When Nick Kyrgios left the court prematurely, surrendering his first-round Wimbledon match against Pierre-Hugues Herbert after the recurrence of an old injury, we saw comments with which we’ve become very familiar.
In fact, the comments began a little earlier, with the Frenchman taking the first set to calls suggesting his Australian opponent might be running out of chances, injury or no. The word ‘frustrating’ was thrown around, but that frustration was seemingly beginning to verge on anger towards him.
After reaching the quarter-finals at SW19 as a teenager, the Canberra-born player has matched that result in a Grand Slam just once in 12 attempts. Now 22, he still has time on his side – or at least he ought to – but continued woes at this level mean many will continue to focus on everything but his displays on-court.
Some of Kyrgios’ antics in his career to date have not won him any new fans, but at the same time it sometimes becomes easy to wonder how much the pressure on him is exaggerated by sport’s love for a bad-boy narrative.
“I hate people thinking I'm anything different to them….I’m not at all high maintenance away from the court,” the world number 20 told the Daily Mail last month.
'Some days it's fun to play but sometimes I'd rather be doing something else.”
We have seen that mindset play out at inopportune times, be it his infamous display of alleged tanking in last year’s Shanghai Masters (after which he apologised and served a ban) or last year’s US Open, where he seemed in the zone in the first set against Iliya Marchenko before dropping the next two and retiring hurt.
Some of these moments, in isolation, might be written off as simply what comes with the strain of a professional tennis career with long hours, strenuous training sessions and long-distance travel. The issue, for those critical of Kyrgios, is that many find it tough to view them in isolation.
The idea of an anti-hero is nothing new to tennis: John McEnroe is the obvious and most enduring example, while Ilie Năstase could also lay claim to the title, but both had achieved more than Kyrgios before such a reputation began to follow him around.
Still, in many of these cases the unpredictability for which such players are criticised is the same thing that has brought them attention in the first place.
John Isner and Jack Sock, the two Anglophone players either side of Kyrgios in the men’s rankings, rarely come up in a mainstream conversation that goes beyond their results.
This comes, perhaps, from a place of expecting players to be supreme athletes, almost robotic in their performances and successes or failures – Kyrgios’ failure to conform earns him haters, but there remains a sense that his inability to consistently make use of his talents is what keeps him permanently of conversation.
A dejected @NickKyrgios discusses his unfortunate hip injury #Wimbledon
As tennis itself has evolved, so has the definition of a tennis bad-boy, and there is an argument that Kyrgios’ ability to take on the mantle comes predominantly because he is unlike McEnroe and Nastase in some regards.
If anything, his development is more like footballing enigmas, where the line is blurred between missteps on and off the field of play.
The what-could-have-been arguments around the likes of Paul Gascoigne and Jack Wilshere largely come down to those occasions where off-field behaviour has lingered around discussions of struggles on the pitch. Here, questions are magnified by the extent to which second and third chances are limited by a reckless approach to the game on a par with Kyrgios’ own squandering of opportunities.
Fans, whether deliberately or not, will continue to recycle the same narratives around such players in part out of their own frustrations at said player’s inability to scale the heights once predicted of them, almost infantilising the player and installing themselves as a de facto sports parent.
The problem here is that, in this scenario, all they have is the actualisation (or otherwise) of the internalised dreams and expectations, in lieu of the player’s own wishes. It’s not necessarily that the talent and the willpower don’t align, but rather that the player’s own goals aren’t at the level to inspire the consistency which observers may feel should be a given.
It is in these situations – whether for Kyrgios or for others (in tennis or in other sports) – that anyone attempting to make sense of a player’s struggles will relate it back to the template they have from an earlier generation.
Wilshere is compared to Gascoigne because the recognition that both are immensely talented yet flawed has been allowed to override other complexities in their respective characters, just as Kyrgios is compared to McEnroe because his reaction to misfortune or personal struggles is not the textbook reaction this generation’s fans have come to expect from ‘elite’ players.
There have been no signs of Kyrgios benefiting from being given a sense of importance in the same way that others have been spurred on by immense pressure at a young age. Maybe…just maybe…he will be at his best when no one is talking about him.
