The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Anyone for aggro?
Simon Briggs meets the bad boy of tennis, Nick Kyrgios
To some he is a breath of fresh air, bringing mischief to an often staid sport. To others he’s an obnoxious loudmouth. But away from the court, Nick Kyrgios is a sensitive soul, who’d rather be playing basketball anyway. Ahead of the start of Wimbledon, he talks to Simon Briggs
‘Fans want excitement. I can give them that'
Nick Kyrgios is a tricky fellow to track down. The most mercurial figure in tennis, he has a habit of dropping off the face of the planet for weeks at a time. And even if you do manage to reach him, you never quite know what you’re going to get.
One of our previous meetings turned awkward – for me, anyway – when he bantered with his bestie, the American player Jack Sock, while only keeping half an ear on my questions. Another found him describing his deep affection for Andy Murray in unexpectedly graphic terms. While the results of an interview are usually intriguing, they are often unprintable.
It was no great surprise, then, that the 26-year-old was a few days late for our most recent appointment. He has been suffering from neck pain, which delayed his flight to Europe, thus scuppering his chances of playing at Stuttgart and Queen’s Club in west London. Even so, he was in an upbeat mood when he picked up the phone from his home in Canberra, and seemed ready to talk.
‘How’s everything going?’ he greeted me, in the smooth, jocular baritone that recently earned him a commentator’s role on the reality TV show Australian Ninja Warrior. He himself was, he said, ‘Sweet. I just finished
two hours of pick-up basketball. I feel like I’m in some of the best shape of my life.’
As ever, Kyrgios is keeping his fans guessing. Last year, he withdrew from the US Open because of Covid, saying he was ‘sitting out for my people, my Aussies, for the hundreds and thousands of Americans that have lost their lives’. This year, he’s back in the game, and seemingly committed to next week’s Wimbledon. Inevitably, though, there was some doubt; at the time of publication, he was still vacillating over a last-minute arrival only four days before the start of play.
‘I want to go out there and have some fun,’ he tells me. ‘I never played this game for the money, or the fame, or any s—t like that. I just wanted to go out and give people a good time. I know that there’s a lot of fans out there who are wanting a bit more excitement, and I know that I can give that to them. I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing by my body as well as my mental health, so that’s why I’ve taken it slow. Hopefully when I return, things will be as good as ever.’
Tennis players tend to be a conservative bunch. Once you move past the giants of the game – the Roger Federers and Rafael Nadals – you run into a set of national stereotypes: earnest North Americans in baseball caps, burly Russians with shaggy hair, gifted Frenchmen who collapse under pressure. But Kyrgios is emphatically his own man: a 6ft 4in, mixed-race Australian with sleeve tattoos, diamond earrings and bags of attitude. He was 19 when he burst into our consciousness, overcoming Nadal – who was then world number one – at Wimbledon before celebrating with a victory dance that he dubbed ‘the juicy wiggle’. Ever since, he has brought a welcome dose of mischief to this often staid and stuffy sport.
At times, he feels like a throwback to the 1980s, that golden age of aggro when John Mcenroe, Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl formed a celebrity hate triangle. Modern tennis is corporate and sanitised by contrast. Nobody is prepared to say what they really think about their rivals. Except Kyrgios. As he told me more than once, ‘I am not going to conform. What am I, a robot?’
His showy tricks on the court – so-called ’tweeners, hit between his legs, or underarm serves – rile the establishment even as they thrill the gallery. His magnetism is reflected in an Instagram following of 1.6 million, and his love life is juicy fodder for the tabloid press. A rumoured liaison with singer Rita Ora remains unproven, but we know that he has a turbulent on-off relationship with fellow Australian Chiara Passari because she posts details – both good and bad – on her own Instagram page. Although her recent posts have been dominated
‘I just want to go out there and have some fun. I never played for the money or the fame’
by loved-up poolside pictures of the pair, she screenshotted a series of angry texts in February before broadcasting them to her 37,000 followers. ‘Look, it has its ups and downs,’ is Kyrgios’s verdict on their time together. ‘Like life.’ He plans to take Passari to Wimbledon with him, along with his manager, childhood friend Daniel Horsfall.
Kyrgios’s dealings with his peers are equally complex. At one stage, Federer tried to sign him for his management agency Team8: he might not win grand slams, but
he empties bars, and appeals to youngsters who might otherwise switch over to the football. And yet, making a guest appearance on an American tennis podcast in 2019, Kyrgios verbally machine-gunned two of the biggest names on the tour. Nadal, he said, was a sore loser. As for the current world number one Novak Djokovic, ‘I just feel like he has a sick obsession with wanting to be liked.’ Kyrgios went on to savage Djokovic’s ‘cringeworthy’ post-match celebration, in which he cups his hands under his heart and then thrusts them symbolically towards the stands.
Traditional tennis lovers see such lèsemajesté as both unnecessary and disrespectful. They also suggest that Kyrgios is a dilettante, who has never made it past the quarter-finals at one of the four grand-slam events. But to give Kyrgios his due, he has won both his past meetings with Djokovic, as well as a healthy three out of eight with Nadal. ‘I never had a problem getting up for those matches,’ he once said. ‘I think it’s more the matches in the back courts against the guys that are really trying to grind it out, they’re the matches that are dangerous to me.’
Yes, Kyrgios is a natural disruptor; the id of tennis. He is unafraid to break taboos, or to cause offence. Even the spotless Federer lost his cool – an almost unheard-of event – when the pair played a tumultuous late-night match in Madrid six years ago, barking, ‘We need a clown for this circus!’ In fact, the only member of the so-called Big Four he never antagonised was Murray. ‘I definitely had a lot of respect for Andy,’ Kyrgios tells me, ‘compared to the other three.’
So would he like to play Djokovic at Wimbledon next week, despite having barely touched a racket since the tour’s first Covid-enforced suspension 16 months ago? ‘Definitely,’ Kyrgios says. ‘It’s pretty crazy that I have only played a couple of tournaments in the past two years and I’m still one of the only people that can make it difficult for Djokovic. That’s a blessing. I can be on the sidelines and people only want one match, they want Kyrgios v Djokovic, and that shows how much I bring to the sport.’
Nicholas Hilmy Kyrgios was born on 27 April 1995, in Canberra. He is the youngest of three siblings and the son of two immigrants. His mother, Norlaila, is a computer engineer, and was also born a princess in the Malaysian royal family, but gave up her title in her 20s when she moved to Australia. His father, Giorgos – who can usually be spotted courtside, sporting a perfectly groomed goatee – is a house painter who moved from Greece at the age of seven. All three children attended private schools, so this was a comfortable upbringing.
Looking at Kyrgios now, you wouldn’t imagine that he was a chubby, late-developing teen who struggled with asthma – and only got into tennis because his brother Christos and sister Halimah had played before him. In fact, his lack of mobility inspired his all-or-nothing game style of tree-felling forehands and cheeky dropshots, backed up by a lightning bolt of a serve. Why stand and rally when stamina’s not your thing?
At 14, he had to make a choice – tennis or basketball. To his eternal regret, he opted for the sport he was more precocious at, rather than the one he loved. If he had his time again, he tells me, he wouldn’t even pick up a racket. ‘It’s a crazy story. Because it’s actually sad as well. Imagine living your entire life, doing something that you don’t want to be doing and you’re just doing it because you’re good at it.
‘I’m not gonna say that beating the best players in the world wasn’t fun,’ he adds. ‘I’m just saying that, with the stress that it’s caused, and the things that have come with it, it’s been tough.’
Mix Kyrgios’s tennis ambivalence with his fiery temper and a strong streak of smartarsery, and you get a dangerously combustible character. Nobody on the modern tour
has as lengthy a rap-sheet. He has been fined and/or suspended for a variety of offences: telling Stan Wawrinka that another player had ‘banged his girlfriend’, deliberately losing matches in Shanghai, throwing chairs on to the court, and – most bizarrely – making an obscene gesture with a water bottle.
On two occasions, the ATP Tour – the governing body of men’s professional tennis – instructed him to seek therapy. Here was an unusual ultimatum – unique, even. Kyrgios was less volatile in the aftermath, but soon abandoned his treatment. This is not a man who enjoys supervision.
Touring life has had its highlights, even for such a self-proclaimed homebody. Take the Acapulco tournament he won in 2019, which he approached with Hawaiianshirted enthusiasm. ‘Mate if we had had a Gopro [head-mounted camera] on what I was doing during that week, it would have been an absolute movie,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone to go about it that way, partying every night and stuff. Every day in Acapulco I felt like they wanted me to lose, and then I kept winning and they ended up just embracing me as that guy who was always going to hang out with them after the game. It was awesome.’
But there have also been numerous lows, accentuated by the inconvenient geographical detail of being Australian in a sport based around Europe and America. He spoke last year of having suffered depression during the long weeks away. There was one occasion in Shanghai – his least favourite stop on the tour – when he ‘woke up and it was 4pm and I was still in bed, curtains closed. I didn’t want to see the light of day.’
Now, he is more careful about protecting
his own state of mind. ‘I’m gonna put me as a human first rather than the athlete,’ he tells me. ‘It can be so easy for an athlete, or just a general person, to fall into the noise on social media, the negativity. I don’t think mental illness in general is getting enough attention.’
He points out that even someone like the world’s highest-paid female athlete Naomi Osaka, who refused to give press conferences at the recent French Open in order to protect her mental health (she eventually withdrew from the tournament after being threatened with suspension, and recently pulled out of Wimbledon as well), finds it hard. ‘A champion like herself still struggles. She’s under a massive amount of spotlight.
‘When I look on social media and I see all the negative comments, it’s taken me a long time to not let that affect me. It’s still a work in progress. It’s one click away from seeing all this negativity and it weighs down on you.’
Afortnight ago in Paris, tennis delivered a humdinger of a French Open semi-final. Djokovic and Nadal pushed themselves to the limit in the mostwatched match ever screened on the Tennis Channel, and the next morning, social media was dubbing it a transcendent experience.
In the middle of this orgy of Twitter celebration, Kyrgios popped up with his own message. No, he wasn’t congratulating Djokovic on his victory. Instead, he was posting a video of his latest Call of Duty escapade. The contrast was a reminder of what a peripheral figure he has become.
Call of Duty, Fifa and pick-up basketball: since the pandemic shut tennis down in March last year, these are the games Kyrgios has been focusing on. What he hasn’t been doing – apart from a three-week window in February when the tour visited Australia – is hitting tennis balls. At first, he wasn’t alone in this. But when exhibitions began to spring up in June, and then regular events in August, he shrugged and returned to his lounge chair.
Some believe that the pandemic suits Kyrgios perfectly. He is able to stay at home in Canberra, enjoying his friends and family, without having to justify his absence from the day job. His own argument is that tennis feels even more insignificant than usual in the middle of a global health crisis. And on this point, once again, he has found himself at odds with Djokovic.
Their stances on the virus could hardly be more different. Kyrgios has backed Australia’s heavy-handed lockdowns without
hesitation, even going so far as to drive around Canberra with emergency ration boxes for those confined to their homes. Djokovic, by contrast, remained eager to play. Last June, he organised a controversial exhibition event in the Balkans – without social distancing – that led to the infection of four leading players, including himself. Kyrgios called the Adria Tour ‘boneheaded’, and told his Twitter followers, ‘Don’t @ me for anything I’ve done that has been “irresponsible” or classified as “stupidity” – this takes the cake.’
When I bring the subject up, Kyrgios restates his opinion that Djokovic had ‘let the sport down a little bit. He’s our Lebron James [the highest-paid basketballer of the moment]. As world number one, he’s got to be setting the example. I just don’t think he did the best thing for our sport, but we all make mistakes. It’s in the past now.’
Kyrgios’s headmasterly stance on Covid played well with his domestic audience – especially when Djokovic arrived in Australia in January and tactlessly asked if visiting players could swap their bubble hotels
‘I play a certain way, as an entertainer and a showman. But actually I don’t like the spotlight’
for ‘private houses with tennis courts’. What a role reversal this was. Suddenly it was Djokovic – an urbane and articulate figure, fluent in half-a-dozen different languages – who sounded like the brat, and Kyrgios like the statesman.
Aussies used to refer to Kyrgios with all sorts of vivid local slang: bogan, galoot, hoon. (These are not compliments.) But since the start of 2020, when he became the first athlete to support bush fire-relief funds, the mood has changed. People started to glimpse the more vulnerable, sensitive soul beneath the bravado. And his unexpectedly mature response to the pandemic has only accentuated the process. As the Melbourne-based writer Russell Jackson put it, ‘Quiet Australians are suddenly loving the loudest Australian.’
Kyrgios says that he has noticed the shift. ‘It’s about realising that people are different when they’re off the court. I wasn’t doing any of that stuff [driving round delivering groceries; raising money for those affected by the Australian bush fires] for media attention. That’s just me, that’s how I’ve always been. I play a certain way, as an entertainer and a showman. But actually I don’t like the attention or the spotlight. I just want some peace and quiet.’
So it is that Kyrgios, tennis’s lord of misrule, prepares for his long-awaited return. It would be rash to say that he has outgrown his self-destructive behaviour. There is always one more warning for ‘audible obscenity’, or worse, around the corner.
But those fortunate Wimbledon ticketholders who find him on their court will be overjoyed. Because Kyrgios has one quality that makes for great sport and even better entertainment. You never know what he will do next.