Tennis is becoming involved in a conflict no one wants, but they asked for it

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It seems a long while ago that the reconsidered position of professional tennis was that its employees should do more talking in public.

But that was just last year in its aggressive push on Naomi Osaka. Don’t want to talk to the media every single day? Well, how about you don’t play at all? How you like them apples?

In an example of getting what you wish for, Osaka took tennis’s mandate and expanded it. Over the weekend at Indian Wells, Calif., some knob in the crowd heckled her.

There wasn’t much to it. A single cry of “Naomi, you suck.” The heckler was booed into submission and didn’t pop off again.

Osaka’s reaction was to ask the chair umpire to hand over the mic so that she could address the crowd mid-match. That request was refused. But Osaka knew that because tennis never stops interviewing players, she’d get her chance.

Tennis likes its players like ventriloquists like their dummies – always be creating content. They speak to the public in the tunnel beforehand, on the court afterward, in a press room after that, and then on social media whenever they’re not asleep.

It is preferred that in the midst of all this jabbering, they stick to approved or, at the least, tolerated topics.

That arrangement was working out fine for tennis when it was trying (and failing) to bully Osaka into submission.

It’s about to stop working, and Osaka is the least of it.

People always link her with Serena Williams, but Osaka’s less obvious antecedents are John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. All three were electrifying talents whose antics were even more interesting than their tennis.

Like McEnroe and Connors, Osaka is an irritant to power. But also like those two, she is still part of the system. Everything she does is designed to get you interested in tennis: the soap opera, as well as tennis: the sport.

In order that things never get too out of hand, only useful enemies are targeted – the media, the faceless drones in charge, social injustice, some idiot in the stands that everyone hates.

This deal is mutually beneficial. Osaka gets to build her personal brand even when she isn’t winning at tennis. And whenever tennis is pressed on its left flank, it can point to Osaka and say, “But we put up with her, so how dare you call us elitist?”

It functioned the same way with McEnroe and Connors during a period of class-based anxiety. ‘You think tennis can’t be blue collar? Look at this shrieking pleb over here and say that to us again.’

But then there is Marta Kostyuk.

Kostyuk isn’t nearly as famous as Osaka, but she also made non-tennis news at Indian Wells.

Kostyuk is a 19-year-old Ukrainian. She came back to win her first-round match on Thursday. Afterward, reporters wanted to talk about the tennis. Kostyuk wanted to talk about the war. Specifically, she wanted to talk about how her Russian tennis colleagues are addressing the war.

She ripped them in general for their shallow denouncements of the conflict. She said that seeing them at tournaments “really hurts me.” She wondered why none of them had apologized to her or other Ukrainian players.

“Seeing them having the only problem is not being able to transfer the money or stuff. That’s what they’re talking about. I don’t know. This is unacceptable to me.”

Reporters know what to do with this sort of thing. They amplify it. But tennis is at a loss. This sort of speaking truth to power isn’t useful to tennis. There is no way to rebrand it, repackage it or transform it into new marketing dollars.

So what does tennis do? Pretend it’s not happening.

Women’s tennis recently abandoned its business connections in China because one player may have been shut up by the government there. Now faced with an ongoing mass murder, the same outfit is trying to be considerate of everyone’s feelings.

Everyone in tennis instinctively understands that something really important is suddenly at stake – the profitability of the enterprise. If it becomes civil war among the players, there’s no way to solve that with 10 minutes of brisk chat on ESPN before the match starts.

Problematically for tennis, Kostyuk has as much access to the mic as all the company men and women in its employ. She just used it to open a new front in the Ukrainian information war that is connected to the Ukrainian ground war.

“Everyone is fighting how they can fight,” she said. “My job is to play tennis. This is the biggest way I can help.”

Kostyuk, who was ousted in the round of 64 on Saturday, is taking an old idea – that war is politics by other means – and applying it to the modern entertainment economy. Big-time sports is neither ready for nor capable of handling someone like her.

We’re no longer talking about X’s feelings are hurt, now Y and Z demand action. Or A said something incredibly dim and now B is on a tear about it on Instagram. That stuff is solved by money. Just offer a little more of it and everyone finds a shortcut around their principles.

We’re talking about raw, primal rage that money cannot shut up. I doubt Kostyuk is sitting around right now wondering what her sneaker sponsor thinks about all this.

She is a cannon loose on tennis’s decks. If it suits her, she can continue firing every week for the foreseeable future. Her stand will embolden and/or shame others into publicly engaging the war.

The applies doubly to the Russian players. If they don’t respond, they look like they’re hiding something, and Kostyuk wins. If they do, there’s nothing they can say that will satisfy most people, and Kostyuk wins.

Like the one in Central Europe, this fight is just beginning. No one’s quite sure what the rules of engagement are. So rhetorically speaking, it is baby steps so far. The urge to a polite exchange of views is still strong.

But as long as the actual war sprawls, the information one will as well. That process is uncontrollable and will end up going places it is not yet possible to anticipate.

The insistence that everyone always be speaking – that’s how sports became another salient in a conflict no one wants. But in sports’ case, they asked for it.