‘I’m not a bad man – I have never shot anybody’
IT ALWAYS seemed to be a question of whether Nick Kyrgios could handle himself rather than his opponents.
There has been little doubt about the Australian’s talent ever since he burst on to the scene at Wimbledon in 2014; the power he can create from a whippet-thin body, the athleticism, the imagination.
But also barely contained in this explosive package is a tendency to self-destruct, to put his foot in his mouth on and off the court, to smash his racket, to rage at officials. His battle with himself was the one he had to win. “I was in a pretty dark place,” he says.
The clouds began to lift when he answered Lleyton Hewitt’s call to join the Australian Davis Cup squad last month. “The best thing I could have done,” he said. “Come back and be with the boys. I found some enjoyment practising again”.
The first shafts of light appeared two weeks ago with a straight-sets defeat of Novak Djokovic in Acapulco – but that could have been dismissed as a one-off. Instead, he finds himself bathed in sunlight after a 6-4, 7-6 victory over the world No2 at the BNP Paribas Open that brought to an end Djokovic’s 19-match winning run at Indian Wells.
The pace of some of his groundstrokes left Djokovic shaking his head and muttering, while he also surprised the Serb with delicate drop shots. But it was his serve that blocked any path that might have allowed Djokovic back into it.
He won 86 per cent of his first-serve points and did not face one break point. In the secondset tiebreak, he struck one secondserve 126mph ace. Whether the psychologist he was ordered to meet after effectively throwing a match in Shanghai last autumn has effected this newfound equilibrium, it is hard to say. Certainly the return to the Tour of his girlfriend, the Croatian player Ajla Tomljanovic, after a long-term injury is keeping him happy. “I was beating myself down and I just wasn’t in a good place,” he said. “Now I’m just trying to stay happy and to enjoy my tennis a little bit.” Kyrgios continues to operate without a coach and believes the key to his new sense of content has been to stop putting unnecessary pressure on himself, and not seeing
himself as the villain that some back home paint him as. “I don’t go into a match thinking, ‘I must win this’,” he said. “I’m only human. If I make a mistake, I make a mistake.
“I don’t think I’m a bad guy at all. I have had a couple of mix-ups on the court, but that’s in the heat of the battle. Off the court, I haven’t done anything against the law. I haven’t shot someone, I haven’t stolen.”
His stability will be tested again tonight in the quarterfinals by Roger Federer, the player Kyrgios rates as the greatest of all time and who for the first time notched up a third consecutive victory over Rafael Nadal 6-3, 6-3, then admitted he was “very impressed” by Kyrgios.
What Kyrgios will not become, certainly, is a tennis robot. After beating Djokovic, he tweeted two early suggestions for coach of the year – Ivan Ljubicic, who looks after Federer, and himself.
He ‘liked’ his own tweet, of course.