Tennis players, it’s time to grow up
I HAVE always done my own hair. That’s just something that I do…
For those of you who don’t get that joke, allow me to de-tangle.
Hundreds of professional tennis players have arrived in Melbourne (on chartered flights) to fight out the Australian Open and some of them are currently in the process of damaging the brand of their sport much more than a McEnroe tantrum.
The winner of the 2021 Australian Open will be the winner of a Grand Slam and walk away with a cool Australian $2.75m. The runner-up drags in $1.5m and the sliding scale is generous all the way down the list.
A first round winner in Melbourne will be leaving the country with $100k in their racquet bag.
That’s good money any time, but in the middle of a pandemic, when the northern hemisphere is facing a long dark winter of more death and lockdowns, it seems a tad more than generous. In fact, it feels quite phenomenal.
So it’s more than a little bewildering to see that some of the “professionals” involved in this cash splash of a tournament have decided to take to social media and complain about quarantine.
Some have even gone so far as to suggest that they are being treated like prisoners. Pretty sure that prisoners don’t get $100k for two weeks in Bluestone College.
This week, Bernard Tomic’s girlfriend (Vanessa Sierra) took the tennis entourage outrage to a whole elite level of tone-deaf buffoonery when she posted a video on social media complaining that there was nobody to wash her hair. Apparently, Ms Sierra never does this herself. She normally has people who wash her hair for her… Twice a week.
Now, this post may have been a version of ironic Tomic, or Sierra sarcastic or something that these two may consider to be humour. But it’s just not funny.
We all know there are still thousands of Australian citizens stuck overseas. Unable to get a flight to fly home. But some of these tennis people don’t seem to get that.
These players all agreed to the terms of the tournament before they entered the country girt by sea. None of the five-star quarantine conditions are a surprise.
Sure, some of the players are posting video where they are just getting on with the process of preparation. They are working with what they have got and hitting balls against beds, doing drills and riding stationary bikes. But those stories are being eclipsed by the self-centred cries of entitlement that are chirping from the privileged few.
At the start of the pandemic, we were told that we are all in this together. We were regularly assured that anybody who had a job was an essential worker.
We were told that supermarket shelf stackers and hospital orderlies were heroes. We were given the impression that we inhabited a new land of equality and equity.
But JobKeeper is drawing to a close and the curtains are being drawn on the positive community experiences. It seems Australia has always had different rules for different classes. International travel and the petty trials of tennis quarantine are exposing the fissures for what they are.
Mathias Cormann has been flying all over Europe on a taxpayer jet. Matt Damon is doing two weeks of quarantine in a private residence, in preparation for the essential work on Thor: Love and Thunder. And Novak Djokovic seems to think he is the leader of his own little anti-vaxxer nation. He has issued a list of demands to Tennis Australia, calling for less time in isolation, and the use of private houses with tennis courts for players to continue to live as if there is nothing wrong in the world.
A lot of children grow up wanting to be professional sportspeople. It’s well past time for the industry of professional sportspeople to grow up and appreciate they still have the opportunity to make a huge amount of money in a very small amount of time for simply playing a game they love.
Of course, not all the players are behaving badly. Some of them are here just to make up the numbers. The top 10 have to have someone to beat. Otherwise, how can they justify the huge money they get paid at the end of the month?
IT SEEMS AUSTRALIA HAS ALWAYS HAD DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT CLASSES. INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL AND THE PETTY TRIALS OF TENNIS QUARANTINE ARE EXPOSING THE FISSURES FOR WHAT THEY ARE.