MELBOURNE, Australia – Here on the island that was once the center of the men’s tennis world – the land of Laver and Rosewall, Emerson and Newcombe and other gods of the game – the strangest dynamics have emerged.
The rest of the world is obsessed with Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. Down here it’s all about their own tennis yin and yang.
One is a top-10 player who will do whatever he can to avoid controversy while devoting all his energy to the sport. The other is an unranked unicorn, who feels most at home in the center ring of a three-ring circus. One has clawed its way to the fringes of the sport’s elite. The other, according to just about every other player and some big names from the past, including Goran Ivanisevic and Andy Roddick, has more natural tennis talent running through his veins than anyone on earth.
The 2025 Australian Open is buzzing with the latest achievements from both.
Alex de Minaur, the world number 8, and Nick Kyrgios, who is back after a two-year battle with knee and wrist injuries, headline for their country at Melbourne Park. Kyrgios starts the night session at the John Cain Arena on Monday, before De Minaur headlines the Rod Laver Arena, the pantheon of Australian tennis, on Tuesday night.
They are both celebrities of the moment; they couldn’t be less alike.
Kyrgios has returned to the center of the tennis world as only he can. He wields his self-confidence like a broadsword, swinging it at everyone he encounters, whether they want to duel or not. He doesn’t even have a ranking after such a long absence due to injury.
But even though he is at the bottom of the pecking order among his compatriots in terms of numbers, there is no doubt about who will fill the stadiums. He has spent much of the past few months harassing world No. 1 Sinner over his doping case, posting lurid conspiracy allegations on social media and filling comment sections with needle emojis. That included posting it in the comments of Cruz, a fellow countryman and son of Lleyton Hewitt, who posted a photo of him and Sinner that probably represented the best moment of his tennis life.
Sinner isn’t too happy about this, even if it’s indirect. “I don’t think I should answer this,” he said angrily when Kyrgios’ statements were discussed at a press conference on Friday.
For Kyrgios, immensely talented but always ambivalent about life as a tennis professional – and always ready to turn matches into a spectacle with tirades against referees, officials and those in his own player’s box, and taunts towards opponents – it was business as usual .
He has sought more nuance in other areas of his life. In early 2023, Kyrgios pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Chiara Passari in 2021, but was not convicted. He has been open about going through depression and has said that his mental health has contributed to his behavior.
“We watch sports because we want personalities,” Kyrgios said on Friday. “Every time I step on the field, I don’t know if I’m going to be super controversial in a good or bad way. Throughout my career it hasn’t always been good, but it has added a lot of excitement to the game. I think it’s important.
“There are so many good players on the tour now. I don’t think there are that many contrasting personalities.”
How big is Kyrgios here? He lost his first-round singles match to Great Britain’s Jacob Fearnley (as did Andy Murray, a Scot) in straight sets on Monday night. He had been nursing an injury throughout, meaning much of the action was provisional – and for him, returning from 18 months, it was perhaps a warm-up.
He will want to pack stadiums for the doubles match, which he will play with his good friend Thanasi Kokkinakis. The duo – known as the ‘Special Ks’ – won the title here in 2022, a run that drew a raucous, rapt crowd and turned the doubles competition into a national event.
At his post-match press conference after being defeated by Fearnley, Kyrgios made a stronger admission: “I don’t see myself playing singles here anymore.”
Nick Kyrgios drew the crowd at Melbourne Park (Graham Denholm/Getty Images)
His contrast with de Minaur could not be greater. Kyrgios is 193 cm tall, a master of trick shots and creativity with one of the best serves in the world. The Minaur is a good half foot shorter, and given how small it is, it’s smaller than that.
De Minaur, always envied for his unparalleled speed, spent the first years after the pandemic lurking in the world’s top 20. He carried his country’s hopes into a fourth-round match against Novak Djokovic here in 2023. Djokovic said he used the moment to take revenge on Australia for deporting him last year over his refusal to fight Covid-19 get vaccinated. He destroyed his favorite tennis son, 6-2, 6-1, 6-2.
Then, last May, De Minaur’s career took off.
He is half Spanish and spent much of his youth there, but never cared much for tennis events on clay. He can run like a deer; he can change direction like a scrambling puppy dog; it has a huge engine. He is ideally suited to the physical, intense play that the surface demands, and he has never relied on a big serve that a clay court could neutralize for his success.
He defeated Daniil Medvedev – who hates clay – to reach the quarter-finals of the 2024 French Open in a miasma of rain and clouds, shouting to his friends and coaches: ‘I love clay. I love it here. I can’t get enough of it.”
GO DEEPER
‘English weather’ in Paris: how a rainy French Open changes everything on and off the court
He got a lot of “I told you so” from those coaches. He then reached the quarter-finals of both Wimbledon and the US Open, being forced out of the former by a cruel setback when he was injured at the end of his fourth-round victory. He fought his way to the end-of-year finals with all his hips and ended up in the elite company of the top eight.
He was already a big star in Australia. Outside his home country, he was best known as a star boyfriend, the man who took the next flight from Acapulco, Mexico, after winning the ATP event there last March and his partner, English top-30 WTA player Katie Boulter, her saw me playing my own game. finale the following evening in San Diego, California. The effort raised the bar for all boyfriends, sports and otherwise, moving from sports coverage to television’s morning shows. He proposed to Boulter in the offseason. She said yes.
At the French Open last May, while walking the halls beneath Court Philippe Chatrier at Roland Garros, he explained that he wanted to evolve from a grinder to someone with the added charisma to occasionally hit the ball down the court. You might even get some easy points on serving. He was too easy to push around.
“I was exposed and bullied a little bit,” he said.
Alex de Minaur has risen to the top eight in the world in the past twelve months (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
When De Minaur arrived on the ATP Tour six years ago, he was just over 68kg dripping wet. He now weighs about 167 pounds after some gym work, and over the past year his weight and strength reached a tipping point. Finally, he was able to get back on the heels of the world’s best players with a combination of new power and more rev on his groundstrokes.
“It was always about getting stronger, giving me a little more weight,” he said. “My ball weight is also a little bigger and ultimately I needed that to compete against the top players in the world.”
He couldn’t win a match during the year-end finals. Still, he believed he had arrived.
“I’ve crossed a big barrier in my career, and now it’s about using my position,” De Minaur said.
Kyrgios disagrees. At his press conference on Friday, he recalled the first time he worked with De Minaur, when the latter was a teenager playing as a training partner in a Davis Cup match. Kyrgios decided to play some ball with him late one day. He brought a beer to court, thinking it wouldn’t be too serious.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to go out and teach this little kid a lesson.’ (But) It was a very exciting set. I was in my prime. He was only seventeen,” he says. “To see how well he’s taken on being our No. 1 player over the last three or four years, he’s grown.
“I was there. I couldn’t always deal with it well.”
No, he didn’t. Can he do it now? Can he be the player who reached a Wimbledon final again?
Kyrgios will never approach a match with much humility. He has said that his sport requires a certain degree of delusion.
“If I play my tennis style, my unpredictability, I have a chance against anyone. That is the mentality you need,” he said on Friday. “If I had walked onto the court for the first time against Nadal, Djokovic, Federer and had been realistic, I probably wouldn’t have won. A guy from Canberra going out there and hitting them… You can’t be realistic. You have to think, ‘I’m the best tennis player in the world.’ Is that realistic? Probably not. But I think that when I’m out there.”
This is perhaps the only similarity between the two, even if De Minaur expresses the sentiment somewhat differently. He has said that passing every Australian Open has made him a better version of himself. He has learned a lot. Winning has built confidence.
“If it was strictly based on rankings it would be a pretty boring sport, but at this stage anything can happen,” he said. “We have seen opportunities arise and many doors open.
“There is always a chance. Every time you go to a tournament, you always have to think there is a chance.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullos)