Nick Kyrgios Is Coming for Tennis

Update: On Monday, just 24 hours ahead his first-round match, Nick Kyrgios withdrew from the Australian OpenA knee injury.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Nick Kyrgios is finally home.

He is now in Australia with his family and in the country he longs to return to after all the months of being away from home, living in a suitcase while he played professional tennis.

He trained in Sydney for months while soaking up the sun. But he also squeezed in a bit of time, though 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 also sleep in the old room where he kept his beloved collection of basketball shoes. It is located next to the room that houses hundreds of his trophies, plaques, and dozens more of his smashed rackets. The macaw of his father is kept in an aviary at the back. Mornings are spent on 12-kilometer walks up Mount Majura with his father, his golden retriever Prince, and Quincy the miniature Dachshund.

He was a tennis prodigy who hit the courts, lifted weights, played with other kids, and gave a lot of swag to the Lyneham children where he began his career. 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.

Everything is now completely 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.

No one in the sport is as popular as Kyrgios anymore, regardless of how much the tennis establishment may like it. His doubles matches are packed and loud. As the Australian Open begins, Kyrgios is one of the favourites to face Novak Djokovic, the nine-time champion. This may be the ultimate double-edged blade. This level of expectation and pressure has been the bane of Kyrgios’ soul before. His self-destructive psyche explodes at crucial moments, creating his irresistible brand of 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.”

All of his recent success and fame, it seems that so much is riding on Kyrgios. The game’s leaders see him as the rare player who can reach a new and younger audience. As Kyrgios’ signature tricks shots through the legs, behind the back and chest win him points, fans raise their glasses and bump their chests. When they see him, they wear basketball jerseys. They turn their matches into a party at the U.F.C. bout.

“He brings something different,” said Andrea Gaudenzi, a former pro who is now the chairman of the A.T.P. Tour, which is the men’s professional circuit.

Ken Solomon, chairman and chief executive 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 1. The premiere episode was almost solely about Kyrgios’s Twitter win lap.

Tennis Australia announced that Kyrgios will play Djokovic in a charity show Friday night. In just 58 minutes, all tickets were gone.

Three hours before the match, the best client of a top luxury hotel chain he knew shook hands with him during a table tennis promotion. He sat in silence in a hallway before the event began, feeling the stress of the future. The star entertainer appeared moments later, as he held a racket at a packed rooftop bar.

There is a lot at stake when Kyrgios is used as a pitchman. 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.

Also, there is the possibility of domestic violence.

Kyrgios will be appearing in Canberra court in February to face a common assault charge stemming out of an altercation in December 2021 with his ex-girlfriend Chiara Passari. Since the incident became public in July, Kyrgios declined to talk about it.

Common assault is the least serious form of assault in Australia. However, it means the victim was subject to immediate, illegal violence or the threat thereof. Kyrgios’s lawyers have said they will mount a defense focused on mental illness, citing his history of depression and substance abuse, struggles Kyrgios has said will always be with him but that he now has under control. The court could decide to impose treatment plans if it accepts the defense and dismisses case. The maximum penalty for common assault is two years’ imprisonment.

The incident occurred during the first weeks of Kyrgios’s relationship with his now constant companion, Costeen Hatzi, whom he met online. After years of mental turmoil and ambivalence, he had just committed himself to tennis again. He was not only rich and famous, but also lonely from the endless travel and lonely battles on court. This tortured his mind.

When he lost matches, or broke rackets, or berated officials of tennis, the harsh criticism and racist comments he received triggered fond memories of those years. He was an overweight boy, with dark skin and modest income, in an overwhelmingly white country, and was bullied despite or because of his tennis talent.

Goran Ivanisevic, the Wimbledon champion who coaches Djokovic, has called Kyrgios a “tennis genius.” Kyrgios’s father, Giorgos, first noticed that skill when Kyrgios was a toddler hitting a ball hanging on a string from a metal pole. He never missed. Soon Kyrgios was learning the sport on dilapidated courts near his parents’ home in Canberra. His father, a Greek-born house painter, would play a few balls after work.

“Still wears the same overalls he walked off the boat in,” Kyrgios said of his father, who still paints houses. “He must have been exhausted.”

Norlaila, his mother from Malaysia, was a software engineer at health care organizations. She drove for hours to take him and his brother to tournaments. They stayed in backpacker hostels, and they tried to get $20 to pay for dinner at a cheap Indian restaurant in the country.

His parents were not very knowledgeable about tennis. Tennis Australia and his regional tennis authority filled in the gaps. Kyrgios won his breakthrough victory at 19 when he defeated Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon 2014.

It almost cost him everything. Kyrgios was convinced that he would solve all his problems by himself after the win and all the expectations that it created. 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 speak openly about his fears, insecurities, and the fragility within his mind to his closest friends 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.”

He was also tired of disappointing himself and others. Before last year’s Australian Open, he embarked on the kind of solid six-week training block he had not done in years. He played for 90 minutes with the best opponents each day, and he also used the weight room. He spent at least two hours per week playing full-court basketball with top Australian players to improve his conditioning.

When asked for a report on his hoops games, he replied as follows:

“Loves shooting mid-rangers.” “Can shoot a three-ball pretty good.” “Play like a wing.” “In the corner.” “Come off picks.” “Pretty versatile.” “Can guard a big.” “Pretty physical.” “Like Tobias Harris in his prime.”

He also ate healthier and focused more on rest than drinking.

He had already won his first Grand Slam doubles title with Thanasi Kokokinakis, his childhood friend and countryman. After Wimbledon, he opted for a healthier lifestyle and was once pulled from a pub at four o’clock in the morning to watch the match. But this time his superb tennis didn’t come with many confrontations with chair umpires. There was also a heated verbal-sparring battle with Stefanos Tsitsipas during which Tsitsipas tried hitting Kyrgios with the ball.

Djokovic beat him in the final, but he was still disciplined through the U.S. Open. In the fourth round, he defeated Daniil Medvedev, the top seed and the defending champion. He then lost to Karen Khachanov, from Russia, in the quarterfinals. He was tired from the season as well as from playing at night for broadcasters to maximize their television audience. He caught his first flight home and only played one singles tournament.

Roman Safiullin (an unheralded Russian) will be Kyrgios’ opponent in round one on Tuesday.

What’s the next step?

Tennis is like no other sport. The soul. Kyrgios is aware that he won’t pursue the game with the same level of clinical efficiency and emotional discipline as Nadal or Djokovic. He plans to break and throw 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.

He might be able to do this, and he may find some peace on the court.

“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.”

This has been Kyrgios’ most difficult task.