Pronounced: “Nick facken KEE-rios, mate.”
Are you saying he’s an uncouth young Australian? A bit of a larrikin? I am indeed. He’s also one of the world’s favourite things: a naughty tennis player.
I see. How naughty? Well, he swears while playing and shouts things such as, “Why am I serving so badly?”
We all do that. True. But he is also a prodigious racket-smasher, sending the wreckage of one bouncing off the turf and up into the crowd.
Yikes. I never do that. Largely because I don’t get free tennis rackets and there’s never a crowd. He also argues with umpires, sarcastically changes socks, cuddles ball boys, gives sullen press conferences and the impression that he is deliberately losing whole games. These were all in one match, by the way, this year’s fourth-round defeat to Richard Gasquet at Wimbledon.
How do you change socks sarcastically? Kyrgios manages it. He’s also a very good player, by the way, albeit rather young.
So you’re saying he’s just a stroppy teenager? Well, he’s 20.
Ah well, we all have to grow up in our own way. Time is the only solution. Others have been suggested.
Oh yes? Speaking of Kyrgios and his compatriot Bernard Tomic on Channel Nine’s Today programme, 77-year-old Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser said: “They should be setting a better example for the younger generation of this great country of ours. If they don’t like it, go back to where their fathers … or their parents came from. We don’t need them here in this country to act like that.”
O … K … I like the way that comment goes from sort-of-inspiring, to patriotic, to sounding racist-and-patriarchal, then to sorry-I-respect-both-genders, then finishes on but-I-really-do-sound-quite-racist. Fraser has since given one of those “unreserved” apologies, saying her comments were “part of a larger un-broadcasted interview”, intended “on a purely sporting level rather than meant as an attack on Nick’s ethnicity”.
Where do Kyrgios’s parents come from anyway? Greece and Malaysia.
He should choose Malaysia then. Good idea.
Do say: “Unfortunately, skin colour marks you as an immigrant in Australia.”
Don’t say: “White skin, you mean?”
