Crowd behaves badly at Australian Open

MELBOURNE: A man who began heckling near the players’ boxes during a Nick Kyrgios Australian Open match was an internet prankster, it emerged Thursday, as concern mounted about rowdy crowds at the tournament.

Kyrgios was about to serve early in the match on Wednesday when the man began shouting loudly while filming himself with a phone before he was kicked out of the Hisense Arena by security staff. It turns out he was a self-described “YouTube star” who spent the day planning the prank.

In a video posted soon after he was thrown out, he expanded on the incident. “You guys might have just seen me on TV — I’ve just been evicted. I think that was the greatest thing I’ve done in my life. “Hope you guys enjoyed that.” A professional pest, his YouTube channel features other videos including “Airhorn in the library” and “Waxing my armpits in public”. Kyrgios, who has a notorious on-court temperament, dealt with the incident calmly.

“The guy in the crowd was crazy. I didn’t really know what was going on,” he said afterwards. It was the latest match at the opening Grand Slam of the year to be marred by crowd incidents. On Tuesday, rising Belarusian star Aryna Sabalenka’s screeching got to the point where spectators started mocking her, earning a rebuke from the umpire.