It was shortly before the start of Wimbledon that Nick Kyrgios seriously began his mission to become the most hated athlete alive.
"I don't really like tennis all that much," Kyrgios told a British broadsheet. "I don't love it."
When Andre Agassi said this sort of thing, in far more nuanced terms late in a marvellous run, he was cheered for it. It made him seem human.
Kyrgios – young, sneering, not yet having accomplished anything of note – comes from a very different place.
It makes him look ungrateful. People recoiled from it.
That must have been the point – to drive away everyone who was suddenly so anxious to love him. It was a bit like telling your dad you're bored by whatever he likes.
In an age when transgressiveness has been reduced to a career-building tactic, it was a bit thrilling to watch someone take a bath in the media's lighter fluid. Kyrgios knew he'd be flamed. He did it anyway.
He's Johnny Rotten to Agassi's Joe Strummer – they're as close as tennis will ever get to punk rock, and both built for provocation.
At that Wimbledon, Kyrgios transformed himself from the sport's next big thing into its next big problem. On the surface, this was alchemy in reverse – turning gold to lead.
The 20-year-old Australian played terribly. He gave up in the midst of a losing match. He gave an exit interview of such towering petulance, it would have best been conducted from a prone position while stamping his feet.
It got worse at the Rogers Cup in Montreal. In the middle of a match against Stan Wawrinka, Kyrgios muttered a sexually charged slur against tennis pro Donna Vekic, Wawrinka's girlfriend.
He couldn't have thought Wawrinka would catch it. The whole court lay between them. And you'd hear that and a good deal worse at the bottom of any scrum in any other sport. But the courtside microphones picked it up, and everyone went bonkers.
The resultant, towering global outrage says rather more about where the rest of us have ended up than it does about Kyrgios, your garden-variety mope with a brain-mouth disconnect.
We've lost the ability to be shocked by the criminal and/or truly aberrant behaviour of pro athletes. If we engaged our feelings on those subjects too deeply, we couldn't in good conscience watch sports. So most of us pretend to be outraged and shrug them off. We've settled on appreciating the art while remaining ambivalent about the artist.
What's important is that we seem to care. Nobody really does. TV ratings are the proof.
What Kyrgios is guilty of are crimes of incivility. Those still drive us nuts. We all know a Kyrgios – a jumped-up little twerp with all the advantages who can't help but act the fool whenever things aren't going his way.
We can fully wrap our minds around a guy like that. Since our outrage leads down no thorny moral paths and provokes no awkward internal discussions, we are free to fully engage our rage.
That's fair enough. Famous athletes are people, but they are most fundamentally projections. We broadcast our opinions and prejudices onto them. It may not be entirely harmless, but shrieking in a bar or ranting on social media is less harmful than a lot of other ways we might exorcise our daily frustrations.
Every so often, a player drifts toward the intersection of bad behaviour and public notice. He or she sits there for a while, being whipped. After a while, people tire of it and move on. Often, that player turns 180 degrees and begin a period of reconsideration. The human brain is tilted toward reconciling thesis and antithesis, often chaotically.
While Kyrgios's shenanigans do him no credit, they serve a double purpose.
They make him the most notable men's player outside the Big Four. On Tuesday, he led off the night session at Arthur Ashe Stadium against Andy Murray. Nobody booed, as they had in Montreal. Kyrgios was intermittently bizarre. He seemed to nap in his chair between the first and second sets. He drifted in and out of the match, but he kept it together. Mostly.
Kyrgios has tried apologizing, half-heartedly. His most vigorous defence is already being mounted through proxies.
"If he's not careful, he's going to get railroaded out of the sport," said John McEnroe, who knows a little about it. "We need him."
It's hard to remember now, but Agassi was once roundly despised. Like Kyrgios, he was a preener and a loudmouth. Like Kyrgios, he gave up on matches and rubbished the sport's institutions.
Esquire magazine used to give out ironic awards to the most annoying people in sports. They called them "the Andres."
Agassi was a creation of tennis's villain machine. No sport produces so many relative to its numbers. Part of this has to do with its gladiatorial nature – two go in, one comes out. In that nexus, there will always be a good and a bad.
There's also the fact that no sport provides us with more time to closely observe the competitor mid-match, but also at rest. During every break, we are assessing their body language and facial expressions. We're listening in as they bicker with themselves or the crowd or their opponent. We are judging based on how they look while they're under enormous pressure. It's a towering standard of conduct to meet.
Like Kyrgios, Agassi was poor at it. Then he changed. Or, more correctly, he came to terms with himself. Also, crucially, he started to win.
Beyond the titles, Agassi's signal achievement was so masterfully playing out the familiar, comforting tale of redemption and forgiveness.
That second iteration of Agassi – older, self-deprecating, welcoming – may be the most-loved player in the history of the sport. That excess of admiration was made possible by the paucity of it beforehand.
Fans badly want to forgive their heroes. All the players have to do is let them.
It's a simple template that ends in huge rewards, material and otherwise. The question is whether Kyrgios will turn the remarkable will he's applied to driving people away, and use it instead to invite them in.