Calcutta: Last month, an American tennis player called Tennys Sandgren lost to a Danish player, Mikael Torpegaard, in the semi-final of a small tournament on the second-tier challenger tour in Columbus, Ohio.
Sandgren shook hands with his opponent and the umpire, unzipped his racket bag, and checked his phone, as he often does after matches. There was a notification on his Instagram. Sandgren opened the photo-sharing app, and that was when he saw the message, which read: "I'm going to kill your family and I'm going to do it as slow as possible while you watch."
According to The Times, London, the remarkable thing about this story is that there is nothing remarkable about it. Sandgren is the world No 227. He is an ordinary player, and this is becoming an ordinary event in the lives of those who play tennis for a living.
"You're used to it at this point," says Sandgren, who estimates he receives hateful, abusive or threatening messages on his social media accounts once every other week.
The messages almost always come from disgruntled gamblers who have lost money betting on a player's matches. Tennis accounts for about 12 per cent of a global sports betting market worth $3 trillion, making it the second-biggest sport, equal with cricket and behind football. Gamblers can wager on anything from Grand Slam tournaments down to obscure challenger and futures events in all four corners of the globe.
"I would say Kyle gets abuse every time he loses, and then he'll get abused sometimes when he wins a match as well," says Steven Edmund, father of British men's No 2 Kyle Edmund.
Unsurprisingly, the two Tours - the ATP and WTA - are concerned by the rise in this sort of threatening online abuse. Ross Hutchins ATP's chief player officer says that within the ATP, the issue is regarded with a seriousness on a par with match-fixing and drug-taking.
Opinion is divided on how effectively social media companies deal with the abuse. Mark Harrison, of the TIU, says the organisation has a "good working relationship" with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and has co-operated in the removal of accounts."We do not tolerate behaviour that crosses the line into abuse, including behaviour that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user's voice," said Kira O'Connor, Twitter's head of trust and safety outreach.Instagram says it has a "zero-tolerance approach to abuse" and has launched a comment moderation tool allowing users to filter out offensive keywords.
Sandgren has even taken to replying directly to his tormentors on occasion, and has been surprised to discover that for the most part, they are contrite, "normal people".
Perhaps they don't realise the hurt they are inflicting. "It can result in long-term emotional and mental-health changes," says Dr Emma Kavanagh, a sports psychologist at Bournemouth University who specialises in virtual maltreatment.
Female players seem to be exposed to a particularly virulent strain. "We compared the abuse directed at the top male players and the top female players, and we saw a very different nature to the abuse [directed at women]," says Kavanagh. "More sexualised, and highly misogynistic."
Among the abusive comments Caroline Wozniacki, a two-time US Open finalist, screengrabbed on her Instagram page in June were phrases such as "You have such a p**** serve" and "My dog plays better tennis than you." Sandgren says that his female friends on Tour are often subject to body-shaming attacks. Madison Keys has described it as a "daily struggle" that "sometimes gets too much".
