Tommy Martin: Djokovic v Australia one of those perfect moral parables tennis specialises in

Defending men’s champion Novak Djokovic practises at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne ahead of the Australian Open tennis championship. The Serbian’s entry into Australia and subsequent detention and release has brought attention from far beyond the tennis court. Picture: Mark Baker/AP

If you’ve ever come across the sports department of a news organisation, you’ll know that they don’t like to be bothered by the outside world. In fact, many otherwise normal people become sports journalists precisely because they don’t like to be bothered by the outside world. They are like contented little hobbits, but with slightly hairier feet.

In my experience of working in sports departments, every now and then a news editor will come ambling over, as welcome as a Jehovah’s Witness who wants to power-hose your driveway. “What the hell does he want?” you think, as the interloper opens with generic sports banter intended to dissolve the palpable hostility. Whatever it is will involve work, you grimly sense, and will inevitably reduce the likelihood of whiling away an afternoon with one eye on the snooker or the horse racing.

It will be something, say, like the story of Novak Djokovic and his efforts to wangle his way into Australia. Even your humble sports hobbit can acknowledge that this is a big story, one deserving of the attentions of a wider, non-sports audience and possibly even worthy of missing the early frames of Mark Allen against Judd Trump in the Cazoo Masters.

It is one of those perfectly formed melodramas that come along every now and then to tie up all the threads of contemporary human affairs into a neat little narrative bow. At one level it’s a plain old case of a famous person trying to get away with something the rest of us wouldn’t dare try. Djokovic is basically Boris Johnson with sweatbands.

Then there’s the broader debate about the rights of the individual versus those of governments to act as they see necessary for the greater good. It’s got a courtroom drama too, and the whiff of a spy yarn with all those suspect documents and incriminating photographs. Most of all, there are the roiling tensions on either side of the Covid misinformation war of which this is just another depressing proxy battle.

Whether all that’s enough to justify pulling you away from the second half of Algeria v Sierra Leone in the Africa Cup of Nations, who can say?

It should be mentioned that the first response of any reclining sports hack upon the arrival of a jittery news editor is to play it all down. Is this really a big deal? Do we need to go big on this? You know there’s Carabao Cup tonight, right?

And besides, to paraphrase Alex Ferguson’s legendary team-talk upon facing Tottenham: “Lads, it’s tennis.” Should anybody really be getting that worked up about it, no matter the real-world ramifications? To witness pro-Djokovic ultras on the rampage in Melbourne the other day was to see a world gone mad. Tennis should never require riot police.

Most people don’t care that much about tennis. They might watch Wimbledon, and even then, only to spot Pippa Middleton and Cliff Richard. Tennis doesn’t normally raise the passions, unless Roger Federer wipes his brow a certain way on Centre Court. People don’t lose the rag on Twitter about Stan Wawrinka’s crosscourt backhand. Until this week, there had been no such thing as a tennis hooligan, even in the wildest days of Henman Hill.

It is quite obviously a brilliant sport. Power, finesse, stamina, grace — tennis has it all. A great tennis match is like sweaty chess. And it is one of the few sports where women have profile and financial rewards anywhere close to what the men enjoy.

But as far as most of the public are concerned it’s more of a genteel backdrop to a pleasant summer’s day. It has that air of middle-class contentedness, the hint of a garden party that may or may not lead to swinging. Easily the most profound thing anyone has said about tennis was by the late American comedian, Mitch Hedberg: “The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I’ll never be as good as a wall.”

But perhaps it’s this lack of a typical, macho sporting hinterland combined with inherent international glamour that makes tennis a perfect canvas on which to project wider societal concerns. Billie Jean King and the Battle of the Sexes; Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters breaking down racial barriers; Martina Navratilova coming out as an openly gay athlete; the debate about equal pay for women; most recently, Naomi Osaka and the snowflake wars. Tennis seems to have a knack for crystallising bigger issues into compelling parables for the rolling news agenda. It’s a sport that appeals to the chattering classes and often gives them plenty to chatter about.

Hence why they are making bad tennis puns on Morning Ireland all week. Sport becomes news whenever it ceases to be about sport but rather something bigger, something of interest to those intruders from the outside world. Things like geopolitics, racism, corruption or anything involving Roy Keane. At that point the sport bit becomes a mere allegory to tell a story about important world issues, real human frailties or genuine societal divisions. All very annoying when you had been hoping to catch the 3.30 from Ascot with a Twix and a cup of tea.

So, the lowly sports hack must grudgingly admit that the Djokovic affair is a stonker, the type of story that leaps from back pages to front, but still there is a lingering resentment towards the encroachers onto his territory. Where will all these tennis enthusiasts be in a few weeks’ time when there’s a cracking five-setter between Milos Raonic and Stefanos Tsitsipas finishing up at eight in the morning?

By the way, did you hear the latest, they say he might go to jail for lying on his immigration form?

Yep, just let me finish this tea, there’s some decent ski-jumping on Eurosport in a minute.