Jaws dropped in Louis Armstrong Stadium on Sunday night as former tennis players turned broadcasters Pam Shriver and Chris Evert closed out their commentary of a US Open round of 16 match with a giggly “boys will be boys!” sing-song observation. “He’s the bad boy of tennis,” Evert said on the ESPN telecast. “I want to cook him a meal.”

Nick Kyrgios’s latest outburst at US Open shows he still has much to learn Read more

The boy in reference was fifth-seeded Russian player Daniil Medvedev, who’d just finished his victory over Dominik Koepfer with a campy, prolonged saunter to the net. The thousands of spectators listening in on the ESPN feed from Armstrong (where I happened to be sitting) and the millions more watching remotely from around the world could be forgiven for thinking they’d accidentally picked up a livestream of two chirpy pals making gendered conversation over lunch. Medvedev’s animated behavior – including an uncomfortable trolling of the New York audience during his third-round victory speech two nights prior – was compared by Shriver and Evert to Saturday’s interaction between Coco Gauff and No 1 seed Naomi Osaka, during which Osaka recruited her defeated opponent to partake in a shared encore interview: The women are being so well-behaved! The boys, they’re misbehaving. Medvedev’s net dance resulted in ESPN tweeting that he’d gone “full villain”, signified by a horned purple emoji.

In 2019 – in a world where the female world No 1 greets the media with refreshingly unpolished candor, and where unprecedented moments of tender camaraderie between players unfold post-match, do we really need the hoary archetypes of a faded Hollywood era to understand modern tennis? No, we don’t. The roles of the bad boy and the good girl don’t need to be played by anyone.

Medvedev was quick to apologize during his press conference after his victory over Koepfer, stating: “Talking about [the] last match, I was an idiot.” A USA Today profile of the incident opened with a call for Australia’s Nick Kyrgios to “move over. There’s a new bad boy of tennis at the US Open.”

If we’re holding athletes accountable for their behavior, let’s hold our own perceptions accountable too

Kyrgios, who warms up for his matches in his Celtics jersey, doesn’t have a coach, and was fined $163,000 for an outburst at the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati last month, is the media’s most prolific recipient of the bad boy label. In the run-up to the US Open, the Tennis Channel ran a Twitter poll, “Will he boom or bust?”, followed by a callous discussion of Kyrgios’ mental health. If it seems harmless enough to mock his on-court antics and frequent tantrums, consider that the vilification of his persona dangerously flattens his character. In labeling players by how they behave, the person becomes the entertainment, rather than the sport itself. There is a perverse glee in showing up for a match to see if a professional athlete will lose it, in waiting for his next memeable outburst. If tennis is in need of a bad boy to spice things up, then it’s because we’re still relying on the dated notion that tennis is a gentleman’s sport for well-behaved men and women to smile and nod and behave in a particular way. A larger infrastructure is in need of renovation.

Organizing players into tropes detracts from their artistry. From the physicality of the game. From the mental fortitude and recalibration needed to navigate every moment on court. Sure, part of the reality of being a public figure is being projected upon by the collective social psyche, but if we’re holding athletes accountable for their behavior, let’s hold our own perceptions accountable too.

Kyrgios’s 2019 US Open run ended after a third-round defeat to Russia’s Andrey Rublev on Saturday night. Kyrgios served 30 aces, and at one point, four in a row in a blistering 40-second service game. The audience was not watching a bad boy. What we were witnessing that night was a player ill-equipped to handle the emotional duress of an inconsistent, poorly paced dynamic. We watched an implosion in three sets. It happens. But throughout the match there was an underlying sense of unease – evident in the way the commentators picked Kyrgios’s quirks apart, the way the camera paused too long on his face as he talked, angrily, to himself in between points – that what we were really waiting for was for him to fall apart.

Medvedev meets the 24th-seeded Stan Wawrinka in a quarter-final match on Tuesday afternoon at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The media coverage owes him more than the lame title they’ve assigned him this tournament. Earlier this summer on the ATP tour, he had 11 wins in 17 days, all in straight sets, amid a breakthrough season that’s seen him win six matches against top-10 opponents. Stop calling him a bad boy. He surely deserves better.