That quote also confirms in me an idea that the conversations players have during matches, even with an umpire, are essentially conversations with themselves. Without condoning the abuse of officials, the umpires seem more closely related to a piece of furniture on the tennis court  than they are to the players. You can see in their mild reaction to a player's outbursts that umpires recognise what is happening, that those expressions are just a window onto the player's lonely world.

Like most viewers, I'm only an apathetic stranger to it, and to Nick Kyrgios. I watch him play because he's good at it. If he cracks up in the process of playing, I am more entertained for it. Even if I imagine via his haircut, his gait , and his mode of complaint that he is a person I would not easily befriend, he still gives me  something to watch – both through his playing style and also his private struggle. I've never looked at him and thought he owed me something.

Knowing that Lleyton Hewitt was overmatched against Ferrer on Thursday, my favourite window onto his finale was when he bothered to ask the chair umpire to get rid of a linesman, who twice called him for foot faults. "Get him out of here, mate," Hewitt pleaded. "He's the only moron out here calling it." Later, when he was asked about this, Hewitt casually admitted there isn't much a chair umpire can do in that situation.

His outburst was of interest because, if he doesn't let something go, he's only a diminishing number losing to the battery power of David Ferrer. In that expression there was a perverse kind of dignity to me, the kind where a sportsman, if he goes down, doesn't go down in the image projected for him by others. It was entertaining to know that he was still raging inside, as he had against the inanity of foot faults his entire career.

Even the prince, Roger Federer, when he played Alexandr Dolgopolov early in the week, expressed a minor lament on the court that I hadn't seen for a while. A line umpire called "fault" on a Dolgopolov serve that was well in. Federer, who is in no position to criticise bad line calls, turned around to the offending umpire and gestured that she clean out her eyes. I found myself willing another mistake, just to see what else was going on inside Federer's head. Where does he store the fury?

Last year when Dawn Fraser was asked to comment on Kyrgios' behaviour at Wimbledon, something crystallised for me in modern sport-talk. Asked for comment after Kyrgios appeared to tank in a game against Richard Gasquet, Fraser uttered something about him going home to where his parents came from if he didn't like it Down Under. Kyrgios, at least, had given her the means to embarrass herself. It was a good example of the pathetic scandal, where the searchlight scans the horizon for problems and in the absence of any genuine offence, creates it out of thin air.

Sport is frothing with all of this now, strangers throwing stones from their subconscious, people complaining about a sportsman's complaints. It is now a major function of a sports scandal to give people a chance to feel right about something, to be sure that when they look at a lad like Kyrgios, or Chris Gayle, they don't like what they see. Things can appear so bad so quickly that it's a wonder the show goes on for some of these guys.

But every-day sport is like a stage musical, it retains an audience in spite of itself. It's only a clutch at the air to try and explain why that is, except to notice this growing function of the pseudo-scandal, and how much we enjoy using it. People do not care as much about a sport as they do about the kinds of people they imagine play it, and whether or not those players reflect their own ideas about what's good and right in the world, and what's pretty.

Unless you're the best tennis player in the world, you ought to be a fallible, flawed subject scratching away at things. And you would think this is where most of our sympathies would lie, with the person who fails and is not ideal. But we seem of late to go on railing against this, forcing apologies for adolescents and craving nobility in every action as if sport were not a snake pit of egos but a place of gentle retreat.

From where do these political angels we project arise, if not from their beginnings in self-love, loathing and desperation? Every sporting star is born somewhere in that mire, and grows into the shape that best suits him. It might be a lonely place for Nick Kyrgios for some time.