Maybe one of the most glorious parts of watching live professional tennis is the decorum of the experience. When you go to a tennis match, there are rules for the fans, just like the players. Perhaps most sacred is you keep quiet during play, especially when players are in the service motion. You can explode and cheer after the point, and maybe even a gasp after an exceptional volley. But otherwise, fans exhibit due restraint when players are in action. That is, of course, a stark contrast to pretty much every other sport besides golf, where fans do everything humanly possible to disrupt an athlete’s progress. This includes everything up to and including inappropriate comments about their family. There’s basically a cottage industry in basketball for fans to get players to miss free throws. But tennis is different, which makes the watching tennis give me hope that perhaps there is some civility left in the world.
That wasn’t the case at the end of a quarterfinal match at the Canadian Open this week, during the final game of match between Sasha Zverev and Alexri Popyrin. In the final game of the third set, as Zverev looked to serve out the match, one particular fan kept yelling just at the moment Zverev started his serving motion. This happened a few times and even prompted Zverev to ask the fan to stop. Eventually, after a couple of delays, security found the culprit and removed him from the match, to the delight of the rest of the stadium. Zverev then won the game and match, although not before a double fault, and then made a sarcastic wave towards the seat where the heckler had been sitting. For tennis, that’s pretty dramatic.
This is by no means the first time a heckler has interfered with game play, even if it is fairly rare. There was a pretty famous case of a fan yelling at Rafael Nadal for what she perceived to be painfully slow play. Amongst other things, she repeatedly gave him the finger while insulting him for a bunch of things while Rafa largely laughed it off. Danielle Collins has been heckled a couple of times, including once in Mexico when she yelled back at the offenders to have a little respect. And a bunch of players have been jeered during a match though not during play. Daniil Medvedev makes a living of it, and Novak Djokovic seems to feed of the crowd’s negative energy. So it’s not like it never happens. It’s just notable when it does.
These unspoken rules of behavior – although I do believe some are actually written rules – are often off putting, or at least confusing to sports fans not familiar with tennis. I’ve heard more than a few times people say that tennis players should have to deal with the same thing that, Lebron James does every time he touches the ball in an away arena. Or get treated like Patrick Mahomes when he goes under center in Buffalo. That tennis is something less than a real sport because of the grace allowed athletes to perform at their best. I’ve also heard that some fans couldn’t enjoy the experience without being able to pour their lungs and creative expression into the experience – not only its cathartic exercise, but also because fans are part of the game itself, able to possibly influence its outcome.
To be clear, I spend many years verbally harassing any basketball team that visited either the Houston Rockets or Florida Gators or whomever I was cheering for at that moment of my life. And I nearly lost my voice recently watching Chelsea beat PSG at the finals of the Club World Cup. I get the visceral joy of becoming part of the game itself, not simply a spectator to observe and admire.
That said, I was glad to see the relative public outrage towards this week’s heckler, even if Zverev’s wave may have been a bit gratuitous. We’re largely living in a time when norms of human behavior are eroding quicker than the shoreline, and the mere concept of civil discourse feels like an antiquated relic. And while this may be deck chairs on the titanic, when you’re sitting at a tennis match and everyone shows players the respect of silence so we can all collectively enjoy the experience, it’s maybe one of the few reminders left that humanity has a chance. And maybe, just maybe, civility’s not entirely gone.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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