Nick Kyrgios ‘rattles top tennis players’ but also ‘does a lot of good’ and brings fresh interest to the sport, according to fellow Australian Max Purcell.
Kyrgios produced his best Grand Slam run to date at Wimbledon 2022, finishing as runner-up to Novak Djokovic after an incident-packed final which saw him face jeers for a controversial underarm serve and getting a ‘drunk’ heckling fan ejected.
His path to the Championship match also had various flashpoints, such as when he called a line judge a ‘snitch’ and when World No.4 Stefanos Tsitsipas labelled Kyrgios an ‘evil bully’ following a tense third-round match between the players.
Purcell, who won the Wimbledon men’s doubles title alongside Matthew Ebden this year, knows Kyrgios well having faced him in the 2022 Australian Open doubles final, and defended his compatriot when quizzed about his notorious antics.
Purcell also pointed towards his charity work through the NK Foundation, an organisation set up by Kyrgios to allow young people from underprivileged backgrounds to play sports such as tennis and allow them to have safe spaces.
"I’m always going to be watching when Nick Kyrgios is playing, especially if he’s playing someone at the top," Purcell told Metro Sport. "Nick’s going to rattle the guys at the top a lot.
"For a guy who isn’t at the top of the sport, and to still have his own charity… all the comments he gets for not being the greatest person, he does a lot of good. He brings more interest to tennis and that’s what we need. [His on-court behavior is] not great, but he’s not doing it for no reason.
"There are a lot of screw ups from the officials. He’s not just blowing up at them because they’re doing nothing wrong. A lot of the time there’s a valid reason for it. Maybe not to the extent he goes to, but like I said he brings interest to the sport.
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"If he blows up, it gets in the media and more people want to see what happens next. He just does himself. He doesn’t care what people think. Which is fine, there’s a lot of boring interviews out there.
"It’s nice listening to Nick’s honesty. There needs to be more of that in tennis. The way he answers questions is a lot more interesting."
Growing up in a household where soccer was king, my earliest memories are filled with chants from packed stadiums and the rhythm of a ball being passed across neighborhood streets. But somewhere along the way, the quiet elegance and raw emotion of tennis pulled me in. What began as a curiosity became a lifelong passion; not just for the sport itself, but for the stories it tells: of grit, of heartbreak, of improbable comebacks and human resilience.
As a tennis writer, I bring the observational lens of someone who didn’t grow up in the sport, but fell in love with it as an outsider; a perspective that lets me see both its technical beauty and its emotional depth. Over the years working with TennisUpToDate, I’ve had the privilege of reaching more than 3.5 million readers worldwide, with one of my features ranking among the site’s top three articles.
With a background in storytelling and a creative mind always searching for meaning beyond the scoreboard, I aim to craft narratives that go deeper than results and rankings. Whether it’s a rising star breaking through or a veteran fighting off Father Time, I try to capture the heartbeat behind the headlines.
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