An ‘evil bully’ who shames the game or a misunderstood tennis outcast?
From accusations of abuse to on-court verbals, is Kyrgios...
THIS fortnight has been a journey within a journey for Nick Kyrgios, the man who could start a row in an empty house.
He began by flouting the all-white rules of Wimbledon, bringing out red shoes and conspicuously wearing a red cap for his postmatch interviews.
It got to the point where tournament director Jamie Baker decided something had to be done and he had a quiet word with those around the 27 year-old Australian.
Rather than defy authority on this curiously totemic issue, Kyrgios immediately acquiesced, and the red cap had gone by the time he played Cristian Garin in the quarter-finals.
It would not have always been this way with Kyrgios, but at his relatively advanced tennis age the penny may be dropping about what is required to fulfil an extravagant natural talent.
While his on-court conduct earlier in the tournament caused outrage, away from the pressure of combat he has been living like a country mouse compared with former days.
It is a far cry from 2019, when his manager arrived at the Dog and Fox pub in Wimbledon village long past midnight to tell him to go home, as he was playing Rafael Nadal on Centre Court that day.
This was not the only sighting of this kind. At the 2020 Australian Open a group of journalists arrived at a favoured late night haunt in Melbourne for a nightcap on the evening before the tournament. There he was, sitting at the bar drinking cocktails with friends.
Instead of visiting local watering holes here like a modern day George Best, Kyrgios has been staying in a rented house, where his father has been cooking dinner for the group.
Now he has reached the Wimbledon final, beating Garin the day after it emerged he was the subject of domestic abuse allegations. He has stated he would very much like to comment, but has been advised by his lawyer to stay quiet.
While there may not have been any Pauline conversion, the player points to his experience at this year’s Australian Open as having shown him the way to salvation.
After losing in the second round of the singles, he and his great friend Thanasi Kokkinakis went on to win the doubles.
Staying in the event for two weeks demonstrated to him the kind of self-denial that a Novak Djokovic or Andy Murray would simply take for granted.
‘I think that doubles in Australia really helped me at Grand Slam level,’ said Kyrgios. ‘Even though it’s doubles and nowhere near the physical kind of capacity to win compared to the singles.
‘You win a match, you have a day off, you practise, you go again over a two-week period. I realised in Melbourne it’s a long time.
‘You can’t explore, you can’t really go to the city. You can’t enjoy your time as much as you would like to. You kind of have to stay in your house, be reserved, take your mind off things.
‘In Melbourne I realised that. Even at a doubles Grand Slam you do really need to just get your stuff done quickly and clinically, then rest.’
A minor detail is that, en route to the title, Kyrgios was described as ‘an absolute knob’ by one of his opponents, New Zealand’s Michael Venus, after an altercation.
The Australian likes to describe himself as an ‘outcast’ in tennis terms. Someone who has known Kyrgios most of his life believes his tendency to kick back at everything stems from the fact that he never looked destined to be a top athlete. As a child he was podgy rather than a prodigy.
As his mother Norlaila has related, it was only during puberty that he shed early weight and quickly transformed into a player who suddenly started beating the world’s best juniors.
His background otherwise appears to be very stable. His parents are hard-working and his two siblings high-achieving — one a lawyer and the other a singer and actress.
The debate rages on, as it always has done, about whether he is ‘good for tennis’ or not.
Labelled an ‘evil bully’ by his defeated third round opponent Stefanos Tsitsipas, it can be argued his excesses shame the game and tarnish the clean-cut image it likes to promote, most successfully in the form of leading icons Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
The interest in today’s final, however, suggests that — as Kyrgios himself put it — there is no such thing as bad publicity.
The fact that the cameras of Netflix are following him everywhere this fortnight, for their tennis version of F1’s Drive To Survive, tends to back that up.