A few years ago Nick Kyrgios was a chubby kid with bad asthma running up a hill, refusing to stop no matter how many times his older brother asked him if wanted a rest. On Tuesday he beat Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon.
Nadal, the world No1, with US$70m in career earnings, was defeated in the fourth round by a 19-year-old, ranked 144, with US$235k in the bank from tournaments. The world may be shocked, but nobody who knows Kyrgios is surprised. Former coaches and teachers, his brother, his mother, all use the same word repeatedly when asked the inevitable question of what he is like: driven.
His older brother, Christos has been competing with Kyrgios since Nick could walk. He could even claim to have beaten someone who has in turn beaten Nadal. But he isn’t bragging.
“It’s not really a good comparison,” he told Guardian Australia on Wednesday, besides it’s been years since he beat his little brother on the court.
Christos stayed up into the early hours to watch his brother’s victory over Nadal. He was at the family home in Canberra where television cameras were recording his mother and 15 family and friends witness Nick become an international sensation. But Christos watched in another room. He did not want cameras to see what he went through as he watched his brother take one of the world’s greatest ever players.
“I’ve watched him play top 10 players before so I wasn’t too surprised to see him win but it is unreal to watch him execute what I know he can do, he knew he could do it and now he’s proven it, it’s a self belief he has had for a long while,” Christos says.
Where other families may have a timetable of who is going to which sports games, dance classes and school pick-ups, the Kyrgioses have a schedule on the fridge of who is going to which international tennis event. Kyrgios’s father and sister, George and Halimah, are currently in London, while Christos’s schedule takes him to the French and US Opens.
“We really make sure someone’s on tour with him, he has enough going on and to focus on when he’s on tour without missing his family or feeling homesick,” Christos says.
Kyrgios’s mother said before his match against Nadal that she did not think Kyrgios could beat Nadal. After winning in four sets, Kyrgios said his mother’s comment had spurred him on. "My mum said in an interview she thought Rafa was too good ... that made me mad and spurred me on," he told the BBC.
It is part of a drive Kyrgios was born with. With eight years between himself and Christos, there was surely a time when the elder sibling was stronger, faster and more adept with a ball. Asked how old they were when Christos realised that Nick could beat him, he replied: “When he started walking.”
“It was pretty early days, he had a natural kna ck for the ball, tennis was the only sport we really competed at, he was really into basketball and I wasn’t, so tennis was the sport we played.”
As for a defining childhood anecdote? Something that sums up his brother well? Christos does not hesitate.
“He used to be pretty overweight when he was a kid and had really bad asthma. We would run up the mountain and I could hear him struggling, would hear his breathing getting really heavy and I would ask him if he wanted to stop. He never did. He would always keep going, it’s probably where all the self belief comes from,” he says.
The self belief, natural talent and hard work carried Kyrgios into his teenage years as a professional playing in international tournaments while squeezing in schoolwork. His former PE teacher at Daramalan College, Roy Jacques, recalls jumping in to play on the opposite team to Nick during lessons to even up the competition.
“He was a very ke en basketballer, a very keen volleyballer. When he was going away to play tennis that used to be when I would take the class to play tennis,” he said.
Jacques said Kyrgios was “always pleasant” and was like any other student in high school, figuring himself out and maturing, but always with the attributes to succeed. “Very driven, very confident,” but his presence on a sports side did not always guarantee a win.
“There was plenty of times he was on the losing team, there was a lot of banter, he had his fair share on teams which lost, it was part of his development, you’ve got to take the good with the bad, he knew that. But he certainly enjoyed winning,” Jacques said.
Kyrgios is already a star in his hometown which is why his mother, Nill, was only too willing to throw open the doors of her home to the media as her son took on Nadal. By midday on Wednesday she still had not slept after the adrenaline surge of watching her son win, combined with rounds of morning television and radio interviews. She was beginning to show signs of exhaustion and a film crew had to delay their interview while she recovered.
“I think he expected to win, he believed in himself, and one of my comments made him want to prove his mother wrong. I’m so happy he has proven me wrong,” she told ABC.
Nill said her son excelled in tennis and basketball as a child before it was time to pick which sport he was going to focus on.
“It was very difficult to schedule the training between the two, in the end we decided let’s give tennis your 100% time and within a couple of years and if it didn’t work out and he was unhappy, take up whatever you want,” she said.
“He’s still playing tennis.”
Nill and Christos will watch Kyrgios play overnight on Wednesday, Australian time, and if his success continues the pair will likely be getti ng on a plane to England to potentially watch him play in the final.
Win or lose, he will then be returning home for a break.
“Maybe a week of no tennis,” Nill says.
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