If you had asked me at the start of last week what Nick Kyrgios would do to earn a €15,000 fine, I would have guessed swearing, tanking, or racquet abuse well before I guessed “jerking a water bottle off to completion.” That’s Nick for you though, as unpredictable at his “worst” as he is at his best.
Kyrgios is no stranger to fines, of course, and is also fairly familiar with steep fines. Here’s the thing though – in the past when he’s been fined significant amounts, it was because he was abusive to players or equipment, or else he didn’t put in a good faith effort to perform the job he is being paid to do. None of that could be said about him this past week at Queen’s. Kyrgios was engaged, competitive, relatively level-headed and calm on court, and seemed generally like he was having a pretty good time – in short, he was performing at the standard that the ATP has supposedly hoped to see from him. He performed a lewd and suggestive act, sure, but it was not done in anger, it was not directed at anyone in particular, and it didn’t even seem to be a comment on anything happening within the match.
How exactly is this act, which was fairly subtle and pretty obviously had no malicious intent, worth a fine of €15,000 (around $17,460)?
Consider this: when Nick Kyrgios sledged Stan Wawrinka at the Rogers Cup in 2015, he was initially only fined $10,000. He was later fined $25,000 on top of that and handed a 28 day suspension – those added punishments were provisional, however, meaning that he wouldn’t have to pay the extra fine or serve the suspension so long as he stayed on good behavior for six months. So already he’s had to pay up more for wanking a water bottle than he necessarily had to for taking time out of a match to get in his opponent’s face about his girlfriend’s sexual history.
When Kyrgios was fined for sledging Wawrinka, it was for an incident of “unsportsmanlike conduct,” and at the time $10,000 was the highest amount that could be fined for an act classified as such according to the ATP Rulebook. Stuart Fraser of The Times reported on Sunday that this week’s fine was also for unsportsmanlike conduct, which according to the 2018 version of the ATP Rulebook may now be fined for up to $20,000 – meaning that the fine given to Kyrgios comes in a little under the maximum allowed.
According to this year’s ATP Rulebook, “unsportsmanlike conduct” is defined as follows:
Any misconduct by a player that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the success of a tournament, ATP and/or the Sport. In addition, unsportsmanlike conduct shall include, but not be limited to, the giving, making, issuing, authorizing or endorsing any public statement having, or designed to have, an effect prejudicial or detrimental to the best interest of the tournament and/or the officiating thereof.
That’s pretty vague. Also, I’m not sure that Kyrgios’s actions fall neatly into this definition. Was the act detrimental to the success of the tournament? It’s certainly an embarrassing thing to have had broadcast, and it prompted the BBC to issue an apology. To say that it harmed the tournament, however, seems to me to require putting the worst construction on Kyrgios’s actions, or imagining consequences which are difficult to prove.
What’s really weird to me about designating the violation as “unsportsmanlike conduct” is that there is a code violation that fits the act much, much better, and that’s a “visible obscenity,” defined in the Rulebook as “the making of signs by a player with hands and/or racquet or balls that commonly have an obscene meaning.” Violation of that rule may be punished with a fine of up to $5,000. Interestingly, in The Telegraph’s reporting of this story they state that the violation is being cited as simply “inappropriate behavior” (which doesn’t actually have a section in the Rulebook) due to “water-bottle abuse… (not being) mentioned in the ATP rule book.” I suspect that is conjecture on The Telegraph’s part rather than actual reportage of the process taken in determining the fine. Either way, just because no section of the code specifically mentions pleasuring a water bottle, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better designation for the act than “unsportsmanlike conduct.” And it’s not like the ATP would have had to search very hard for it – the section defining a “visible obscenity” is directly above the section defining “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
It’s a shame that the process for dealing out fines is not more transparent from the ATP, because it would be very helpful to understand in this case exactly what the process was for deciding what part of the code the act violated, and how much the fine should be. Actually, I was initially hoping to write a list of past fines and what they were for, but as far as I can tell the ATP does not publish that information of their own accord – they release the information to journalists who may or may not publish that information themselves, and who often have slightly different takes on the same story. Consider the difference in Stuart Fraser’s reporting of this particular violation compared to The Telegraph’s, for instance. It is therefore difficult to contextualize this particular fine with regard to other recent ATP fines, especially since a Google search on the subject produces stories that are pretty much just about Nick Kyrgios or Fabio Fognini.
The other thing that was notable in researching this is how vague the rules are. The guidelines in the Rulebook, for instance, specify a fine cap but not a fine floor – a player may be fined up to $20,000 for “unsportsmanlike conduct,” but as far as I can tell he may also be fined merely $1,000 or even possibly nothing. The ATP therefore has a great deal of discretion with regard to how much to fine, even for more severe offenses, but they also seem to have tremendous discretion with what violation the transgressor is fined for. Kyrgios could easily have been fined the maximum amount of $5,000 for a Visible Obscenity, which his act clearly qualifies as, and instead he was fined more than three times that amount, for the much more general “unsportsmanlike conduct.” It’s possible that the ATP decided to go with a higher amount due to past offenses, but that’s just a guess considering that they have not made the rationale for this decision public.
When it comes right down to it, Nick Kyrgios is being fined over $17,000 for shaking a water bottle and then squeezing some water out of the top. That’s it. It was lewd, childish, and completely unnecessary (and very, very Nick), but it was also non-violent, did not interfere with play, and was just a freaking water bottle. Should he have been fined? Possibly. Should he have been fined $17,000? I do not personally think so.
The ATP has told Nick that he has to put more effort into playing the sport – well, he just put in two very good weeks in which he made back-to-back semifinals, and this is his reward. The ATP may have meant the fine as a deterrent, but it kind of just looks like unfair and overzealous scrutiny of a player who they are perhaps too used to correcting.