Is social media a net benefit for tennis players?
Plus AI brings Johnny Cash back to life, in a not entirely desirable way
Like a lot of people, during Wimbledon I was urged by Netflix to watch its tennis series Break Point. It’s a 10-episode behind-the-scenes look at the private lives and pressures of a number of rising or already-shining tennis stars: Nick Kyrgios, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Taylor Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, and more. It aims to do what Drive To Survive did for Formula 1: make the participants into more than distant icons by exposing the personalities underneath.
I was intrigued by Break Point. I actually got my start in journalism through reporting on tennis. Not for a local paper, but for a British tennis magazine, enterprisingly called “Tennis”, back in the days when there were physical tennis magazines. (My career in journalism basically shows nominative determinism in publications: writing about tennis for Tennis, every week about computers for Computer Weekly, about business for Business, about science for New Scientist, after which the newspaper names of The Independent and The Guardian maybe don’t fit the template so well.) I covered Wimbledon and the French Open multiple times; all the Grand Slam tournaments at least once. Ask me nicely, I’ll show you the press passes.
One thing I did learn is that you don’t necessarily learn much about a player’s real personality from their behaviour on the court, or in their offcourt media appearances. For the men in particular, there’s an essential competitive veneer on the court, and in the press conferences which they’re contractually obliged to appear at afterwards, a weariness that comes from the boredom of repetition. It takes artful questioning to pique a player’s interest enough to engage with a topic; but most of the journalists in the room don’t want that, just a couple of quotable sentences they can mash into the second paragraph of their story about how X beat Y in the third round. Only if you can get the player to engage do you get a glimpse of what they’re like in person.
The same applies to the women: relentlessly competitive on the court, guarded and occasionally forthcoming in press conferences. I often found the women more willing to express themselves (Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf were particularly enjoyable). But the fact that you don’t really understand the people underneath was driven home for me when Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf let it be known they were a couple. I’d always thought Agassi was, to put it simply, a jerk, while Graf was a delight; the realisation that she saw something completely different in him told me unambiguously that I was totally wrong about him. (His autobiography Open, written with JR Moehringer, is the best tennis book I’ve ever read. And I’ve read them all.)
That’s the context for my viewing of Break Point. Necessarily, a lot is missed out in the story of being a professional tennis player: the hours and hours and hours of drilling and practising, the slog of packing and transiting and travelling to the next location, the mental slog of repeatedly losing. Most pros lose more matches than they win; in a tournament of 32 players, 16 will have a 0-1 record after the first round, and another 8 will only have a breakeven 1-1 record after losing in the second round. I’d also like a word with the editor, who seems to think that matches always start with a service from the ad (left-hand) side—this really began to grind my gears after a bit.
What we do get to see, from time to time, is the players having some downtime after or between matches, sitting on exercise bikes after a match (though not explained, this is apparently a recommended warmdown to move lactic acid out of the muscles; the alternative is an ice bath), or sitting in courtesy cars being shuttled between hotel and stadium grounds.
At which point the phones come out. And oh my, do they love their phones. Quite a few of the scenes, particularly those involving the temperamental Nick Kyrgios, reminded me strongly of the “Good tweet, Bad tweet” scene from Succession:
Bearing in mind all the caveats above, you can understand tennis players (and probably everyone) through the prism of their childhood. Kyrgios in particular mentions being teased, even bullied, for being overweight as a child: there’s a glimpse of footage, and you can see how kids would have delighted in being unkind to the chubby-looking kid. And now look at him: 6’4” (1.93m) and solid. His determination unlocked a talent that none of them have come close to, and he’ll never let anyone forget it: every match is figuratively spitting in the eye of those childhood bullies, over whom he now towers physically and in achievement. Only trouble is, that’s not the mentality that wins tournaments. (He’s won seven titles in 11 years on the tour.) In some of the Netflix footage, you can seen Kyrgios almost delightedly knowing that his social media is going to blow up (after the bad-tempered Wimbledon 2022 4th round match against Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas, where the Greek completely lost his mental moorings in exasperation at the Australian’s tactics). Good tweet, bad tweet, he doesn’t care; he feeds on the hate because it makes him stronger.
Similarly for Novak Djokovic: as a child in Serbia, he was literally practising tennis and then ducking into bomb shelters to escape NATO shelling. Him against the world? You absolutely bet it is. When he plays at Wimbledon, the armed forces personnel guarding the exits are from the same groups that once forced him to run for cover. Success must make the grass taste even sweeter.
What you can also see in some players’ use of social media is an almost desperate desire for connection. This isn’t surprising: a pro’s life is lonely, because it’s very expensive to have multiple people travelling around with you. Only the very successful can afford to, which then reinforces their success because they have a support network around them for the times when they suffer a setback. For both the struggling and the famous, social media—Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and (far less so) Facebook—provide validation from fans and even other friendly players when they’re far from home.
But that can blow back, as the series demonstrates. Aryna (pronounced Aree-nah) Sabalenka is Belarusian, aged 24 when the series was filmed in 2022. She’s broad-shouldered and hits the ball like it just insulted her mother. At the time of filming, she was solidly in the top 5 (her ranking varied over the year between No.2 and No.8).
Then in February 2022 came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and abruptly everyone did not like Russians, and did not like Belarusians either. And some of them on social media decided they particularly did not like Belarusian tennis players—including her. The moment was captured by the camera team.
“After the match, I opened Instagram. And the first thing that popped up was, like, ‘You fucking bitch, you’re gonna die!’ Or like ‘You better die. And I wish all your family will die from cancer’ and blah, blah, blah. And you see these messages and I cannot handle it any more. This is way too much.”
Sabalenka was utterly crushed; even more than a loss, to feel that suddenly a whole world was against her was too much. In the episode, her coaches try to reassure her, without success:
Sabalenka, let’s be clear, isn’t an apologist for the Russian invasion. But even if she was, it’s not as if that would make the slightest bit of difference to a war being fought with real tanks, real artillery, real people. (“If I could have any control of it, then of course I would do everything I can to stop everything”, she says in the documentary.) She’s just a pleasant person who happens to be really good at tennis and has been caught up, through an accident of birth, in a vicious conflict that is playing out both on the literal battlefield, and on the social media where she looks for validation. (Perhaps she envies Roger Federer, born in stoically neutral Switzerland.) In general, her Instagram and Twitter feeds are bursting with positive energy—you’ll be very fit if you follow her exercise routines—but these few minutes of the documentary told the story of how something you thought was emotional scaffolding holding you up can instead be knocked away in an instant.
Before social media, the tennis tour was a lonelier place; handheld games and MP3 players were a lifesaver for a lot of younger pros (they tend not to be big on reading). It’s utterly unsurprising that they’d leap onto all the different platforms in a search for connection with their fans. And when it works, the effects are positive. The trouble is that the monsters live out there too, as Sabalenka found out.
Net-net (haha), do we think that social media has been a positive for tennis players? I think the answer is the same as for everyone: partly yes, sometimes no. Kyrgios thrives on it, good or bad; Sabalenka mostly thrives on it, but discovered that the downside can be gigantic. There’s no simple metric. And there’s no getting rid of it, either.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• Faceb..Meta has released its open-source Large Language Model, helpfully called Llama (at least when Mark Zuckerberg refers to it). The content is out of date (asked to write 200 words about the current state of professional women’s tennis, it mentioned Ash Barty and Naomi Osaka, one of whom has retired and the other is not playing and has just had a baby) but generated briskly, if with all the snap of a New York Times sports writeup.
• Apple is testing a chatbot but “has no idea what to do with it”. Bit like me, then. Everyone says “but you could make the chatbot the front end/back end/replacement for Siri!” Apparently Siri is much too clunky and embedded for that; it’s almost the poster child of legacy code in the AI age.
• G/O Media says more AI-written articles are coming, and you’d better get used to it. Alternatively: we’ll avoid them, and the sites using them, like the plague.
• Fake reviews written by chatbots are multiplying, and pose a problem for online review sites to recognise. The Guardian posted one it had generated on Tripadvisor; nothing happened. The writer deleted it and pointed out to TA what he had been able to do; TA said it was “highly likely our agents would have identified and removed it”. Sure, Jen.
• Johnny Cash sings Barbie Girl. (In Folsom prison, no less.) Plus a bit of Spice Girls and Miley Cyrus. Yes, AI-generated. Much more like that from @ThereIRuinedIt on Twitter.
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