COLUMN: The Nick Kyrgios–Aryna Sabalenka “Battle of the Sexes” isn’t entertainment. it’s embarrassing.

Every few years, sports producers get bored and decide to dust off a bad idea. This time, it’s the “Battle of the Sexes,” repackaged for an era that rewards outrage over substance. Enter Nick Kyrgios and Aryna Sabalenka, two elite athletes in their own right, now cast as characters in a spectacle designed to provoke more clicks than thought.

Let’s be honest: this event isn’t about tennis. It isn’t about gender equality. It isn’t a tribute to Billie Jean King. It’s a circus—built on conflict, engineered for attention, and marketed with the subtlety of a reality-TV reunion show.

Even if you set aside the cultural weirdness, the actual tennis is poised to be excruciating.

Sabalenka is one of the most powerful players in the women’s game, but physics is physics. She will be physically outmatched by a man even if that man is, like Kyrgios, long removed from the grind of the ATP Tour. And let’s be clear: Kyrgios no longer has the mental, emotional, or physical engine required to play professional men’s tennis today or ever again. He can still summon brilliance in short bursts—he always could—but the sustained, top-end demands of the ATP Tour are behind him. This exhibition is the only venue where he can still pretend otherwise.

So what we’re left with is a fundamentally uneven matchup between a woman forced into a strength-disparity spectacle and a man whose body and career can no longer survive the real sport. That is not tennis. It’s theater, and not the good kind.

Nick Kyrgios has always been a virtuoso of volatility. His talent is undeniable. His relationship with attention is even more undeniable. He thrives on spectacle, on provocation, on the constant hum of public reaction. At times, it has made him compelling. More often, it has made him exhausting.

In this match, he will likely win the points. But winning the points isn’t the same as winning at anything that matters. The more the spotlight enables the worst incentives of his public persona, the more he sinks into the caricature the event is built around. The match will feed him attention, and that attention is precisely what has pushed him into a tragic loop: the louder the noise, the more he becomes its prisoner.

Sabalenka is a tremendous athlete who deserves to be showcased on the merits of her game. Instead, this event reduces her to a prop in a man-versus-woman novelty act that should have been retired decades ago.

She isn’t competing to elevate women’s tennis. She’s competing to satisfy a storyline that someone in marketing decided would “go viral.” And in agreeing to participate, she ends up reinforcing a spectacle that undermines the very legitimacy of the sport she represents.

No woman benefits from this matchup. Not Sabalenka, not the WTA, and not the next generation of players who shouldn’t have to endure the tired trope that women’s tennis is only interesting when measured against men.

Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in 1973 mattered. It changed culture. Women were fighting for legitimacy. The moment had purpose.

But today, women’s tennis is the most successfully marketed women’s sport on Earth. It commands massive audiences on its own. It has stars, depth, money, and credibility. To drag it back into a carnival show that implicitly suggests its value must still be proven against a male opponent is insulting.

This isn’t progress. It’s regression with a sponsorship package.

At the center of this farce is a simple truth: the entire enterprise is built on the notion that if you engineer enough outrage, people will watch. It’s sports entertainment in its cheapest form. It mistakes noise for relevance, heat for substance, and spectacle for value.

The players will get paid. The promoters will get their clicks. Kyrgios will get his attention. Sabalenka will get swept into someone else’s narrative.

Everyone gets something except the sport itself.

Tennis deserves better than this. Fans deserve better than this. And culturally, we deserve better than one more artificially manufactured gender showdown designed to distract us from the reality that the tennis won’t be good, the dynamic won’t be healthy, and the message won’t be meaningful.

Kyrgios may win the match. Sabalenka will play the role the event asks of her. But the entire thing is still a loss. For the sport. For the conversation. For anyone who hoped we had evolved past this kind of sideshow.

The simplest solution is the right one:

Look away. Let it flop. Tennis moves forward when we stop rewarding the things that hold it back.