Boris Becker and Nick Kyrgios have been beefing on social media lately after the Australian commented about former tennis greats, including the German.
Kyrgios is an outspoken individual who doesn’t particularly care whether you like that. He’s going to tell you what he thinks, and he certainly did in a recent interview with the Athletic when he compared tennis eras.
While tennis stars are generally quite complimentary of past legends, Kyrgios dissed the legacy of Becker and others by implying that they would struggle today.
Obviously, the comments went viral, with some agreeing with him and some disagreeing with him. At face value, the quality of tennis today is probably greater than in the past as simply everything evolved.
There is better equipment, better training, and better nutrition today, so it’s natural to assume that today’s tennis players are superior to those in the past.
And yet, comparing eras doesn’t work. Each era of a sport is unique to that time and comparing doesn’t make a lot of sense. While Kyrgios might be correct in his words, it was a bit of a sneering comment and Becker responded with some juicy remarks.
In the most recent episode of the Eurosport podcast ‘Das Gelbe vom Ball,’ Becker added some more comments explaining that players who came before allowed those who came after to exist in the first place.
They popularised the sport and made it grow to this global scale, which mostly benefits the current generation.
We live in a democracy. Everyone can think what he wants. You have to have respect for the past and simply say ‘thank you’ out loud that these old pros existed, because without them the tennis circus would no longer exist.
Let me start with Australia. Rod Laver, Ken Roswall, John Newcombe, Ken Roach – the gladiators of the Australian tennis scene. Then I have to mention Patrick Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt. They were all number one, they won Grand Slam tournaments.
In the same way, these current players will push the sport forward and make it grow. We just had four players win over $10 million in prize money in a single year.
That never happened before, and it wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have all those great legends make tennis a global phenomenon.
I go further in the generational question and say: 70s, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, then Ivan Lendl came along. They popularised the sport, they drew viewers to the television. You can see the result today. There has never been so much prize money, there has never been so much publicity as there is today. And that’s because of the legends.
Becker has a fair point in the way he’s framing his argument, and he’s right. It allowed Kyrgios to do what he’s been doing in his career. As Becker put it, he’s been out of tennis for over a year and still benefits from the sport and earns money. It wasn’t that simple back then.
I did play a bit in the 80s, but there was [Stefan] Edberg, [Mats] Wilander. The 90s were {Andre] Agassi, [Pete] Sampras. All these players make it possible for Nick Kyrgios not to play tennis at all this year and still be able to make a living from tennis.
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