Nick Kyrgios and the fury of watching wasted greatness

It is extremely difficult to watch Nick Kyrgios quit a tennis match and not feel something.

Rage, maybe, is what comes to you. Or disappointment. Perhaps, for the more uncharitable of us, schadenfreude.

But you have to feel something watching someone this good continually crash out of tournaments early, or play as if he’s late for an orthodontist appointment. At times it’s as if Kyrgios has to force himself to play poorly, so skilled, practiced, and perfectly built he is to play tennis. Just out of muscle memory he’ll smash a 130-mph serve on the line, then purposefully junk up his form and heave over two hideous ones to double fault on the very next point. You could spend a lifetime playing this game and never hit a serve as beautiful as the one Kyrgios goes out of his way to fuck up.

Kyrgios did it again, for the umpteenth time, on Wednesday, in a match against his countryman John Millman at the US Open. After losing the first set 3-6, Kyrgios came back and won the second easily, 6-1. Then, in a third set he lost 4-6, he started rubbing his shoulder, had the ballboy stretch him out, received a code violation for dropping a hard F-bomb in earshot of a linesman, argued it with the chair umpire, then lost a final set 1-6 in which at times he appeared to be smacking the ball out of bounds in order to get out of there as quickly as possible.

For fans of tennis, it was another Kyrgios Moment. If you follow the game at all you will probably have read about these, in any number of the illuminating profiles or essays about the 22-year-old Australian. The locations of these moments change, and each has a different flavor, but in essence they are all the same: The brilliant young player exits a tournament early in a match most thought he would win. Also he’ll yell at someone, often using imaginative expletives, about something.

The shoulder discomfort complicates the moment this time, of course, and it’s entirely possible that Kyrgios hurt himself and was doing his best to get off the court quickly to preserve his body.

After the match, Kyrgios said as much. He spoke about the injury, his disappointment, and closed, in an almost heartbreaking moment, by saying, “I keep letting people down. I don’t know.”

This is part of what’s so difficult about trying to follow Kyrgios’ career. His forthright answers about his own struggles with motivation, about the loneliness of top-flight tennis, about disappointing the fans who love him, they are all so completely at odds with the player you watch on the court.

For less empathetic fans — and there are plenty — that fourth and final set was an all-too-typical showing from Kyrgios, a player who looks as if he were constructed in a laboratory to play tennis. Listed at 6’4 and 187 pounds, Kyrgios is broad shouldered but quick, with the type of hand-eye coordination only a few people alive have ever been blessed to be born with.

So Adonis-like is he, it’s tempting to just paint Kyrgios as a physical freak, someone who was gifted this game. That’s not right, though. No one is born being able to return a 120-mph serve, or hit a cross-court backhand to within an inch, both things Kyrgios can do with regularity, if he’s in the mood. Kyrgios trained, a lot, hours and hours, more time than you or I could ever probably fathom, to get to where he is.

Which, of course, makes it all the more flabbergasting watching him walk away from a US Open like he did on Wednesday.

The match will spark the usual debate on Kyrgios. Whether or not he is wasting his talent. If he’s throwing it all away. Kyrgios’ play drives many sportswriters nuts, as many of them (myself included) harbor deep-down fantasies about what it would have been like if we’d been able to play a sport at the top level. You know, if we’d only had the talent that Kyrgios seems so set on squandering.

(The match on Wednesday had my bud Dan Wolken arguing about what the meaning of “talent” even is. ... Do you see what this guy is doing to us?)

There will be a line drawn in the sand on Kyrgios, on how we’re all supposed to feel about this. If you’re an optimist, you’ll say that Kyrgios doesn’t owe the game of tennis anything, that he’s honest with media, and trying his best, and was injured this time, just as he was injured for the last five Grand Slams, and if this is how he wants to play, then that’s fine. If you skew more cynical, you’ll argue that Kyrgios sure seems to behave horribly an awful lot for someone who is supposedly trying his best, and has shown a troubling pattern of quitting on matches, injured or not.

I’m not entirely sure where I fall. I guess I am angry. It is maddening to watch Kyrgios at times, though for me it’s not because he owes himself, or the game of tennis, anything. My anger is purely for a selfish reason: I like watching beautiful tennis. And Kyrgios seems determined to make sure that, at least when his mood turns, I am not able to do that.