Every hero is situational. I don’t mean that to diminish them. But every hero needs a little dumb luck, a neat alignment of their special qualities and the exigencies of the moment. In 2020, as a pandemic ate the world, tennis needed a hero who checked off a number of key criteria. This hero must not be hell-bent on traveling for and competing in competitive tennis matches during a public health crisis. Indeed, this hero should be able to pledge allegiance, without hesitation, to the couch, the controller, the two dogs. The hero also had to have a platform befitting a top tennis player, but none of the smoothed-over stump-speech civility that usually characterizes those players. The hero must have a dogged commitment to posting online—rudeness is a plus. The hero must have a history of acting somewhat stupidly and thus some desire to look good against the backdrop of peers acting far more flagrantly and consequentially stupid. And so it came to be that Nick Kyrgios was the hero tennis needed in 2020. He’s been looking for an excuse to Stay At Home his whole career, and a novel coronavirus asked him to do exactly that. His long-lived disinterest, in this new context, became sagacity.
So the best season Nick Kyrgios ever had was one in which he played nine matches, tucked away the racquets in February, and spent the rest of the year patrolling the timeline. As tennis players did dumb things, over and over, the voice cutting through the din had a familiar Aussie twang. Tennis’ watchdog did not miss a single misstep. Just review the evidence. When Novak Djokovic organized his ill-fated international exhibition tournament over the summer, Kyrgios called it “boneheaded.” The indelible image from that event is the gaggle of ATP players gyrating shirtless on a stage in a crowded Belgrade nightclub; the event went on to produce a cluster of positive COVID-19 cases, including Djokovic himself. Kyrgios described the bunch as “partying like potato’s [sic] during a global pandemic.” Sascha Zverev, one of the shirtless gyrators in question, issued a boilerplate promise to self-isolate for two weeks after this exposure to confirmed cases...only to be spotted six days later, on the Instagram account of a German fashion designer, partying at a club in the French Riviera. Here again was Kyrgios, filming an extemporaneous riff while driving his car, asking, “How selfish can you be?” Predictably, the tennis players began to close rank. Fellow potato Borna Coric questioned Nick’s qualifications for judging conduct—as if chewing out umpires holds the same moral weight as potentially pumping a dance floor full of coronavirus—and Kyrgios asked about his “peanut of a brain.” When Boris Becker emerged from a broom closet to chastise Nick for daring to criticize other tennis players, he too was met with devastating force (called a “donut”). There are only so many saints canonized for their strongly worded tweets. But for many sane fans, there was catharsis in seeing a tennis player trying to hold his colleagues accountable.
Then came the Australian Open, on his home turf. As hundreds of players and staff descended on Melbourne, they were placed in hotel rooms to quarantine. Many players were dissatisfied by the digs, for reasons ranging from food to mice. Djokovic passed an ambitious list of requests for improved accommodations on to tournament director Craig Tiley; Kyrgios, who read this as a demand for special treatment, called the Serbian a “tool.” While he will admittedly leap at any chance to troll this man—he later walked out into an empty stadium, for a doubles match, imitating Djokovic’s bosomy post-match celebration—Kyrgios has reason to be sensitive here. As a result of some of the most stringent lockdowns in the world, Australia had almost eradicated active COVID-19 cases, and had been living mask-free for months. Kyrgios relishes this hard-won normality, understands the sacrifices required to bring it about, and didn’t like seeing those safety measures questioned by outsiders. With elderly people in his life, and a mother who is sick, he took it personally. That was the through-line as he spoke to me on a jittery Zoom, from the lot behind a coffee wholesaler in his hometown of Canberra. There’s a basketball hoop there. He likes to go there to clear his head. On that particular day it was a “stinking hot” 40 degrees, per his agent, and Nick was in the thick of that annual flurry of pre-Open press that does not seem to scale up or down with his world ranking. Nobody frets about whether you’re seeded this year so long as you’re one of the only living humans who can both give an entertaining quote and give Rafa a scare.