You love it, you hate it. You would pay the ticket to see his matches, but you can’t stand his behavior. You can’t stand the perverse talent, equal to that of a tennis player, which he uses to dissipate himself and irritate the rest of the world. That’s how it happens, with Nick Kyrgios, the handsome and the tennis bully.
The last to call him a bully, indeed, as a bully and bullied together, was Stefanos Tsitsipas, the number 5 in the world, last night at Wimbledon, after four fiery sets that Kyrgios eventually took home. Playing tennis like a god, and swearing like he’s used to. Muttering, arguing, commenting on every point or almost. A blasphemous talmud who never knows how to keep his mouth shut.
On the field number 1 crammed with people looking for the show and wanting blood, waiting for the wonders and enjoying the infamy, Nick dodged one of the shots that Stefanos, a spoiled star, shot at him, exasperated by his continuous curtains, by the jokes provocative («good answer», when Stef lost his measure), from the stream of consciousness into which his matches often turn. But the other, the second shot, took it all.
“He acts like someone who has been bullied in school,” said Tsitsipas, angered by the defeat.
“Would I be the bad guy?” Replied ‘Kygs’, arriving at the press conference with a t-shirt dedicated to Dennis Rodman, the old NBA bad boy. “Take a look at the game: it was he who threw me on.”
When Stefanos lost the second set and threw another ball missing an inch from the spectators, Kyrgios stopped and demanded that his opponent be disqualified. “If I did, I’d be out already,” he protested, not entirely wrongly. Game interrupted, invective, the supervisor summoned to the field. Tsitsipas only got a warning, a reprimand
For once, however, Nick did not lose his head after the scene, he did not break out as often happens to him, indeed, almost always. He remained present, alive in the game. And he won it, earning a place in the second week of Wimbledon – it is the fourth time he has made it, in his career -, and a semi-final with Rafa Nadal in prospect. The champion that Kyrgios as a kid unexpectedly threw out of the Championships in 2014, when he was an unknown 19-year-old, world no.144, but already full of talent.
Since then Nick the heat has missed almost all appointments: with life and with tennis. Splendors and miseries, (high) fines and sanctions, quarrels with the public and with opponents, identity crisis; alcohol, drugs, chairs thrown on the pitch (it happened in Rome), escapes from the world. The fear of not being able to do it, the anger of feeling inadequate, a burden on family and friends: “I had the feeling of always disappointing everyone”
A referee, Mohamed Lahyani, even risked his career to try to comfort him, getting off his high chair and talking to him like a son (“Can I help you? Tell me what’s wrong”) during a match in which Nick had lost contact. with himself. He did not react, but stared into space beyond his frustrated ambitions.
He looks tough, Nick, but he’s a sensitive guy: Both choaro and kyrgios on the pitch and the one off are two different people “, he explains, who during the lockdown personally delivered packets of food to home for those who had no money to pay for them. . The attacks of the haters on the internet haunt him, the ferocious criticisms of his lost talent of him for a time have plunged him into a black crisis.
“I was estranged, I was abusing alcohol and drugs, I was in a spiral out of control,” he told Australian journalist Craig Gabriel. “I had cut ties with real life. Now I drink at most a glass of wine at dinner, I’m rebuilding the relationship with my family and finding the basics: diet, sleep, a little more training. That’s all. I think Covid has helped me in this ». Months of isolation, in Canberra, his home; the time for reckoning that he had always put off. Then the return to competitions, the relationship with his longtime friend Thanasi Kokkinakis, with whom he won the Australian Open in doubles in February; and the fresh one with Costeen Hatzi, his girlfriend-influencer. Two who have the keys to his heart.
He’ll never be a simple guy, Nick, hardly an example. But god like him plays well. John McEnroe considers him the true (but unspoken) heir to him, the old Australian champions of fair play, like Newcombe and Roche, are a little ashamed of him, a little look at him as the prodigal son he could become. And they try to advise him, to stimulate him, to coax him, to explain how to regain possession of the opportunities he has wasted.
But Nick doesn’t like criticism. “Everyone always wants to have their opinion, but it’s my life, not theirs, that I’m living.” In Indian Wells, a spectator, as often happens, started attacking him, yelling at him from the stands. Nick noticed that Ben Stiller was in the stands and took the opportunity to respond to the provocation: «Can you play tennis well? No. Then why are you talking? Maybe I explain to Ben Stiller – he said pointing to the American actor – how should he act? … ». King of the extreme dialectic, specialist in ‘trash talking’, the weapon with which in many sports, first of all his beloved NBA basketball, a little teases and a little takes his opponents to the limit, trying to get off their nerves. As long as they don’t jump to you first.
“I have reached a phase in my life where I want to put things in order a little,” says Nick, who never seems more determined than in recent weeks, determined to achieve at 27 what he has never been able to grasp. Before. A great result, a bang in a Grand Slam, perhaps here at Wimbledon, on the grass where he feels at home and his tennis, all enchantment and instinct, can shine better.
In a tournament with few bosses and many absences, balanced and indecipherable, so far he is the one who has impressed the most. The American Nakashima takes his turn in the next round. apparently a designated victim on the way to the final. But with Nick, as someone wrote, it’s like with Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never really know what’s going to happen to you.
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