Nick Kyrgios can hardly contain his mirth when it is suggested he might lose to a woman – even if it is world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka.
“I think she’s the type of player that genuinely thinks she’s going to win,” he tells his friend and tennis star Alexander Bublik with a broad grin during a rooftop interview in Manhattan.
“She’s not gonna beat me, brother. Do you really think I have to try 100 per cent?”
He then goes on to suggest that “our serves… women can’t return and then we can just chip and drop shot”.
Kyrgios is planning to take on three-time major winner Sabalenka in an exhibition later this year, perhaps in Hong Kong – although sources say the exact venue has not yet been confirmed – and regulations on WTA players and exhibition events will make it politically tricky.
Kyrgios’s performance is a passable homage to Bobby Riggs, the tennis player and hustler who successfully goaded both Margaret Court and Billie Jean King into matches known respectively as the “Mother’s Day Massacre” and “the Battle of the Sexes”.
Sabalenka is the runaway world No 1 in the women’s game (Photo: Reuters)
For Riggs, the matches were about the pursuit of money and attention, all served with a side-order of smugness. For Kyrgios, the motives are the same.
There was a time when the Australian was able to garner all of the above through pure tennis ability. His breakout run to the Wimbledon quarter-finals is now 11 years in the past, when he beat Rafael Nadal in the fourth round. He backed it up by making the last eight of his home grand slam seven months later, but it was seven years before he would do it again.
And now, since the start of 2023, he has won only one competitive singles match. He has played a few more exhibitions at the Ultimate Tennis Showdown, the event that is being lined up to host his clash with Sabalenka, but the reality is bleak. He has become more of a meme than a tennis player.
Kyrgios’s demise has not come about without misfortune. His well-documented battles with depression, anxiety and substance abuse doubtless made it harder to be a professional tennis player in the truest sense of the words.
But his appetite for the graft required to succeed at the top of the game, alongside the likes of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, has either waned or was never really there.
He continues to put his name into the hat for grand slams and big tournaments on tour – his interview with Bublik took place shortly before he pulled out of the US Open – but tends to withdraw a few days before, citing injury.
Tennis is a gruelling sport and there is no shortcut for the hard work required to withstand it. Train hard without the proper foundation, and the body will break down. Kyrgios is only 30 but has the injury record of a player far older and with far more miles on the clock.
It’s entirely possible that Kyrgios does win against Sabalenka, even with the talk of him playing into a smaller court on the other side of the net to even the match out. But because the UTS format has only one serve, that significantly swings the pendulum back to Kyrgios. It makes no odds really. He will be favourite, almost no matter what.
But what will him winning prove? Sabalenka will brush it off and continue her dominance of the women’s game, playing a different sport against different people, probably with a slightly bigger bank balance. After all, she will never have to play Kyrgios in a match that matters.
Victory would simply give Kyrgios and Bublik more chance to gloat about their abilities and laugh at the women’s game, with the latter mentioning “equal prize money and all that”.
And Kyrgios will go on being a part-time tennis player, and little more.