Eva Asderaki-Moore probably loves her job. But there were times, during Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open win over Carlos Alcaraz on Tuesday, when the chair umpire clearly had it with the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” she pleaded. And then “That’s e-nough!” – which she enunciated like a schoolteacher marshalling her charges on a very long, very noisy, coach trip.
You had to feel for her. What is tennis thinking, after all? It throws 15,000 people into an arena, whips them up into a state of delirium with some of the greatest feats of athleticism seen in a grand slam quarter-final, then expects pin-drop silence between points. At 1am? When some of these people have been drinking since lunchtime?
The rowdy crowds have been as big a story at this year’s Australian Open as many of the featured players. The return of the “party court” – AKA Court 6, which got its own terraced bar last year – generated so much noise that a men’s singles match on a neighbouring court had to be moved further away mid-set. Meanwhile, anyone taking on a home favourite – and, heaven forfend, beating them – has been barracked in spirited Aussie fashion, as Jack Draper discovered in his back-to-back matches against Thanasi Kokkinakis and Aleksandar Vukic.
Danielle Collins did not just take on the Melbourne-born Destanee Aiava in the second round, but most of those watching from the stands as well. She laughed afterwards that her “super drunk” haters were funding her next trip to the Bahamas with their ticket money, which only upped the ante. In her next match, a loss to her fellow American Madison Keys, she was booed on and off court. Not that Collins minded. “Good luck pissing somebody off or getting under the skin of somebody that really doesn’t care,” she said.
Someone who does care – has always cared – is Djokovic. His sensitive skin is easily irritated. Remember last year’s Wimbledon, when he was upset with Dutch fans chanting ‘Ruuuuune’? At this tournament, it was a Channel Nine presenter, Tony Jones, who “insulted and offended” Djokovic, after a crass attempt at humour that involved Jones faux-chanting to Serbian fans. The 10-times champion took second-hand umbrage and he won the point. A brief but effective boycott of the host broadcaster triggered an apology.
Friction between players, media and crowds is all part of the sporting roundelay, but it does raise the question of where we draw our lines and what we want and expect of our much-prized fandom in today’s social climate. A heightened cultural sensitivity is, after all, at odds with sport’s more tribal traditions. There are not many other scenarios where we encourage large mobs of people to yell at and hate each other, unless we are the new president of the United States or one of his social media billionaires.
Sports fans are rightly becoming less tolerant of abuse and of the excuse for it presented on football terraces or Instagram feeds. We demand more and better of organisers and participants and we expect sport to reflect the safe and inclusive environment we all want to live in. At the same time, we are deeply committed adherents of a fundamentally oppositional form of entertainment, whose continuing existence is predicated on “passion” and “atmosphere” – the two elements that allow organisers and broadcasters to alchemise an otherwise trivial pursuit into a billion-dollar industry.
In other words, we are consumers of a product specifically engineered to get everyone riled up, which is an outcome perfectly suited to the shouty polarities of our age. And the people who manufacture it never stop telling us how much it matters and how much it matters that it matters.
The current mechanism of fan engagement is engineered to push us into losing our sense of perspective and then to stoke even more outrage when we do. You can see it clearly in football’s coverage of refereeing decisions, from Jhon Duran’s red card to Kai Havertz’s handball. The super slo-mos, the heated panel debates, the infinite content possibilities of an irresolvable was-it-or-wasn’t-it VAR ruling. All of this gleeful clickbait is the very same stuff eroding respect towards officials and encouraging parents to scream at the poor volunteer officiating their kids’ weekend game.
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So where are we headed? Gen Z are held to be less tribal in their approach to sport than previous generations, less likely to root themselves in deep and historic rival identities. Research shows that far fewer of them call themselves sports fans than, for instance, millennials. They engage with the stories that surround sport rather than the live action itself and are more likely to follow individual players than teams or clubs.
It does not make them less vocal or their reactions less visceral: witness the aftermath of the women’s floor final at last year’s Olympics. The sight of Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing to the new champion, Rebecca Andrade, on the Games’s first all-black gymnastics podium – “giving her flowers,” to use Biles’s phrase – seemed to encapsulate the emerging generation’s signature values of empathy, community and purpose.
Within a week that joyous moment had curdled into a social media pile-on, after Chiles lost her bronze on a technicality. Bitter accusations of injustice and racial politics continue to fuel a righteous and surely out-of-proportion anger no one is minded to quell.
Sport promoters win both ways. Until recently, a game’s following was based on allegiance. Now it is built on attention, an ever-rolling scroll of content designed to trigger and monetise our emotions. It is hard, in those circumstances, to fashion a future where fans are passionate, but not too passionate, and where loyalties are tribal, but not aggressively tribal. Good luck to all the chair umpires.
