"Way to go, Nick!" your columnist enthused.

The keenly-anticipated Australian Open tennis tournament has coincided with the not-the-slightest-bit-anticipated return from his holidays of Labor leader Bill Shorten. Shorten has had a lot to say and the political media has reported every syllable of it. And yet the nation, I sense, is quite rightly more interested in anything muttered, growled, shouted or tweeted by Nick Kyrgios.

Capable of being passionate about politics and about sport I have been asking myself why I am so excited by Nick Kyrgios (and by other dashing young Aussie racqueteers of this summer) and left so weary and uninspired by Shorten. Are political fandom and sporting fandom different creatures, tickling different corners of the mind?

I am not alone in being unmoved by the Labor leader. One analyst, playing with the findings of the latest Newspoll, notices that PM Turnbull and Labor leader Shorten are the most unpopular such couple (serving PM and Opposition Leader) for 20 years. In those olden days the opposition leader the Australian people were discerning enough to despise was the Liberal's chubby, smirking Alexander Downer. In a famous episode of Father Ted, the dreaded Bishop Brennan dismisses witless Father Dougal as "this cabbage". Alexander Downer too was always a Liberal cabbage.

But perhaps for fulfilment and pleasure, sporting fandom always has an edge, a deserved edge, over political fandom.

The elite athlete is always dazzlingly good at something difficult and worthwhile. Meanwhile most politicians are stupefyingly ordinary. I am in awe of Kyrgios' tennis but I am not in awe of anything about Bill Shorten, except perhaps his populist shamelessness. I suspect I am Shorten's moral and intellectual superior in everything. I would even effortlessly trounce him at tennis. That is unless of course he was somehow able to use a courtcraft version of the rat cunning that has somehow enabled him to gnaw, scuttle and squeak his way into the leadership of a once proud and worthwhile party.

One joy Kyrgios brings to Australian public life is the stimulating love him/hate him emotions he stirs in folk. Contrast this with our lacklustre feelings about Turnbull and Shorten, those cabbages.

Kyrgios, though, is an exciting mix of genius and obnoxiousness. Some of us appreciate a temperamental genius (Beethoven was publicly obnoxious and had a volcanic temper) and wonder why that genius must as well be some kind of social role model.

It is a baffling expectation. It is not as if we looking, in Beethoven and in Kyrgios, for someone to sit beside on a long international flight, to share a house with or to marry our daughter. We look and listen to those two giants for what it is (symphonic music and magical athleticism respectively) they are brilliant at.

Loving fine music and fine sport I think an even better analogy in this case is that Kyrgios is a kind of Australian Maria Callas. She went to Heaven, the angels flinching in fear, in 1977. She was a byword for volcanic behaviour but also of course for fabulous, soul-wringing, soul-tingling singing.

Those of us who love a temperamental genius not only love the sparks those geniuses set flying but also suspect that the temperament and the genius are conjoined. We fancy that a genial, mild-mannered Beethoven would only ever have composed lullabies and jingles, that a calm and matronly Callas would only ever have anonymously crooned hymns in a church choir. Tormented souls are the best entertainers, be it on the opera stage or on the tennis court.

Saint Roger Federer appears to disprove this statement. But one day (remember you read it here first) we are going to discover that all this time Federer has been ineligible to play with Earthlings because he is from another planet where skills and poise like his (otherwise inexplicable) are commonplace.

As I write (early in the first week of the Open's spellbinding fortnight) the nation is dreaming, drooling at the thought that Kyrgios may soon begin to fulfil his infinite promise and win major tournaments.

But I have a contrary hope, one that I will keep to myself because it will sound unpatriotic and will get me torn to pieces by social media piranha trolls. My shy hope is that mercurial Kyrgios, fed up with everyone's expectations of him, will soon abandon tennis altogether. The flair shown in his hairstyles and in his clothing (including the anti-Trump T-shirt) suggest he could become one of the all-time-great fashion designers.

Should he leave tennis soon he will become a priceless "What might have been?" figure in Australian folklore. That will give his life and career a tragic allure. Historians and novelists will find his story irresistible. No operas will ever be written about that forgettable cabbage Bill Shorten. But grand operas about Nick will be composed and staged starring wild prima donnas (latter day Maria Callases) who like the legend they are warbling about are chips off the same old block of genius.