The real Nick Kyrgios – by his closest family

There is Australian weather – and then there is Canberra weather. One midwinter’s morning, about two decades ago, was not atypical: a little over freezing.

When a young boy arrived for his tennis lesson, he could not hold onto his racket. Rather than call the lesson off, the boy’s father hatched a plan. He filled up a tub, like a cooler box, with hot water. The boy then put his hands in the box. Now, a young Nick Kyrgios could grip his racket.

“I have no idea how Nick used to train in the morning,” Kyrgios’s mother Nill recalls. Unless it was raining, “they would be out there,” playing 12 months a year. She laughs about a picture of Christos, Nick’s older brother, “trying to train at 7am – he can't move his legs because it's so cold.”

“You've got to be tough to come out of Canberra playing tennis,” Christos tells Telegraph Sport. “I have memories of getting up early before school and trying to play and you can't feel your hands or your fingers.”

Some parents readily cancelled lessons if conditions were too cold or too slippery. But the Kyrgios parents were “adamant that we don't miss a session,” recalls Andrew Bulley, who coached Nick every week from the age of four to 14.

This weekend, Nill and George, Nick’s parents, will drive from Canberra to Melbourne with his dogs in tow: a trip that the family used to do every year, before the pandemic.

When Nick Kyrgios plays his opening match at the Australian Open on Monday, he will do so as one of the world’s most talked-about athletes. His tennis has been reinvigorated in the past year; he is the fourth favourite for the men’s singles title. But, five days after the Australian Open final, Kyrgios is due in court to face a common assault charge by his ex-girlfriend, over an alleged incident in January 2021. (Kyrgios is seeking to have the charge dismissed on mental health grounds.)

‘The kids will tell you that I was very strict’

At the start of 2023, Nick spent five days in the family house in Watson, a suburb in north Canberra. His parents have lived here for 35 years. They had three children: Christos, born in 1987; Halimah, born in 1989; and the baby of the family Nick, born in 1995.

“Canberra is his home – he feels safe,” says Nill, speaking half an hour after Nick has left for Melbourne. “When Christos and Nick are here, we just laugh, we joke.”

Nick returns home as often as his schedule allows. In Canberra, Kyrgios can often be glimpsed walking his dogs King and Quincy. Occasionally, he also returns to hit at the Lyneham Tennis Centre, where he used to cycle 15 minutes to play, often watched by his grandmother. After she died in 2014, Nick made a donation to build ‘Nanna’s Hut’, a small gazebo where spectators can watch in the shade at Lyneham.

To understand the dynamics that shaped Nick’s childhood, it is necessary to go back a generation. George was seven when he emigrated from Georgani, on the Greek mainland, to Australia; Nill was eight when she moved from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Queanbeyan in New South Wales.

“That was traumatic for me – I copped a lot of racism,” she recalls. “I can remember sitting on a bench wishing that someone would ask me to play. Those memories are very painful – to be isolated, to be called whatever names people call someone with dark skin.”

Nill believes that her childhood informed her parenting in two ways. First, “I protect them, I’m mother hen.”

Second, she wanted to give her children the chances that she had lacked. “I was very bossy – because when I grew up I had nothing.” Both parents – Nill as a software engineer, George as a house painter – worked gruelling hours to provide for their children.

“My teeth are terrible so I vowed that the kids would never have bad teeth. So I scraped and scraped and we paid $100 a month to get their braces for months and months. I can still remember the last payment.

“If you’re not going to do it properly, don’t do it at all – forget about it… I was very strict, I was very tough on the kids. I wanted a lot from them.”

In return, “the only thing that mum and dad expected from us is that you turn up and you give 100 per cent,” Christos remembers. “Every instance that our parents pushed us was simply out of love and giving us an opportunity that they knew we would appreciate in the future.”

For Nick, these opportunities extended way beyond sport. When he was five, Nill took Nick to watch his sister, Halimah, doing a jazz class. “I go, well this is a waste of time,” Nill recalls. “I enrolled him in a dance class. At the end of the year he had to do a concert and he was the only boy on stage. I was so proud of him, he knew the steps.”

‘His tennis IQ is off the charts’

As a baby, “Nick enjoyed being on court watching Christos, picking up balls,” Nill recalls. “We just gave him a racket one day.”

Aged four, Nick started having lessons. Bulley swiftly realised that it made no sense for Nick to play with children his age. As well as an hour – later, two – a week of private lessons, Nick also had a group session with older children every week.

“Once he got it, he got it pretty fast,” Bulley recalls. “He could adapt quickly, and then disregard things that weren’t working… His tennis IQ is off the charts.”

Yet coaching Nick was challenging too. Doing drills, he was easily “bored”: “Scoring was a big thing. You had to score.”

Players almost invariably look more impressive when they are in training – rather than in matches, when they tense up. Nick was different. “Most people can train well and then find it hard to find that competitive mindset. He didn’t shy away, he didn’t dial back.”

Nick needed these qualities playing against Christos, a good enough player to win local underage tournaments. Big brother did not go easy on little brother; in fact, big brother cheated. “I called balls out that were in to try and win,” Christos admits.

Like many tennis players, Nick is an example of the little sibling effect: shaped by the challenge of playing with their older siblings, younger children ultimately tend to be better athletes. Aged 12, Nick defeated Christos – who was 20 – for the first time. When he wasn’t playing with Christos, Nick spent hours on Saturday and Sunday playing with a pair of brothers, both a little older, who came to Canberra from a country town most weekends.

Yet, while he was a fine junior player, Nick – perhaps because he was chubby and is asthmatic – was not considered a tennis prodigy. Bulley believed that another boy he coached, a little older than Nick, was more likely to turn professional.

“He's always been considered the kid that was not going to make it or had issues,” Christos reflects. “He loves to go out there and prove people wrong.”

One public holiday, when he was a boy, Nick told his parents “I want to hit today”. But when the three arrived at the courts, they were shut. “Just to get Nick to have a hit we all crawled under this fence to get to the other side,” Nill recalls. “I had grass marks all over my T-shirt.”

‘He’d pick basketball every time’

Nick’s competitive instincts were not harnessed to tennis alone. He was a fine swimmer; he quit aged 13 because he no longer enjoyed it. But his real sporting love was neither swimming nor tennis.

As a boy, Nick played pick-up basketball games, and represented his school and the Australian Capital Territory youth teams. He played six or seven times a week; at home, he watched the NBA, supporting the Boston Celtics, and played the NBA Live Playstation game. Bulley often began tennis lessons by asking about Nick’s basketball.

“I love the game. I love the sound of the basketball court,” Kyrgios told The New Yorker in 2017. “I love the team environment.”

Unlike many parents of promising tennis players that Bulley has coached, George and Nill did not rush Nick to specialise. But when Nick was 14, he received the offer of a lifetime: five days of free coaching a week from Tennis Australia in their high performance academy in Canberra. For Nick and his family, this was a hinge point.

“I was all for basketball and I made the decision to play tennis,” Nick later said. “I got pushed by my parents and to this day I can still say I don’t love the sport.”

Nill’s mind sometimes drifts back to the day when the family decided that Nick should focus on tennis. “It was a discussion to say ‘Ok Nick, you’re good at both but at the moment, you’re being torn apart. You’ve got school, you’ve got basketball, you got tennis, okay, now, you can’t do everything. Let’s give tennis the full focus for three years. And if you don’t like it or we’re not getting anywhere, then you revert back to your basketball.’ So we all agreed. But what we didn't realise is once you start the journey you can't get off.”

Nick’s height, 6ft 4in, is three inches shorter than the average in America’s National Basketball Association. And so while his temperament and personality was better-suited to the team sport, his skills and physique were better-suited to the individual pursuit. “If you could say to him, would you have rather been as suited as you are to tennis talent and physically in basketball, and you could pick a path, he’d pick basketball every time,” reflects Christos.

With his NBA dream gone, from the age if 14 Nick had to content himself with casual games; he still plays as much as possible in between tennis tournaments. “He watches basketball every day – it’s his passion, it’s his let-out, it’s his medication,” Nill says. “If I had my time over I may try to figure out how to get him into basketball.” 

Just this week Kyrgios used his tennis earnings to invest in his true love, buying a stake in an Australian basketball team.

‘Tennis became more like a job’

After joining the Tennis Australia academy, Nick’s rise continued. Aged 16, he got a full scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport in Melbourne; to retain an element of normal home life, Nill arranged for him to live with a family friend rather than share a flat with other scholars.

Without the release that basketball provided, Nick’s relationship with tennis changed. Now, it was something that he had to do. “It does become more like a job,” Christos reflects. “You get up, you go to the academy, and then you’re doing whatever the academy is telling you.”

Nick had always been prone to occasional outbursts on court; his mum says that he gets the temper from her. “He’s been emotional ever since he was a child,” Nill says. “He cries a lot, you can tell that he’s gonna start crying when his lips quiver.

“He needs to shout at someone because he needs to get it out. Sometimes that little bit of racket-throwing wakes him up.”

Christos believes that Nick would have been happier had the family ensured that he could still play some basketball. “Basketball being taken away completely could have contributed to not feeling 100 per cent happy all the time.”

As Nick moved towards becoming a professional, his coaching also changed – becoming more didactic, rather than the fluid style that Bulley recognised suited Kyrgios best.

“This is not a criticism of the coach, but it was very much just cross-court cross-court, line – it was very, like, systematic,” Bulley reflects. “There wasn’t quite as much experimentation, freedom.”

“He always seemed to thrive more in environments where it is an element of a mate – someone that you respect, and you turn up for them as well rather than have someone sitting above barking orders,” Christos explains. “You’ve got to put in the work sure. But if you're not enjoying the journey and turning up then you’re not going to get the best out of yourself doing it anyway.”

In 2014, Kyrgios defeated Rafael Nadal as he reached the quarter-finals round of Wimbledon aged 19; his life changed forever. Back in Canberra, Bulley went to the Kyrgios family house to congratulate Nick. When one of his friends asked who he was, Nick said “this is Andrew, it’s my coach.” The friend said that he thought someone else was Nick’s coach. Nick said “this is the coach,” pointing at Bulley.

Soon after, Nick tried to hire Bulley to be his coach. Tennis Australia said that, if Nick was to continue receiving funding, he needed to use one of their coaches. “I said, ‘Nick, We still need Tennis Australia's financial support’,’” Nill recalls. “The relationship between Tennis Australia and us was always a little bit bumpy.”

‘I just sit there and cry and think what have I done?’

To see some athletes at work is to see someone wearing a mask. With Kyrgios, it is different. Problems in his personal life do not dissipate when he picks up a tennis racket.

“When stuff’s going wrong on the court, you can pretty much guarantee that something's not right off it,” Christos reflects. “He wears his heart on his sleeve.”

As the stakes have increased, so has Nick’s penchant for outbursts on court. For everything from breaking rackets, swearing to himself – and at the umpire – spitting at an abusive fan and shouting obscenities at opponents, Kyrgios has been fined over £450,000 over his professional career, making him comfortably the most-fined player in tennis history. “He's not a bad guy, he just becomes a devil when he enters the court,” Stefanos Tsitsipas, who Kyrgios defeated in a tempestuous match at Wimbledon last year, said on the new Netflix documentary Break Point.

All the while, Nick’s reputation has wildly oscillated. The prodigy became a great wasted talent, ruining his gifts through a lack of dedication. And then, when he reached last year’s Wimbledon final, public opinion shifted once again, hailing Kyrgios for battling through his troubles.

In 2015, Australian Olympic swimming champion Dawn Fraser said that Kyrgios should “go back to where their fathers or their parents came from”. Kyrgios has often received racial abuse by spectators, including during a match against Andy Murray last year. “When people start using those words go back to where you came from – that’s really hurtful,” Nill says, fighting back tears. “I can’t bear to think that people have suffered.”

Every day on Twitter, Kyrgios gets direct messages saying “hope your family gets cancer and dies – this sort of thing,” Christos says. Last year, when he was putting his rackets into the back of a car in Sydney, a person in the street yelled at Kyrgios, “your brother’s got f------ cancer.” (Christos has alopecia.)

Kyrgios has said that “There are times when I hate this sport.” Rather than the act of hitting a ball with a racket, his frustrations have been with the remorseless grind. “A full schedule doesn't work for him,” Christos says. “He needs to be fresh mentally, physically.” As Christos notes, a full NBA season – including the play-offs – is over within eight months; the tennis tour runs for 11 months.

Nill remembers once watching him at an event in Washington. “He said ‘I just want to go home’. I looked at him and my heart broke.”

In 2019, Kyrgios’s struggles with mental health and depression were such that he had suicidal thoughts and seriously considered quitting tennis altogether. “There's been chats that he’s had with me and my parents where he's like, ‘I don't think I can do it anymore’,” Christos recalls. “Through Nick’s career, mum said to him if you don't want to keep going with it, then you know your five years self from now would love you to keep going. I can tell you that now. And we are all behind you if you want to keep doing this, but you don't have to.”

For Nill, who seldom watches Nick live, “There’s a little bit of regret that we put him in a very difficult position,” she says. “How do I protect him from being pulled from different sides, being judged, being pressured?

“The constant attention – it’s very hard for me sometimes. I just sit there and cry and think what have I done?” When Christos’s wife gave birth to their first child last year, Nill told him “not to introduce him to tennis,” she laughs. “Maybe he can play golf.”

‘I just want him to be happy’

Kyrgios is the only current player on tour to defeat Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic at the first time of trying. And so, to many, Kyrgios’s career has been an eternal failure to live up to expectations: a rather ungenerous description of a man who has reached world No 13 and last year’s Wimbledon final. Kyrgios has also won a grand slam: last year’s Australian Open men’s doubles, when he triumphed with Thanasi Kokkinakis, his friend since childhood. “He has so much fun playing doubles,” says Christos, which emphasises that Nick’s temperament is “100 per cent” better-suited to team sports.

Aged 27, and with a settled relationship, “the best is yet to come,” Christos believes. “There’s been a switch flicked. There's still heaps and heaps of stuff he’s dealing with in terms of the pressure and the weight of competitive stresses of being who he is. But he’s competing every time.”

Last year, Ashleigh Barty ended Australia’s long wait for a homegrown singles champion, becoming the first woman to win the title since 1978. Now, in the shadow of his looming court case, Kyrgios has a chance to end an even longer wait. Not since Mark Edmondson, in 1976, has an Australian man won the singles title.

“I definitely think he can do it,” Christos says. “He’s shown that he’s got the physical ability, the desire and obviously he has the talent.”

But for Nill, some things matter altogether more than wins and losses. “I just want him to be happy.”