Boxing great Anthony Joshua came to appreciate the passion Kyrgios shows on the court after watching him at Wimbledon and experiencing similar anger.
Joshua admitted that he's not a huge tennis fan but he did follow Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon as there was so much media attention around it. The British boxer found Kyrgios a bit 'crazy' to begin with but understood his passion when he experienced similar emotions after his loss to Usyk:
“I don’t think people underestimate it, what I’ve come to figure in life is if you’ve never experienced it, you can’t understand it. So for those who’ve never experienced it, I don’t think it’s that they underestimate it, they just won’t understand it. We were talking about tennis on the way here and Kyrgios, I’m not a big tennis fan but I watched him at Wimbledon. Amazing character, I like his character but I thought ‘rah, this guy’s a bit crazy’."
Joshua continued:
"Now I can understand it because I’ve experienced it, that anger and emotion of losing. But at the time when I watched him at Wimbledon before my fight, I underestimated it. I was like, ‘Why is he acting like that? It’s only a game of tennis, it will come again.’ So it’s not underestimating it, I said until you love something so much that it can make you do crazy things, you probably wouldn’t understand.”