DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Nick Kyrgios received the most recent model of the “Battle of the Sexes” in tennis, beating top-ranked girls’s participant Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 6-3 in an exhibition match that represented mild leisure slightly than one other landmark second for gender equality.
There was laughing and joking between the gamers, some under-arm serves, over-the-top grunting on pictures, and even some dancing from Sabalenka throughout a timeout to entertain the gang on the 17,000-seat Coca-Cola Area in Dubai — the place the most costly tickets offered for approaching $800.
Kyrgios, the 2022 Wimbledon runner-up who has performed solely six tour-level matches prior to now three years due to wrist and knee accidents, appeared to play inside himself at instances and confronted the drawback of Sabalenka’s aspect of the court docket being practically 10% smaller in an try to degree the enjoying area. The gamers got just one serve per level, slightly than two.
Kyrgios was drenched in sweat by the point he clinched victory off his third match level and the pair have been all smiles after they embraced on the web.
Kyrgios acknowledged feeling nervous and having to “strap in.”
“I believe it is a nice stepping-stone for the game of tennis,” the Australian mentioned.
Sabalenka mentioned the match was good prep for subsequent season, with the Australian Open developing in January, and want to play Kyrgios once more to actual “revenge.”
“Actually loved the present,” she mentioned, “and I really feel like subsequent time I play him I will know the ways, his strengths and his weaknesses, and it should be a greater match, for positive.”
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The so-called “Battle of the Sexes” was a reputation borrowed from the 1973 match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which King received in straight units within the Houston Astrodome and occurred amid King’s efforts to start out a feminine tour and get equal pay in tennis.
Fifty-two years on and the most recent iteration had no actual wider cultural significance. As an alternative, Sabalenka and Kyrgios — members of the identical company, Evolve, that organized the exhibition — simply needed to placed on a present, interact a youthful viewers and make some cash.
Kyrgios may be considered a controversial option to play in such a match, given he pleaded responsible to shoving a former girlfriend to the bottom throughout an argument in 2021 — he escaped conviction on a cost of widespread assault — and has beforehand expressed his opposition to equal pay in tennis.
