The tennis player is one of the most unpredictable athletes in the world, but he can always be relied on for dramaThe main interview room in the bowels of Arthur Ashe Stadium was as packed with reporters and cameramen as you’ll find it after a second-round match on an otherwise routine Thursday afternoon during the first week of the US Open. The occasion was an audience with Nick Kyrgios, the mercurial Australian star who an hour earlier had seen off the Frenchman Pierre-Hugues Herbert amid sweltering heat and humidity on the fully exposed Court 17, where after what appeared to be a public unravelling was curtailed by an unusual intervention from the chair umpire Mohamed Lahyani, who descended from his...
The tanking of Bernard Tomic and the retirement of Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon has produced scornful reproach but empathy ought to be the reaction when young people reveal their vulnerability in publicWhen Bernard Tomic, grappling for an elusive sense of purpose in whatever remains of his professional life, slunk out of Wimbledon on day two and later admitted his love of tennis is being drowned by pernicious feelings of ennui, the mind went back to the first time he saw Novak Djokovic standing on the opposite side of the net.The memories of that sun-kissed Centre Court afternoon in 2011 should induce fond nostalgia. At best, however, they are no more than bittersweet and are mostly tinged with the kind of...
Australian was two sets up and coasting against the Italian veteran but another meltdown on court has left him searching for answersIn answer to the first question – which was: what the hell can you do to retrieve a situation like this other than offer an earnest, pitch‑perfect mea culpa? – Nick Kyrgios had a quite predictable, wordless answer before he had sat down at his press conference on Wednesday. He rocked his head back and laughed self‑deprecatingly as a door swung open and he walked into the room.He is used to that part, and delivered a media performance to rival his fascinating on-court meltdown against the Italian veteran Andreas Seppi, from whom he took two brisk sets before shambling...
The Australian’s lack of respect for his sport has rightly been clamped down upon, and while he is the only one to blame it would still be a shame if he was lost to the gameNow that the authorities have cracked down on his persistent poor behaviour, the question for Nick Kyrgios to answer – and hopefully it is one that he will be asking himself during his unexpected sabbatical – is whether he owes it to himself to explore the outer reaches of his vast talent. In the end, it is not about you, me or the paying punters he so disrespected with his shameful exhibition of indolence against Mischa Zverev in Shanghai last week, the sheer egregiousness of which compelled...