Wimbledon: Nick Kyrgios – balancing act between genius and madness

Nick Kyrgios can play tennis to fall in love with. But also provide the kind of freaks that cause competitors and mentors to shake their heads.

When the first headlines about Nick Kyrgios’ Wimbledon opening game appeared on Tuesday, the thought of the notorious Bad Boy’s next scandalous appearance was not entirely absurd. “Kyrgios makes ball girls cry,” it said. “Kyrgios hurts ball girl.” But it was just a deliberate blurring of the message at the expense of Enfant Terrible.

Because Kyrgios had only hit the young woman so painfully on her upper arm with one of his hammer impacts, measured at 222 km/h, that an outbreak of tears also followed because of the shock. Kyrgios was there to comfort the girl who had been hit. “I probably would have cried as well,” the Australian said later, after his hard-fought starting win against Denis Istomin (Uzbekistan).

Kyrgios, the 23-year-old giant with the imposing figure of an NBA basketball artist, is one of the greatest talents in world tennis. But he is also the craziest, dazzling, most unpredictable figure in the nomadic operation of the thugs – a moody, uncontrolled man who seems to hover between genius and madness forever. Already at a young age, too many bizarre chapters have accumulated in his scandalous chronicle, and the Australian has even been banned by his own professional organization, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).

“If Nick wasn’t his biggest opponent, he’d probably already won a Grand Slam title,” says America’s former eccentric John McEnroe. In Kyrgios and his torn soul McEnroe recognizes himself effortlessly: “He’s not someone who goes through life smoothly”, says BigMac, “he plays against the norm”.

When Kyrgios was sentenced to a forced break in 2016 for a game he had played in Shanghai against the German Mischa Zverev, the ATP also imposed a sports psychological consultation on him. The ban was reduced because of this, but Kyrgios quickly remained true to himself again, falling back into old annoying patterns of behavior. Questionably lost matches, fierce arguments with referees, but also sometimes with colleagues, quickly accompanied his travels in the travelling circus again.

Kyrgios rather acknowledged the criticism with fatalism, he himself does not know “what happens in the next moment”: “Sometimes I feel like playing tennis, and in the next moment I lack any motivation. Most recently he was even punished in the venerable Queens Club for simulating a masturbation scene on the break bench with a drinking bottle. Nothing, really nothing is impossible with Kyrgios.

In his most brilliant moments, Kyrgio plays tennis to fall in love with. Some blows are just insanely good – and sometimes hard on the edge of provocation. Kyrgios recently made a pirouette on the tennis green against the English hero Andy Murray, before sinking a butterball. Sir Andy took it stoically, but most of the players were “reluctant to be made a fool of,” as one European tour player says: “Nick would certainly not win a popularity contest here.

After his recent victory over the Australian in Stuttgart, Roger Federer said that Kyrgios would like him to somehow get the ball rolling in his tennis life: “Nick is one who can inspire the spectators. He plays a tennis I really like.” He himself was also a “wild guy” at a young age, said Federer: “But at some point I said to myself: Stop now, it can’t go on like this. “Or you won’t get anywhere.”

And what about Kyrgios? He would have all the means, all the strokes, the great athleticism to get off the ground at Wimbledon. Then, if he could hold his senses together for two weeks. Against the Uzbek Istomin he hammered 42 aces into the opponent’s field in about three hours, actually a declaration of war to all those who can and want to play here for the title in 2018. But Kyrgios also had his bright moments in other Wimbledon years before chaos broke out the next moment, as he did in 2015 when he described an arbitrator as “dirty scum” – and then rowing back that he meant himself.

At that time he stopped playing completely for a long time in the match against the Frenchman Richard Gasquet and after a club throw into the audience in a duel with the Canadian Milos Raonic only narrowly escaped a disqualification. “The example of Kyrgio also shows how enormous the burden of expectations is,” says England’s former star Tim Henman, “constant life in the spotlight, public observation – not everyone can cope with that.