For two weeks every summer, Australia is the centre of the sporting universe.
The Australian Open fortnight provides a rare opportunity for the country to throw open its arms to the world and for the world to sit back, observe and, occasionally, judge.
In Australia’s Open, an ABC TV documentary airing tonight, Tennis Australia chief executive Craig Tiley says the Open allows Australia to be “showcased in every country in the world”.
“It would cost you billions to buy that ad time to equate to that same kind of exposure.”
That marketing value gives the impression of a passionately welcoming and supportive sporting public in an idyllic, sun-baked paradise — an enviable position to be in.
But it wasn’t always like this.
And, although undoubtedly Australia is all of those things and more, there is another side to the coin that recent Australian Opens have exposed.
“Anytime there is a huge audience, there’s always a risk that what people see may not be what you intend for them to see,” Tiley says.
In Australia’s Open, that duality is explored as the nation’s biggest annual global sporting event clashes with societal issues that are thrown, inadvertently, into the spotlight.
‘I’m not going to come any more’
Parochialism is a part of sport.
Cheering on your favourite athlete as they give their all is a right of passage for sports fans.
Raucous barracking reflects a genuine passion and investment in the athletes that are, in theory at least, flying the flag for you, even as they enter the gladiatorial Colosseum on their own.
But what happens if those supporters go too far?
“I think the Australian crowds in the last 10 years have got a little out of control,” former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash says in Australia’s Open.
“Cheer on your countrymen, no problems, but they’re not representing your country, they’re individual and I think we need to understand that.”
Perhaps understandably, support at the tournament reaches its highest intensity when there is an Australian on court.
It’s a support that, in recent years, has reached an unprecedented, impassioned peak when Nick Kyrgios is in the house.
“You guys are a zoo,” Kyrgios said during the 2022 Open, describing the fervent support he was enjoying as “out of control”.
It makes for an enviable atmosphere for some but a desperately uncomfortable experience for others.
“Everyone was telling me, ‘Oh, you know, you’ll really enjoy it, it’s going to be amazing,'” British qualifier Liam Broady said after playing Kyrgios last year.
“But I thought it was absolutely awful.”
Broady was not as strong as Daniil Medvedev, who described the crowd reaction to him when he played Kyrgios as being “disappointing” and “disrespectful”, leaving the Russian questioning whether he even wanted to play.
After decades in which the Australian Open was the fourth and least of the grand slams — and therefore the one most often missed by the big names, a huge amount of effort had been made to make the event the best it could possibly be for visiting players.
“We should have more respect for the international players that come over here,” Cash said.
“We’ve got to also accept that if it goes too far, there’s a chance that these players will say, ‘I’m not going to come to Australia anymore. I go there and I get abused, what’s the point of that?'”
‘A welcoming city with a terrible secret’
The world’s best questioning whether they want to travel Down Under for the tournament is not new, although that changed in the late 80s with the move away from former tournament home, Kooyong.
“I think we … were coming out of being that country that was over the other side of the world,” Cash said of Australia in the 80s, and it was true.
Paul Hogan was huge in America; Kylie and Jason were huge everywhere; beaches, surfing and barbecues became a byword for Australiana — and Australiana was cool.
“We wanted to send that message to the world: This is who we are. Come and visit us,” former tournament director Paul McNamee remembers in Australia’s Open.
“You’ll be welcome, just bring your bathers.
“We opened the doors, that’s what this country does.”
The Australian Open’s great success since the move from Kooyong was to make it a place where the players are put first: “The AO is the happy slam,” Katrina Adams, the chair of the US Open, says.
Of course, COVID dramatically changed all that. And while the tournament achieved the impossible by getting the 2021 event underway, there was one major hitch that overshadowed all that good work.
The Novak Djokovic saga made headline news around the world.
Djokovic, who had a visa to enter Australia despite his high-profile status of not being vaccinated against COVID-19, arrived in the country only to be told that his visa had been cancelled.
“It was just a nightmare,” former ABC journalist Tracey Holmes recalls.
Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić said “Australian authorities humiliated themselves” by detaining Djokovic, with his mother Dijana saying it was “not fair … not human”.
Kyrgios called it a “shitshow”.
“We were trying to do our best… It just grew every day,” Tiley says.
“The Australian Open had never had so much profile in every single media outlet globally — and just not something we particularly wanted in those circumstances. But, you know, that kind of goes with the territory.”
The unintended consequence of Djokovic’s detention was to shine another light on a previously ignored corner of Melbourne and Australia.
“The Australian Open suddenly becomes the lens through which you view something else,” journalist George Megalogenis says in Australia’s Open.
“That this welcoming city, a city [that] for a number of years was rated the most liveable city in the world, has a terrible, terrible secret that’s hiding in plain sight.”
In the desperate attempt to get one of the world’s most recognisable people to these shores, a spotlight had been shone on some of the least recognised — asylum seekers stuck in legal limbo.
“People in the centre of the city who can’t get out, who are locked up for nine years having committed no crime,” Megalogenis says.
Australia’s border policy was thrust into the spotlight, and the world made its judgement.
Home court pressure points
The Australian Open spotlight also shines brightly on homegrown talent.
“To win a home grand slam is incredibly difficult,” Tiley says.
“The expectation of the crowd creates a different pressure on the player … it’s a very difficult thing to do.”
Cash, a two-time Australian Open runner-up and one of the few home-grown singles finalists in recent years, admitted that he needed psychological help to “survive” during the Australian Open fortnight.
“That extra expectation [at home] was crippling at times,” Cash recalls.
Interestingly enough, the stats tell a different story.
Since the advent of the Open era, Australian players have, overall, won 10 per cent of grand slam singles titles, a figure that rises to 15 per cent (17 of 110) for home events.
A similar pattern is true of British players at Wimbledon and home players at the French and US Opens.
Granted, 16 of those wins came in the 11 tournaments from 1959 to 1978, when Australians made up the majority of the field — in the 1973 Open, 32 of the 48 women in the singles field and 31 of the 56 in the men’s were Aussies, some 60 per cent. In 2022, that Aussie share was just 6 per cent of the 256-strong singles field.
Yet the stats are also pretty clear: since Chris O’Neil in 1978, no Australian man or woman had won the singles title in the Australian Open and, aside from Cash in 1987 and 1988, only three players had made a final (Kim Warwick and Wendy Turnbull in 1980, and Lleyton Hewitt in 2005).
So Ash Barty’s heroic win in 2022 was remarkable not just for the odds of an Australian woman winning overall, but that woman being an Indigenous woman at that.
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“I grew up thinking I couldn’t do a lot of things … I would have this inner voice that would constantly be going on, saying, ‘You can’t do that because you’re Aboriginal,'” says Indigenous TV presenter Shelley Ware.
“Ash Barty maybe could stop that inner dialogue for young people.
“I think for a moment we became one [when Barty won the title and was presented the trophy by Evonne Goolagong Cawley].
“Because the whole of Australia forgets, just for a little minute, that there are so many obstacles and so many barriers that have held Aboriginal people back.
“There just aren’t many other ways in which Aboriginal women are celebrated to that level.”
New York Times journalist Damien Cave had a slightly different take, shining that spotlight back on Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people.
“I think the level of attention, in some ways, is a bit of a tell,” he says in Australia’s Open.
“It’s still so uncommon for Australians to see Aboriginal Australians at high levels of society.
“There’s such an intense focus on it because white Australians want to feel better about it.
“They want to feel like this is something that’s more resolved than it actually is.”
The same could be said of Australians living with a disability.
While it is true that no Australian man or woman had won the main singles draw at the Australian Open in 44 years before Barty’s 2022 triumph, Dylan Alcott had won seven straight quad singles titles between 2015 and 2021, and David Hall won three wheelchair singles titles in a row from 2003.
“If you have a little Google on who won the Australian Open in any particular year, all you get is the able-bodied men and women,” Ware says.
“We still say there’s been no local to win the Australian Open in 44 years [before 2022].
“It’s simply not true.”
A global crisis
The Australian Open is renowned for its hospitality, but on current trends, Australia in January is fast becoming anything but hospitable.
The greatest existential threat to the Australian Open, both real and imagined, is a mutual threat facing everyone, to some degree.
During the 2020 Australian Open, temperatures on court reached 60 degrees Celsius in the baking heat of the Australian summer.
Bushfire smoke blanketed Melbourne as thousands of people across Victoria fled for their lives as fire engulfed their belongings.
Workers were told to stay inside. Close the windows. Avoid exercise.
Across the city though, tennis players laced up their shoes and prepared to serve.
“I remember waking up in the morning and hearing that the labourers in the city were told not to work because the pollution was so bad because of the smoke,” Broady recalls.
“So I thought, you know, we aren’t going to play tennis today.
“But it turned out that we were going to.”
Broady’s furious reaction highlighted players’ concerns they were pawns in the corporate cogs of a major tournament, as much as them being shipped into the country and locked in their hotel rooms during the COVID tournament the following year.
It highlighted the very real threat that the Australian Open, and other tournaments around the world, face in a warming world.
“It’s a real worry because if it’s our new normal, you worry about the ability of Melbourne to both bid and host major sports events in summer,” journalist Catherine Murphy said on ABC’s Offsiders.
“I just really hope it’s not the new normal.”
Whether that is the new normal or not, the Australian Open is a part of Australian life and has proven that it will continue, through the rough times and the smooth.
The tournament has, over the years, shown the same kind of resilience that Australians themselves possess in the face of horrendous weather conditions and self-doubt over our place in a constantly changing world.
“People say this is going to threaten the event and how can we watch tennis or anything with all of this going on?” Tracey Holmes says.
“And then the minute it starts, it’s like nothing else matters.”
Catch the new two-part documentary ‘Australia’s Open’ for all the drama on and off the court from 8.30pm on Tuesday, January 9, on ABC TV and ABC iview.
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