"She's drunk out of her mind in the first row, talking to me in the middle of the game!" he shouted as he sat down between games. "What's acceptable? I know exactly which one it is. The one with the dress, the one who looks like she's had about 700 drinks, bro!"
It was (almost) enough to make one feel sorry for Ania Palus, who was temporarily ejected, and wouldn't have been expecting to make yesterday's front pages when she took her seat. "I'm really sorry," she said, adding limply: "I only had one Pimm's and one rosé."
In any case, Kyrgios had moved on, levelling insults at his own support team and the players' box where his girlfriend Costeen Hatzi and father Giorgos were seated. "Why didn't you say something? Does it get any bigger or what? You want a bigger one – it's not big enough for you? There's no bigger match. Well done guys, I can't do anything. Do you f***ing care or what?"
Sarcastic clapping against his racket and puerile throwing of his water bottle came next, before the umpire, whom Kyrgios had already branded "stupid" and a "f***ing idiot" in a row during last year's Australian Open, finally handed him a code violation. And yes, it was a relief to see Kyrgios lose, because this isn't the behaviour of a winner: a winner shouldn't rack up £12,000 ($23,000) in fines at Wimbledon alone. But all I could think was that this was Prince George's first Wimbledon – with both the experience and the sport sullied by one player's disgraceful antics.
I know, I'm channelling my inner Mary Whitehouse. I might as well don the giant anti-smut specs and poly-blend polo-necks now. As Mark Twain so elegantly put it, "Profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer". And as BBC commentator Andrew Castle, himself a former pro, pointed out during the Kyrgios-Djokovic match, in his apology to viewers: "It is live sport, and it is tense".
Certainly one would expect this and worse from footballers and rugby players but, for me, part of the charm of cricket and tennis has always been their quaintness: the bygone world they conjure up with their pedantic rules and dress code.
And what's the point of getting dressed up in all that finery and re-mortgaging your house for a glass of fizz and a measly portion of strawberries and cream just to watch a bar-room brawl?
Ah, but such behaviour is just proof of genius, isn't it? That's what those defending Kyrgios today are saying. They would use a similar excuse to defend the expletives creeping into the cricket world; you might remember Virat Kohli dropping the F-bomb as the Indian captain gave Joe Root a send-off in the Test against England last year. "Emotional", "passionate", "volatile," "mercurial": we're living in a social-media age where the loudest and bluntest voices are the only ones worth listening to, and strings of expletives are what make us sit up and listen.
We need spicy "characters" such as John McEnroe in tennis and sport more generally. But once you start to ask what kind of a character someone like Kyrgios is, it gets tricky. After all, this character is so "colourful" that many believed he shouldn't have been allowed onto Centre Court to begin with – what with the possible jail sentence he is facing after allegedly assaulting his former girlfriend. That's when "characters" stop being such a "breath of fresh air", surely?
Yet in today's public life, characters are supposedly laudable. Donald Trump is a character, as is Boris Johnson. And just look at education minister, Andrea Jenkyns, who had only been in her illustrious job hours when she decided to respond to a jeering mob outside Downing Street by raising her middle finger.
"I responded and stood up for myself," she said, in a non-apology that might have been modelled on deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner's response to her description of the Conservatives as "homophobic, racist, misogynistic scum". When Rayner later said that her outburst was just her being true to her northern, working-class roots, what she really meant was: "I can't help being me".
It's a sentiment I'm sure Kyrgios would agree with, but one to which I'm sure Prince George and most of the tennis-watching public would have the same response: "A little less 'you' would go a long way".
