Lawn Tennis in a Submarine

 
Kyrgios, containing a calmer moment! 

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My favourite sport is watching tennis and pastime (writing about submarines). But rarely do the two meet.

Now that women are welcome on submarines there may be narrow, assertions that they are "girlie" and therefore "unreliable." But such assertions may mask the reality that some crew members see them as competition, as this article eventually makes clear.

Traditionally the bad boys of tennis have been American and this is only fitting: Jimmy Connors (bad but funny), John McEnroe (bad, less funny), Andre Agassi (bad, but married the one time sex-symbol  Brooke Shields, so must be OK). All of them turned out OK, once they matured. Agassi’s part in this tale doesn’t end there, though.

The world’s second greatest traditional Tennis Power - Australia - has now caught up in the bad boy stakes: Bernard Tomic has had his run-ins but getting better.

Now there is Nick Kyrgios [pronounced Kir-ee-oss] who has already been fined at Wimbledon 2016 for bad language. Earlier, in 2015, in what is Kyrgios' most memorable line –  he advised an opponent during a championship match - picked up by the court microphones - that "Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend, sorry to tell you that mate".

Below, full of bad language, is only a partially exagerrated parody of Kyrgios. He has a very exotic ethnicity - not black but Australian-Greek-Malaysian. Some might say a fiery combination...

Baaaad Language Warning!!
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Will Swanton, Australia’s premier tennis reporter, today compared Agassi with Kyrgios

Swanton remembered Agassi, when young in the late 1980s, and pre-Wimbledon:

“Andre Agassi got drunk on Jack Daniels, berated spectators, smashed balls at opponents, abused linesmen, stomped around with a Mohawk haircut he dyed red or orange, wore a wig, drew crosses on his face with eyeliner, grew an inch-long pinky fingernail, painted the pinky red, painted it black, gave his racquets to a homeless man and vowed never to play again but then contested a tournament in Florida while wearing pink lipstick and ripped denim jeans.

Why? Rebellion. Too much pressure. Suffocating expectation. Stop telling me who to be. Stop telling me how to act.”

Swanton continues: 

“Nothing tops Kyrgios’s sledge of Stan Wawrinka and the defenceless Donna Vekic on the shame file but Agassi gave it a decent whirl in his day. [Agassi said that winning] the 2005 US Open made him “as happy as a fag in a submarine”…"

There you have it.