Nick Krygios, pundit? King Kyrgios: the player who’s been criticized and psychoanalyzed more than anyone else on the ATP Tour today; who’s become almost the dictionary definition of the “divisive tennis star”; whose career has been defined as much by his battles with the media as the men’s Top 10. The villain, the bad boy, the ingrate, the brat. To imagine him putting aside a decade of beef to step behind the mic and assume the honeyed role of the tennis analyst seems faintly incongruous. Yet here he is, in half-profile from his spot on the Tennis Channel set, hands in pockets, relaxed, laughing and joking with Brett Haber and Jim Courier like an old media pro. He’s wearing a dark jacket and a lilac T-shirt. The match comments are delivered with fluent authority. The cadence of panel chat comes easily to him: like a good baseliner, he knows when to step in and when to stay back. His hair looks nice. It turns out Kyrgios is pretty much the same on set as he is on court: rattlingly opinionated, and endlessly entertaining. Nick Kyrgios, pundit: why not?
Alone with Novak Djokovic, the Australian star is the player that every tennis fan today must have an opinion on. I’ll state mine up front: I love the guy. Yes, he’s sometimes obnoxious on court (no more so than many others at the top of tennis, mind you), and his digs against other players can cut deep. But whether he’s cruising or crashing, the man is compulsively watchable. He has opinions, and – unlike many other players on tour today – the courage to express them. He coaches himself, which makes him an exceptionally shrewd observer of the sport. Most importantly, he has a celestial gift for hitting a small fluorescent ball around a court.
Knee and wrist injuries have kept him on the sidelines for much of this year but we all remember Kyrgios’s 2022, when the man who thought his window had shut for good suddenly, thrillingly found the form of his career. He took the first set off Djokovic in the Wimbledon final and fileted Daniil Medvedev at Flushing Meadows with the finesse of a master sushi chef. A player who began his career as a mercurial purveyor of tweeners and trick shots has now matured into something like the complete package. His authority comes not only from that pinpoint rifle of a serve but from the exotic variety of moves he can pull from any position on court: the split step, the drop volley, the slap forehand, the backhand bunt. He’s the only player on tour today with the ability to make the mundane magnificent; among the many aesthetic peaks of his golden 2022, he ludicrously made the mid-court dink into an offensive weapon. Force of character is as much the key to his late-career success as technical prowess, a force that’s impossible to separate from Kyrgios’s combustibility, his continuous flirtation with the darkness: he’s the Caravaggio of the ATP Tour, a tennis tenebrist who throws blinding thunderbolts across court as the storm of his personality rumbles ever forward. The intelligence and bravado, that sense of a million perspectives yearning to break free, are not simply intangibles of the Nick Kyrgios Experience, but somehow manifest in his physical being too, in the hunched roll of his walk, that sacerdotal prowl.
All of which should, theoretically, make him an ideal candidate to step on set and call some matches. And yet. I still had some apprehension about Kyrgios paunching himself into the pundit’s chair – especially on the Tennis Channel, a smugly clubby, fake-happy, tennis-dad kind of network, which seems an odd fit for Kyrgios with his who-cares who-cares derision and splenetic charm. How wrong I was to doubt him.
Kyrgios, called up as a late addition to the commentary roster for the end-of-season ATP Finals in Turin, has been incisive and funny in equal measure, all while doing nothing to hide his preference for players who “step in” and are prepared to take some risks. In Wednesday’s match between Medvedev and Alexander Zverev, that was Zverev, while in Thursday’s battle of the rising stars, it was Jannik Sinner over Holger Rune: “Aggressive type tennis gets rewarded on fast courts. I want to see bang-bang tennis, one-two.” Zverev lost and Sinner won – a perfectly symmetrical result for the start of Kyrgios’s career on camera.
Surprisingly, the man billed by the Tennis Channel as “the human highlights reel” has also done his fair share of filler, enlivening the dead air with a “Here we go, two break points for Zverev” here and a “He needs some first serves here” there. He’s dropped pleasing bits of player lingo into his commentary: “short replies” for short returns, encouraging Rune to “finish the set off with good habits” after the Dane got toweled in the opening stanza against Sinner. He’s had a solidly comic gaffe: asking viewers to “look at people that have had sex against Medvedev” before swallowing hard and quickly correcting to “success”. And he’s proved adept at coming up with interesting ways to say “that was a good shot”, which is after all what a lot of commentary involves. Here was his call after a superb lunging cross-court backhand from Sinner: “Incredible. Ridiculous. How. Question marks.”
Most illuminating of all has been the insight that Kyrgios has offered into his own approach to facing the sport’s best players. We’ve learned that Medvedev’s serve can sometimes be picked because he tends to throw the ball out to the right too much; that Kyrgios often “lies” with his ball toss (“One of my strengths is that I can hit all the serves off different ball tosses, you gotta keep people guessing”); that he does not warm up before matches; that he was virtually coaching Rune for six months a few years ago after the young Dane slid into his DMs to ask for advice. Asked whether he’d rather be loved or genuine, Kyrgios immediately replied: “Genuine. I don’t mind being the villain – I’ve definitely experienced stadiums where not one person’s been going for me, it’s a great feeling. You find some really dark energy when the whole stadium doesn’t want you to win, those are some of the best moments.”
Candor of this variety has been a feature of this year for Kyrgios, who’s endured a reckoning of sorts. He’s spent much of the season in rehab for his various injuries, but still consistently managed to make headlines. He admitted shoving his ex-girlfriend but in February the assault charge he was given over the incident was dismissed; Kyrgios later issued a public apology for his actions. In May he helped Canberra police catch the man who stole a Tesla from his mother at gunpoint. Over the summer he revealed that he contemplated suicide after losing to Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2019, part of a string of commendably forthright revelations about his struggles with drinking and self-harm: “I ended up in a psych ward in London to figure out my problems. I was drinking, abusing drugs, lost my relationship with my family, pushed all my close friends away. You could tell I was hurting.” That emotion and openness are among Kyrgios’s great character assets; his readiness to show vulnerability marks him out as a rare specimen among modern athletes, who are almost universally controlled and media managed to the point of robotic tedium.
Kyrgios has long had a fractious relationship with Australia’s media and tennis establishment – partly because of his contempt for authority but also, I sense, because he doesn’t fit the model of the Anglo-Celtic “good boy” that has been Australian tennis’s traditional pinup. He’s no Lew Hoad, no Pat Rafter, no Ken “Muscles” Rosewall; he’s not even a Lleyton Hewitt. He’s a Greek-Malaysian kid from Canberra who’s fanatically committed to the Boston Celtics, simulates sex acts on court, and loves his mum. When I was a child my Greek-Cypriot grandmother used to call anyone monkeying about and trying to be funny “Karagiozis”, and I see something of that folkloric clown in Kyrgios, in his lust for provocation and comedy. Perhaps the only country that has the comfort with unruly complexity to truly accept him for who he is, is America. On the basis of his stint on set this week, all shrugs and gossip and nonchalant conversational lobs about his beloved Celtics, that certainly seems to be the case.
If there’s news that emerged from Kyrgios’s time behind the mic, it’s that he plans to retire in one or two years: “Kygs has got about a year or two left, then I can sit back and watch these young bucks go at it,” he said during the Sinner-Rune encounter, while noting that he may still seek Djokovic’s advice on “alien longevity stuff”. This isn’t exactly news, since Kyrgios has set out the retirement plan before: last year he told an Instagram Q&A that once he passes 30, he’ll “probably go to my house in the Bahamas and just sit and do nothing”.
In the era of the Big Three we’re used to players carrying on into early middle age, but until Roger Federer came along, 30 was generally seen as the natural end point of a top tennis player’s time among the pros. Björn Borg quit at 26; Marat Safin blootered his career into the tram lines after he turned 29; Pete Sampras hung up the baggy shorts at 32. Kyrgios retiring once he passes 30 would be a reversion to the historical norm. But for anyone who loves tennis it would be a shame. The greatest compliment I can pay the man’s punditry is that it immediately made me want to watch him play again. Kyrgios the commentator, no matter how casually commanding, will never match Kyrgios the player, this volatile maestro of the lines. Tennis after Kygs will be more polite, more tasteful, perhaps even more graceful. But it will be far less interesting.
