‘Nike went ballistic’: The untold stories of the real Nick Kyrgios | MichaelChammas
Nick Kyrgios on the day in 2010 his former agent discovered him.“I sent him messages but I couldn’t get a reply. And I could see that he’d seen them. I chased him for about 18 months.”“That’s your boy, Kyrgios,” Morris’ colleague said to him.Morris didn’t believe it. This tall, skinny version of the chubby kid he wrote about in his notebook had transformed. Still, Morris wasn’t convinced it was the same person.
Nick Kyrgios wearing his lucky shirt during the 2012 Australian Open boys final against Thanasi Kokkinakis.“They said, ‘What the f--- is this kid doing? Do you think we can use pictures of him in a shirt that’s 18 months old?’ It showed his purity and creativity, but it also showed his naivety as well. He just didn’t think it would be a problem.
Like the time in Lyon when, after bowing out of the singles draw early in a French Open lead-up tournament, he sacrificed his grand slam preparations to honour a pledge to his doubles partner and friend Matt Reid.“That night at dinner he was a little injured and was about to tell me he was going to go to Paris to prepare for Roland Garros,” Reid recalled.
He has seen several sports psychologists, which Kyrgios says he regrets, who have tried to untangle the young Australian from a web he’s been spinning since he knocked over Rafael Nadal to reach the quarter-finals at Wimbledon as a teenager in 2014.Credit:“He became a caricature of this bad boy image and he played up to it a little bit,” Morris said.
Before Kyrgios’ giant-killing Wimbledon run in 2014, Morris asked him for help raising funds for the school of his nephew, who has Down syndrome.Morris didn’t mention it again over the next week, but within half an hour of his career-changing victory against Nadal, Kyrgios walked out of the locker room with his shoes in hand.John Morris with his nephew Daniel.
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