Nick Kyrgios will never have the career he could have potentially had, but at times, the Australian did show just how good he could be, something he’d never expected a decade earlier.
Kyrgios's career could best be visualized as a complicated maze with many twists and turns along the way. He eventually reached a really high level, but getting there took a long time and lots of mistakes.
The potential was evident to most people when they saw him play. A ridiculous serve, incredible ability to find angles on the court, yet a notorious and almost fundamental lack of professionalism that stifled that potential from the start.
In 2022, Kyrgios played a season seriously. The end result was many great results, including a Wimbledon final, in which he looked like he belonged.
It didn’t look like a player who was there by accident; he looked like somebody who would proudly lift that trophy. It could have happened years before, but that's a different story.
Being there is, regardless, something he never expected to happen. He spoke about it recently on the Tennis Insider podcast, remembering how he never saw himself as a pro when he was younger, but the potential was too big to ignore.
"I never thought I was going to become a pro. I was playing from seven and then I got to about 15 and I was, you know, going up the ranks, obviously playing a lot of junior events and then won a couple of junior doubles Grand Slams. And then I was the No. 1 junior in the world. But I never thought I would still."
Kyrgios has been publicly on record as preferring other sports to tennis. His love for basketball is well known, and it's something that has never gone away. Had he not ended up in tennis, he would likely have ended up as a basketball player.
He almost did, but with the way his tennis career was trending, the Australian had to go that route. He was just that good, even though he never fully believed it.
Even after winning an ATP Challenger event at 17 and seeing the list of players who had done it before him, the Australian shrugged it off as something impossible.
"And then I won a Challenger at 17, I think And then I saw the list of people that had done that and it was like Raonic, Federer, Dimitrov. I just laughed, I was like there's no way that Nick Kyrgios is going to be at that level."
"And then a year later it was, I was there, it just happened straight away. l be as good as Federer at the time. Nadal."
But he did become that good, and quite early, too. He just never fully committed to the sport until a couple of years later. Unfortunately, by now, injuries have caught up with him, so it remains this odd story of tremendous potential that was never truly fulfilled.
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