San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
KYRGIOS IS BIGGEST DRAW IN TENNIS
The gifted bad boy who excites crowds real threat at Aussie
Nick Kyrgios is finally home.
He is in Australia, with his people and in the place he longs for during all those homesick months living out of a suitcase on the professional tennis road.
For months, he soaked up the sun and trained in Sydney. But he also squeezed in a bit of time, although never enough for his liking, on the black couch in his childhood home in Canberra, Australia’s quiet, rural capital, telling his mother how safe he feels while she drinks tea a few feet away in the kitchen. He could sleep in his old room, where his cherished collection of colorful basketball shoes lines the shelves. That is next to the room with hundreds of his trophies and plaques and dozens of his smashed rackets. His pet macaw is in an aviary out back. Mornings bring brisk, 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) walks with his father, his golden retriever King and his miniature Dachshund Quincy, up nearby Mount Majura.
He hit balls, and lifted weights, goofed around with and gave endless swag to the children at the tennis center in Lyneham where he got his start. Like many in Australia — and lots of other places these days — they worship their local folk hero, no matter how boorish and aggressive he can be in the heat of competition, or when a live microphone appears at his chin. Or maybe that’s why they do.
Now though, everything is suddenly different.
Last year, Kyrgios evolved from a temperamental talent with so much unrealized potential into the kind of transcendent showman that this supposedly genteel sport offers up every so often — the gifted bad boy who drives the tennis establishment mad but enthralls crowds in the late stages of the most important championships.
Whether the tennis establishment likes it or not, no one in the sport fills a stadium like Kyrgios these days. Even his doubles matches have become raucous, packed affairs. And as the Australian Open gets underway, Kyrgios, 27, is among the favorites to challenge nine-time champion Novak Djokovic for his home Slam, which may be the ultimate double-edged sword. That level of pressure and expectation has been kryptonite for Kyrgios before, his selfdestructive psyche exploding at a crucial moment, producing his unique brand of irresistible tennis theater.
“It’s going to be a hard couple weeks, regardless of whether I win or lose, emotionally, mentally,” Kyrgios said in a pre-christmas interview from his parents’ home. “I’m one of the players that has a scope lens on him all the time. Big target on my back.”
With all his recent success and notoriety, so much suddenly appears to be riding on Kyrgios. The game’s leaders see him as the rare player who can reach a new and younger audience. Fans raise their beers and bump chests as Kyrgios wins points with his signature trick shots through the legs and behind the back. They wear basketball jerseys when they watch him and when they play, just as he does, and they turn his matches, even the doubles contests, into the something like a rowdy night at a UFC bout.
“He brings something different,” said Andrea Gaudenzi, a former pro who is now the chair of the ATP Tour, the men’s professional circuit.
Ken Solomon, chair and CEO of the Tennis Channel, the sport’s leading media partner, called Kyrgios “ground zero” in efforts to attract fans who have never touched a racket and perhaps never will. On Friday, Netflix released “Break Point,” its documentary series on pro tennis that the sport hopes will do for it what “Drive to Survive” did for Formula One. The premiere episode focused almost exclusively on Kyrgios, who took a signature victory lap on Twitter.
Leaning on Kyrgios as a pitchman for the game carries plenty of risk. What makes him so irresistible, that at any time he might produce another can’t-miss moment on the court, has at times made him a walking grenade. And he’s the one with a finger on the pin.
There is also the allegation of domestic violence.
In early February, Kyrgios is due in court in Canberra to face a charge of common assault stemming from an altercation with an exgirlfriend, Chiara Passari, in December 2021. Kyrgios has declined to discuss the matter since it became public during his run to the Wimbledon final in July.
Common assault is the least serious assault charge in Australia, but it implies that the victim experienced immediate, unlawful violence, or the threat of it, although not bodily injury. Kyrgios’ lawyers have said that they will mount a defense focused on mental illness, citing his history of depression and substance abuse, struggles that Kyrgios has said will always be with him but that he now has under control. If the court accepts this defense and dismisses the case, it could then decide to impose a treatment plan. The maximum penalty for common assault is two years’ imprisonment.
The incident occurred during the first weeks of Kyrgios’ relationship with his now-constant companion, Costeen Hatzi, whom he met online. He had also just recommitted himself fully to tennis after years of ambivalence and mental turmoil. The sport had brought riches and fame but also loneliness, with its endless travel and solitary battles on the court, which tortured his psyche.
The withering criticism and racist attacks he endured when he lost matches that he was expected to win, or broke rackets and berated tennis officials, triggered memories of those years before a growth spurt at 17 turned him into a strapping, 6-foot-4 elite athlete. As an overweight boy with dark skin and modest means in an overwhelmingly white country where everyone seemed to have more, he was mocked and bullied, despite his talent for tennis, or maybe because of it.
His parents knew next to nothing about tennis. Tennis Australia and the tennis authority for his provincial region worked to fill in the gaps, and Kyrgios notched his breakthrough win at 19, when he upset of Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2014.
It nearly ruined him. After that win and all the expectations it produced, Kyrgios
Today-jan. 28, Melbourne Park
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thought he had to solve every problem on his own. When he couldn’t, he lashed out, at tennis officials, the media and the people around him.
Then, last fall, after a year in which he flirted with quitting but also showed flickers of his magical game, Kyrgios began to realize he didn’t have to do it all alone. He could talk about his fears and insecurities and the fragility of his mind to the people closest to him, and they could help.
“Knowing that I am not alone anymore and I can kind of open up and talk to people, now that’s a big one for me,” he said. “It’s OK to, you know, feel like having to cry some days.”
Kyrgios will play Roman Safiullin, an unheralded Russian, in the first round Monday.
What happens now? Tennis, like few other sports, is an MRI of the soul. Kyrgios knows he will never pursue the game with the clinical efficiency and emotional discipline that Nadal and Djokovic have showcased for so long. He is going to throw and break rackets. It’s a manifestation of how much he cares, he said, and for him to thrive, tennis has to be about who he is, someone who plays with emotion, instinct and improvisation, like a jazz solo rather than a symphony.
If he can do that, maybe he can find peace on the court, even when the pressure brings the stress of a near-explosion that keeps his mother, too worried about what will happen, from being able to watch.
“Not many people can say that they have become a Slam threat, they are going to have the support of the nation, well, the support of some of the nation behind him,” he said. “Just got to try to enjoy it.”
For Kyrgios, that has always been the toughest task of all.