Today in a**holes

I don't know if tennis player Alexander Zverev is going to win the Australian Open men's singles title this weekend, because I'm frankly not that invested in tennis these days. But I do know what's he already won.

Best Diplomat.

And, no, before you ask, the Australian Open does not have a Best Diplomat award. Not so far as I know, anyway. 'Course it's the Aussies, so you can never be sure.

Anyway, if the Open does have such an award, he gets it, after winning an 81-minute first set against 24-time Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic in the men's semis yesterday. The match abruptly ended at that point when Joker went to the net, congratulated Zverev and then gathered his things and retired from the match.

This was not because he decided he didn't want to play anymore. It was because he couldn't, on account of a muscle tear in his left leg that was as heavily bound as possible but wasn't enough to allow him to continue. And as a guy who's been playing the game professionally for almost a quarter century, he would know.

And how did the fans react to this?

Not by respecting his judgment and giving him the warm applause a great champion deserved. Oh, hell, no.

Nah. They booed him. Booed him right off the court.

Now, the Blob has written before about fans behaving badly. There's a lot of material there, after all. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, "Fans are a**holes."

I won't go that far. But I will say they certainly can be a**holes, and way too frequently.

Which gets us back to why Zverev wins Best Diplomat of the Open.

That happened when, during the on-court post-match interview, he directly addressed the ... well, the a**holes.

"The very first thing I want to say is, please, guys, don't boo a player when he goes out with injury," Zverev said. "I know that everybody paid for tickets and wants to see hopefully a five-set match. He has won this tournament with an abdominal tear, won this tournament with a hamstring injury. So please show some respect."

Note, if you will, that Zverev twice said "please." Note, also, that it was two times more than he should have used that word. Which means he was being, yes, diplomatic.

A less diplomatic man, after all, might have phrased it differently:

"Listen, you a**holes, knock off the booing. I don't care how much you paid to get in here, you're watching perhaps the greatest player in history trying to play with a muscle tear in his leg, so show some damn appreciation.  You ever have a muscle tear in you leg? No, you haven't, because if you had, you'd be curled up in a ball crying like a puppy, not trying to play a Grand Slam semifinal. So shut the hell up, jerks."

Major props to Zverev for not saying any of that. 

Although it would have been cooler if he did.