Australia’s Great Anti-Hero
I have never been one for severe heat and tend to seek refuge in an air conditioned bar with a queue of ice cold beverages and the comfort of knowing that I am welcome to stay as long as need be.
It is rare that I throw myself at the mercy of a pounding sun that knows little in the ways of providence and humility.
There are exceptions to every rule however, no matter how personal or flexible, and the prospect of a day at the tennis seemed as good a reason as any to get a little uncomfortable. It is, of course, that time of year and though I am not well versed in the ways of tennis, I am decent enough to appreciate the game and an event of the magnitude of the Australian Open.
I was also interested in seeing the next great defeat of an Australian anti-hero.
Despite the constant flow of bikini clad girls wandering through the sweltering heat at the bar and in the outer, I managed to force myself into the squeeze of Rod Laver Arena to engage in a prolonged bout of relatively silent sitting, watching what would hopefully be the farewell of one of Australia’s most disliked athletes, Lleyton Hewitt.
Despite being Australia’s most successful tennis player since the glory days of the seventies, at an age where most players of his stature have reached levels of iconic reverence, on his home country’s biggest stage, Hewitt was hardly afforded a genuine cheer. There was, of course, plenty of noise. Most of that came from The Fanatics, a group of hell-boring drones whose monotonous ranting, comfortable middle-class nature and manufactured patriotism is as embarrassing as it is irritating, provided most of it. The more discerning sports fans, who tend to dislike Hewitt as both a player and a person, preferred to just enjoy the match, applauding the tennis and the fight and the contest. The vast majority appreciated Hewitt’s fight as much as they enjoyed Gonzalez’s forehand but the genuine emotion that fills a stadium when an authentic and beloved champion is competing was nowhere to be seen. In essence, it was a strange coolness, a detachment bought about by a decade of Hewitt behaviour and revelation. Had Pat Rafter been adorning centre court on Tuesday, the genuine affection the Australian public has for their heroes would have permeated every crevice of the arena. Even players like Pat Cash, the Woodies and Wally Masur would have received more genuine affection from the crowd and the Australian tennis watching public as a whole despite their obvious talent deficiencies compared to Hewitt.
The comparison between Rafter and Hewitt is an interesting one. Rafter, by nearly any measure, never had the physical tools or the tennis ability of Hewitt. While both won two Grand Slam titles, Hewitt has a Wimbledon title to his name while Rafter only has two U.S Opens, the least regarded of the majors in Australia. Both players reached the ranking of number one in the world yet Rafter’s reign lasted only one week while Hewitt held the mantle for eighty weeks including a streak of seventy-five straight weeks between November 2001 and April 2003. Rafter has eleven career titles. Hewitt has twenty-six. Rafter’s career record is 358-191. Hewitt’s record is 488-163.
Yet Rafter is a beloved figure in tennis and Australian sport, an Australian of the Year winner and a Hall of Fame inductee. Hewitt, by comparison, is loathed by his contemporaries and generally treated with disdain by the tennis going public, even in Australia.
Hewitt’s most astonishing achievement is, perhaps, not his Wimbledon victory or his ascent to the number one player in the world but his capacity to turn off a sporting public in his homeland who should naturally be drawn a player like Hewitt.
He is successful and we all love a winner. He is a scrapper and Australia has always had a soft spot for the tenacious bulldog who never says die. He is a tennis star and tennis players have always held a special place in the story of Australian sport. He was a young prodigy who actually lived up to his potential and Australians have always been particularly supportive of young athletes who go on to achieve greatness.
Hewitt should be revered, an archetypical Australian sporting legend, yet through his propensity to take the low road, his constant whining, his disagreeable personality, his clichéd and irritating on-court demeanour and his whore-like mentality towards publicity, he sits along side the likes of Anthony Mundine as accomplished Australian athletes who are genuinely disliked both at home and abroad.
Early in the decade Hewitt was rated the least admired Australian athlete by Sport magazine. In 2006 he was listed as the tenth most hated athlete in professional sports by GQ, a list that includes the likes of Terrell Owens and Phil Mickelson, where the piece noted that “he isn’t even popular in his native Australia”.
To achieve such a universal dislike and lack of admiration is really an incredible achievement.
It is not particularly surprising, however, when you consider Hewitt the man.
On the court, Hewitt acts like a spoilt only-child who chucks a tantrum whenever he doesn’t get his Caramello Koala. His histrionics reek of a sore loser who cannot accept personal responsibility for defeat. He has called umpires “spastics” and accused linesmen of foot faulting him because he was a white man playing against a black man. His behaviour at the 2001 U.S Open against James Blake where he linked a black linesman’s foot fault calls to the blackness of his opponent was one of the all-time shameful incidents on a tennis court.
Hewitt also disregards nearly all of the unwritten rules of the tennis court with his insufferable dramatics and his public celebration of an opponent’s error. In 2005 this angered Argentinean player Juan Ignacio Chela to the extent that Chela delivered a body serve before spitting in Hewitt’s direction. It is a mark of how unpopular Hewitt is that public sympathy tended to rest with Chela with one paper noting that “many regretted [the spit] didn’t find its target”.
His persistent invoking of Rocky with his loud self-motivation screams and his use of “Eye of the Tiger” as a pre-match song only further served to distance him from any self-respecting sports fan. Hewitt was and is a sad parody of the from-the-boondocks-athlete-who-overcame-adversity-to-reach-the-top and a transparent one at that. The sporting public tend not to buy such a story when a player has had the privileged upbringing and run Hewitt has.
Off the court Hewitt’s behaviour and words have been similarly as irksome, sulky and disagreeable. Hewitt rarely has anything positive to say about the game or his opponents. Grace is neither a word that he understands nor a quality that he exhibits. He has attacked the Australian public for having the nerve to cheer a fellow Australian opponent. He has gone after the organisers of the Australian Open over the Melbourne Park surface with complete disregard for the tournament or the damage his attacks have. He became entangled in a court battle with former friend Andrew McLeod all in the name of money. He similarly courts the cheap press of the women’s dirt rags in a transparent attempt to boost his profile and his bank balance.
I went to Melbourne Park with the optimistic hope that this would be Hewitt’s last Australian Open but I was wrong. He said he won’t retire, living in the delusion that he can return to the top ten and win a future Australian Open. It is not really surprising that he will play on. He will have little else after tennis. There will be no media career when he is done. There is little call for poorly spoken, one-dimensional, uninspiring analysts. Well, if you discount the Channel Nine cricket commentary team. Few would buy into any attempts at philanthropy. He doesn’t strike me as a person with a wide array of interests or talents. Tennis is the end of the line for Lleyton Hewitt.
When he is finally forced to give the game away, he will not sit in the pantheon of Australia’s great sportsmen or even on the list of Australia’s finest tennis players. There will be no post-retirement renaissance either. Hewitt’s achievements will be respected but it will be left at that. There will be no reverence, no divine aura that will surround Hewitt in retirement. He will fade into the background and most of us feel so little attachment to him that the only sign that he is gone will be that our irritation and embarrassment levels when watching big time tennis will be significantly further south than they once were.