Sympathy for Coco Gauff, who went to a lot of trouble not to be seen concertedly beating her racquet to smithereens against the floor at Melbourne Park. She left the court, she waited until she was in a quiet corridor, she ducked behind a partition... But those pesky cameras are everywhere and Coco Gauff concertedly beating her racquet to smithereens against the floor at Melbourne Park was soon screening globally.
Gauff uses a Head Boom Pro whose “enlarged power grommets” and “elongated boxbeam shaft” combine to give “sensational power”, according to its manufacturers, and not least, we can now all agree, during a major post-defeat meltdown backstage at the Australian Open.
Sympathy, too, because we’ve all been there, more or less: gripped by the all-consuming infuriation which, at some point, is the inevitable consequence of playing tennis, not just at the highest level, but at all. See also: golf.
Let’s be clear: tennis players will always want to smash racquets. They always have – or certainly since 1958 when Mervyn Rose of Australia legendarily became the first tennis craftsman to blame his tools in this most spectacular of ways. That was 10 years before tennis went pro. It’s not always the money. Sometimes it’s just the sport.
But there are too many cameras, of course. The official coverage of sport ripples ever outwards, down tunnels and out into car parks, merrily shining light on the magic all the way. The Australian Open counters that it’s only trying to “provide fans with a deeper connection to the athletes”. Iga Świątek replies that she feels like an animal in a zoo. Clearly one person’s “deeper connection to the athletes” is another’s 24-hour cage-cam and we should probably all be thinking about this harder than we tend to.
The organisers in Melbourne also note their provision of camera-free spaces for the players, including the “medical health, wellbeing and beauty room” and the “player quiet room”. But you can’t go smashing a racquet in the “player quiet room”, can you? And only at a push, I would imagine, in the “medical health, wellbeing and beauty room”.
What Melbourne isn’t offering, clearly, is a dedicated place for racquet-trashing – a bespoke “Fury Cubicle” or “Rage Booth”. Nick Kyrgios once thoughtfully used a mid-match bathroom break to smash a pair of racquets where nobody could see him doing so, and, reluctant though one is to use Kyrgios as a model for the game going forward, he was clearly feeling towards something there.
Racquet-smashing needs a space – somewhere sealed, sound-proofed, maybe with rubber walls, where an aggrieved player can go and be absolutely sure that whatever happens in the next 30 seconds is between them and their conscience, and, possibly later, their racquet sponsor. And then Novak Djokovic doesn’t have to take an angry lump out of one of Wimbledon’s beautifully turned wooden net-posts as he did during the 2023 men’s final, and we don’t have to watch him. He can sort himself out in the Rage Booth instead.
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And no doubt people will say that to accommodate this kind of behaviour is to license and possibly even encourage it. On the contrary. A Rage Booth could actually be used to combat rage. We’ve long understood how décor can control mood. We’ve seen it in hospitals and prisons. So, boilingly mad players might get in the Rage Booth, see staring back at them a mural depicting a scene from, say, Wicked: For Good, and find that the urge to knock the enlarged power grommets off a Head Boom Pro abruptly dissipates.
Or they might find the urge increasing, and smash the racquet even harder, perhaps even against the mural. But either way, we won’t need to know, and that’s the point.
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One might even envisage a broader application for this special cell. Players could, for example, adjourn to it to do their swearing, thereby sparing coaches, umpires and crowd members of a sensitive disposition. And they could go in there to ingest their protein gels, thereby sparing everybody.
We could even call it the Gauff Zone, as meagre atonement for her unfortunate embarrassment this week, and for her brave, if unwitting, work in forcing this issue onto the agenda.
Photograph by Samir Jordamovic/Anadolu via Getty Images