not the announcers, not the crowd, not the players, not even the divinities - knows what is going to happen, and yet what is going to happen is of immense consequence to the contestants. Fun does not matter. Winning matters. Even God takes an interest in the drama. That’s why Evangelicals pray to Jesus for their teams to win. It’s because He hasn’t decided yet, and they hope He might tilt the scales in favor of their beloved athletes, whose strenuous efforts come to nothing with defeat. More and more, it is this element of pure suspense and high stakes, unrivaled by any book or movie in scope and reality, which keeps me coming back. There is so much on the line for the athletes. All their training comes down to this fleeting confrontation, this desperate struggle with the opponent. If they lose, they have no teammates who can shoulder the blame. It’s their own damned fault, and they can either wallow in the shame they feel, or they can overcome it, continuing to train for the next time.
No matter their prior reputation or obscurity, the elite athlete heads into a match with the opportunity to earn renown. No one ever cared about the athlete who was just a “good sport” and “enjoyed the game,” no matter how many plastic trophies parents purchase for their defeated kids. History appropriately forgets those defeated wretches. What lesson do they have to offer? What example do they provide for anyone to bother emulating? Sportsmanship? Please. Holding their plastic trophy, the child on a team which has lost every game that season knows deep down that in the end she is really just among the defeated. At least if she is on a team, though, she might be able to tell herself that it’s the other players’ fault, that her teammates just suck. The debilitating misery of defeat, however, can only be more intense in an individual sport.
The dynamics of individual competition dramatically enhance the existential stakes of sport. Both sides are held to the same standards and rules, but only one player emerges victorious at the end of the tournament, and she is the one who has truly achieved. “People say winning doesn’t matter,” says a psychotic and inspiring coach in Cobra Kai, “but winning does matter.” And he’s right. Becoming a champion is the point. Children aside, elite sports aren’t just for fun, not even high school sports are, nor should they ever be. The stakes are too high. The elite athlete may become semi-divine, worshiped across the whole of his society and even the globe. But more than fame, he will achieve the internal satisfaction of absolute victory. As the coach in Cobra Kai says to his teenagers about to enter their karate tournament, “if you win, then you will know, for the rest of your life, that you are a champion.” And in an individual sport, if the athlete does not achieve the existential fulfillment of championhood, then she has only herself to blame. There are no teammates to fault. It is no surprise that tennis players, who take upon themselves such immense pressure to perform with perfection, are so famously prone to emotional outbursts.
So much of who wins can come down to only a handful of slight differences in statistics, and tennis players struggle to forgive themselves when they commit any error. With the constant arrival of “sudden death” encounters through repeated match points and set points, the tennis player often has to endure multiple occasions during which either a final conclusion could result or the match could go on for another two hours. She might have multiple opportunities to score a match point and secure victory, only to lose her advantage and go down to utter defeat in the end, simply by virtue of her own failure. When behind, she might have to face several encounters in which her opponent has the chance to end the match entirely. Still, if she performs, she can turn the tide and win. Each and every mistake thus takes on existential consequences for the tennis player, who is often prone to visible mental breakdowns which the devotees of “sportsmanship” aspire to tame and control. I remember watching one of my favorite players, Aryna Sabalenka, hit herself repeatedly on the head and appear to curse herself while pacing around after her mistakes. “That’s what they teach them to do to themselves in Belarus!” my viewing companion shouted at the television. But it’s not the brutality of dictatorship which causes players to so mercilessly punish or hate themselves. It is the unbearable pressures of the moment.
It is not President Lukashenko who is making Sabalenka hit herself on the head during her matches. It is the inherent tension of tennis. Yet the solemn “sportsmanship” moralists who govern the sport nevertheless make every attempt to control the emotional expressions inherent to the high stakes of the match. A player can be reprimanded, and in extreme cases even lose a point!, for cussing, throwing her racket, breaking her racket, shouting down the umpire, or hitting a ball into the stands. As she seeks victory and deals with the turbulence within her, self-righteous groups of grim commentators, somber judges, and couch-bound fans, none of whom are in the agonizing position of the players, critically evaluate her emotional behavior on the basis of smug standards of “sportsmanship.” They urge the player to consider more good natured conduct, and they condemn her for expressing herself “inappropriately” on the court. But what she knows is that it is not sportsmanship which matters, but victory. It is the players who embrace this simple truth to whom I am most drawn. My personal favorites are the elite tennis athletes who scoff at their dignified overlords’ brutal attempts to suppress their emotions.
“I live by the sword and I die by the sword,” said the controversial Australian player Nick Kyrgios in an interview before the 2022 US Open quarter finals. “That’s my motto.” Then he plunged into a five-set match against the Russian player Karen Khachanov. The showdown lasted over three and a half hours. Kyrgios repeatedly released F bombs into the audience and on live television. The same analysts who condemn his “unsportsmanlike” conduct found that their producers were unable to resist allowing Kyrgios’s foul language to seep into the living rooms of the “folks at home.” Deep down, they knew his behavior only reflected the raw emotions inherent to the game. They knew that these are the hysterics which make tennis so exciting to watch. The sportsmanship police claim to oppose this behavior, but in practice, they cannot turn away. The more Kyrgios screamed, the more fervently I cheered for him.
To the Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas, however, Kyrgios is worse than his impassioned outbursts. When these two play against each other, Kyrgios often can’t help himself but talk shit at Tsitsipas, who often cheats by looking to his dad for assistance. After an emotionally heavy match between the two of them at Wimbledon in 2022, Tsitsipas accused Kyrgios of being “evil” and “a bully.” Tsitsipas:
“It's constant bullying, that's what he does. He bullies opponents. He was probably a bully at school himself. I don't like bullies. I don't like people that put other people down. He has some good traits in his character, as well. But he also has a very evil side to him, which if it's exposed, it can really do a lot of harm and bad to the people around him."
“He’s just soft,” Kyrgios said to the reporters who asked about Tsitsipas’s comments. “He’s got some serious issues…. If he was affected by that today, then that’s what’s holding him back.” Kyrgios had far more respect for the Russian player, Karen Khachanov, who beat him in five sets at the quarter finals this week. “I’m obviously devastated,” said Kyrgios, who brutally destroyed two rackets in the aftermath of his defeat, “but all credit to Karen. He’s a fighter. He’s a warrior.” That appropriately conditional respect for his opponent, of course, was no cause to suppress his emotions, no reason not to destroy his rackets, no excuse to stop himself from cussing. Why should he cage himself? Why deny expression to the intense feelings of failure which consumed him after his match? Kyrgios, in his press conference, summed up the agony of the defeated who have come so close to a championship.
"I honestly feel like sh*t. I feel like I've let so many people down. These four tournaments [the grand slams] are the only ones that ever are going to matter. It's just like you've got to start it all again. I have to wait till Australian Open [in January]. It's just devastating. Like, it's heartbreaking. Not just for me, but for everyone that I know that wants me to win…. Just feel like it was either winning it all or nothing at all, to be honest. I feel like I've just failed at this event right now. That's what it feels like. That's all people remember at a grand slam, whether you win or you lose. I think pretty much every other tournament during the year is a waste of time really. You should just run up and show up at a grand slam, that's what you're remembered by."
These were the feelings running through him when he spat in the direction of a heckling fan, cussed repeatedly even at his own box of supporters, and smashed his racket on the court in the aftermath of his quarterfinals defeat. Understandable. But the sanctimonious tennis overlords were eager to control Kyrgios’s passions and force him to behave himself as if sportsmanship were more important. They fined him $32,500 in total for his violations of their moral principles, and I like to think they divided the money up amongst their minions, although in truth they invest it in “player development programs.” The fines have no real effect on Kyrgios’s behavior, because money isn’t the point. Unlike the solemn bureaucrats who oversee the tournaments, most of whom will never taste real glory, Kyrgios knows that neither dollars nor ethics are what truly matter in sports. The seemingly eternal renown which accrues only to champions, who know forever that they are the victors, is the purpose behind all Kyrgios’s strivings. Only the triumphant matter in the end; everyone else is forgotten.
What we can suspect is that the sportsmanship overlords, who would have us believe they genuinely care about promoting good behavior for its own sake, are in reality simple sadists. They enjoy putting players in difficult situations and then relishing their misery, forcing them to maintain self-control if they don’t want to be fined a few thousand dollars. When the breakthrough American player Frances Tiafoe lost in five epic sets to the Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz in the semi-finals, he was in literal tears. Nevertheless, for the fan’s sake, the tennis officials paraded him onto the court and forced him to give a distressing interview in front of the entire crowd. “I feel like I’ve failed you,” he said to the mostly American crowd, which had been his standing by him for several matches. He could barely seem to speak; he seemed only to want to be alone. But the sportsmanship overlords amplified his sorrow for TV ratings, even as they demanded he keep his behavior within the parameters they had invented. Then, as they were preparing to celebrate Alcaraz with his own interview, they waited in silence while a miserable Tiafoe struggled to gather all his things from around his bench. His emotions seemed to prevent him from moving quickly. The cameras pursued periodic focus on him as, through suppressed tears, he did his best to get off the court so the Alcaraz interview could begin. If they had simply let him leave to begin with, he would never have been subjected to the theater, but the drama is what the US Open officials probably wanted all along. Kyrgios had it right, I thought to myself. In the face of sadistic officials who force miserable players to give interviews and press conferences after devastating defeats, while fining them for any “inappropriate” expression of their emotions, why not simply act however you feel?
If I have any critique of Kyrgios’s conduct on the court, it has nothing to do with ethics or appropriate behavior. It has everything to do with the risk that his emotional outbursts might inhibit his performance. Sportsmanship only matters if it is in the service of victory, not as an end in itself. Often, but not always, those who can control their emotions and exhibit the strongest “mental toughness” in the face of their own imperfections and failures are the players who prevail. They are the players who are able to maintain methodical control over the mechanics of their game.
When the “warrior” Khachanov defeated Kyrgios, the difference between the former’s cold and collected fortitude and the latter’s relentlessly explosive behavior may have been decisive. Khachanov handled himself with calm clarity both under pressure and in the face of his mistakes. Even in a hard-fought match that came down to a small handful of break points, Khachanov maintained a strikingly calm and stoic demeanor. Kyrgios, meanwhile, screamed repeatedly at his box of supporters when he made mistakes, raising his hands in the air and shouting supposed obscenities like “What the fuck!!!!” This might have given Khachanov a more precise control over his bodily mechanics, a more clear-headed insight into his opponent’s weaknesses. Kyrgios was perhaps emotionally unable to match this, and it might have made all the difference.
Still, despite all the moralizing television commentators who claim otherwise, I do not discount the possibility that the screaming, cussing, spitting, and racket-smashing could have an invigorating, energizing, and overall beneficial impact on Kyrgios’s game. It gives him the rage which he uses as his weapon. The match was a close one. Kyrgios could have won. One of the commentators who condemned Kyrgios’s behavior, after all, is none other than John McEnroe, who went down as a legendary champion despite some of the most infamously awful behavior in all of tennis history. And of course he is the one who, during the 2022 quarter finals between Sinner and Alcaraz, referenced the “Tsitsipases, those who just haven’t have quite got the whole thing, the whole package.” He knows that ultimately it is not conduct which will distinguish between Tsitsipas and Kyrgios, but achievement. The athlete’s only true obligation on the court is not to be a class act, but rather to attain victory. Glory is on the line, and sportsmanship only matters if it serves that end. Sometimes it might. But it should not be forgotten that despite all his tendencies toward emotional outbursts, Kyrgios defeated Daniil Medvedev, the world’s then-number-one ranked player, just days before his own demise. It could simply be the infectious bias of the sportsmanship votaries, who are prominently represented among the expert panelists, which inclines me to sometimes imagine that Kyrgios’s emotions would have been better suppressed than expressed.
Regardless, it’s players like Kyrgios to whom I gravitate, perhaps because I’ve never been one to exert strong self-control over my emotions. I refuse to judge those who similarly struggle. Instead, I fall down before them as if they were my own cherished matriarchs. It’s why I support not only the turbulent Aryna Sabalenka and the expressive Daniella Collins, but also the easily angered Leylah Fernandez, who improbably made it all the way to the US Open final in 2021. Once there, she was down in the second set to Raducanu when she finally gained momentum and seemed on the verge of a comeback. The crowd was coming back to Fernie. But then Raducanu needed a medical timeout, one which lasted some time, and Fernie sat anxiously on her bench, shaking her legs and becoming angry that the crowd momentum she had finally achieved had been replaced by an ominous silence. Fernie shouted angrily at the umpire that Raducanu, whose leg was visibly bleeding, didn’t really need her so-called medical timeout. Fernie didn’t seem to care about Raducanu’s leg; how could she? The bleeding had settled an erupting fan base which had just moments before been hive-minding in her favor! Awaiting her was once she returned to court was an uncertain, newly reset crowd dynamic.
My parents frowned upon Fernandez’s behavior, shifting their allegiances to Raducanu. They like to see young people exhibiting good sportsmanship and polished manners. But Fernie’s antics only drove me to support her more strongly, just as Kyrgios’s F bombs and racket-smashing draw me toward him. And yet these sometimes frenzied antics may have cost her the victory she sought. The whole time Fernandez shook and shouted, Raducanu simply sat there cooly sipping her water while her attendants cared for her leg, looking off into space and ignoring Fernie’s outbursts. Then, calm and collected, Raducanu strolled out onto the court, finished off Fernandez, and won the U.S. Open at just eighteen years of age, cementing her immortality on the banners proclaiming past champions.