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By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]Listen: I find it as sad as you do that tennis has become some grim crucible for debate about every vexed social issue. If you want to rip millennials for being mentally soft, discuss the nefariousness of the Chinese Communist Party, or complain about vaccine mandates, there’s a tennis story line ripe for you to dig into. And in this new year, there’s already another grim reason for tennis to dominate headlines. This latest Novak Djokovic saga has taken on the shape and mood of a missing Kafka manuscript—detention, confusion over rules, bureaucrats contradicting each other, wailing kin. There’s no denying the initial, warm wave of schadenfreude about a misinformation-spewing anti-vaxxer getting bounced from his pursuit of a historic title because he couldn’t figure out how to dodge a vaccination mandate. But once that subsides, you wade into the morass of Australian governance, which has embarrassed itself pretty badly here too. With each new layer of reporting, I can’t decide on which is the most surreal of the following details:1.
The time frame. On Tuesday, Djokovic triumphantly announced that he’d gotten a medical exemption that would let him play in the Australian Open, then spent all of Wednesday on a plane to Melbourne, and spent Thursday in a 10-hour face-off with government officials who denied his visa. It took a legal challenge for him to fend off deportation until Monday.