The Turkish original of this article was published as Kyrgios ve Demirtaş on 15th August 2015.
[14th August 2015] Would you happen to know Mr Kyrgios? No, he is not one of SYRIZA’s bright new stars. He doesn’t have anything to do with Tsipras, Varoufakis, or Tsakalotos. I don’t intend to undertake yet another comparison (now starting from their respective bankruptcies) between the Greek “new left” and the HDP’s New Life “leftism” on both of which so many have pinned such high hopes.
Don’t you think that that would be too obvious an idea in the first place? Right now, yes, I have a comparison, but a different sort of comparison in mind.
Nick Kyrgios is an Australian of Greek origin. Only 20 years old, a 6’4” young giant, a brilliantly talented tennis player. Last year, when he was just 19 and ranked no better than 144th , in his very first Wimbledon he managed to make it into the quarter-finals by defeating Rafa Nadal (then world number 1) 7-6, 5-7, 7-6, 6-3 in an extraordinary four-set display, in just under two hours, that included 37 aces as well as an unbelievable between two-legs passing shot. He has a huge following. He is said to have breathed new life into Turkish politics, oops, sorry, world tennis that has been rendered a bit boring by the spectacle of the AKP, oops, sorry, Nadal, Djokovic or Federer winning all the time.
And yet there is a fundamental problem with this young man, which is that he is somewhat lacking in character. He does not have a solid, reliable personality. He is much too spoilt, and as immature as an unripe watermelon. He is scandal-prone, occasionally because of his bad temper and language, or else because he picks needless quarrels with his rivals or umpires. And then he also has an overprotective mother, who jumps in to defend her son. The worst is that when he ends up in a predicament, he has difficulty bringing himself to admit that he is in the wrong. He tries to stick it out by blaming others. Only eventually, when it finally hits him that there is no getting away from a penalty of some kind, does he hang his head and revert to an over-apologetic mode to proffer some not very sincere sounding self-criticism.
Especially in tennis with its peculiar culture of courtesy and etiquette, where players have no physical contact with each other, and even in the rare case of a hot quarrel are forbidden to cross over to the other side of the net, such rude behavior constitutes more of an eyesore.
This year, for example, when he had risen hugely in world rankings to enter Wimbledon as the 26th seed, because of his obstinate, ill-tempered bickering Kyrgios began to be cautioned by the officials from the outset. In round four he was paired with Richard Gasquet. During the second set, he received a Code Violation warning for using foul language. Subsequently, it looked as if he had given up trying as he deliberately avoided the ball or hit it into the net, for which he was roundly booed by the spectators. Between two games, it took him too long to change his socks, and when he was asked to hurry up by the British umpire James Keothavong, he retaliated, arguing that he was actually wearing two pairs on top of one another, and that he had just finished taking off one of them. “Mate, Rafa (Rafael Nadal) and stuff play 30 seconds in between points every time and all I’m doing is putting my sock back on,” he petulantly added, leaving most people with the impression that he was just a bad sport who couldn’t take imminent defeat.
Far worse has been his last incident. This past week, he was playing in the Rogers Cup in Canada. In the second round, he had been paired with world number 5 Stanislas Wawrinka. Halfway through a game, he suddenly lashed out at his rival, sledging the recently separated Wawrinka through an incredibly rude remark about his 19 year-old Croatian girl friend Donna Vekic (beginning to be heralded as “the new Sharapova”) whom Wawrinka has just started dating. Dragging Thanasi Kokkinakis, another young Greek-Australian tennis player, into the picture, just before serving “Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend, sorry to tell you that mate,” he snarled. Wawrinka did not hear it at the time, but as the court microphones caught Kyrgios’s crudity, like the entire public the Swiss player, too (who had to retire in the third set through injury), got to learn about it. The rest is perhaps even more shameful for Kyrgios. Initially he was all bluster: “He was getting a bit lippy with me. Kind of in the heat of the moment, I don’t know, I just said it.” As for their locker room encounter after the match, he again tried to minimize it, rather brazenly saying that obviously Wawrinka was angry but that hopefully it was now all over and behind them. Meanehile his mother Nill Kyrgios had promptly jumped into the fray, tweeting: “A sledge for a sledge…do your research before piping up like sheep! #moaners,” though then there was such a reaction that she was forced to retract and close her account.
Nevertheless, it does look as if this time things are not going to go the way this shrill and strident mother and son might want, as it is not likely that there will be a quick and easy cover-up. While Wawrinka maintained his dignity through measured tweets underlining that he did not know what to say or do in the face of such unsportsmanlike disrespect, Kyrgios was repeatedly booed as he entered and left the court during his third round match with John Isner (which he lost in two sets). He was then fined the maximum possible 10,000 dollars by the ATP; furthermore, notwithstanding Kyrgios’s hasty claims that surely it now had to be all over since he had repeatedly apologized to Wawrinka both publicly and privately, the ATP also sent him an Investigation Notice, which could eventually lead to a temporary ban. In a statement to Fox Sports, Australian team captain Wally Masur said that they were trying to arrange things behind scenes so that Nick Kyrgios could continue his journey along a rising learning curve.
I cannot exactly say why, but while following all this it was “Selocan” Demirtaş that kept coming to my mind. Now he, too, is perhaps a talented but not a very ethical and sportsmanlike type. Yet another immature, unripe watermelon, I would say. All kinds of rudeness, crudeness and lying — he has it all. You cannot pin him down; he first says one thing and then switches to another, changing and evading and distorting all the time while also pleading that he has been misquoted. He talks differently in Turkey, in Germany, in Brussels, at Kandil, or to the BBC. And unfortunately, he happens to be not in tennis but politics. The mother looming behind and above him is not Nill but the PKK. His support team is not headed by Wally Masur but by Cemil Bayık and Bese Hozat. And whatever is it that he stirs up is paid for in human lives.