Nick Kyrgios has insisted he won’t be “crawling to the finish line” of his career like tennis legends Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal.
Despite planning a comeback in December ahead of the Australian Open, Kyrgios admitted he still endures mental health struggles. The Canberra native openly admitted: “I fight it most days.”
The 2022 Wimbledon runner-up has been limited to a single ATP match over the past year due to a series of injuries affecting his knee, foot, and wrist. Kyrgios, 29, has even dropped hints about potentially retiring from the sport in the near future.
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Murray, 37, marked his farewell from tennis after the Paris 2024 Olympics, while 38-year-old Nadal will follow suit at the upcoming Davis Cup finals. And both legends of the game share in common the fact they’ve had to deal with persistent injuries in their careers.
Kyrgios maintains a friendly rapport with Dunblane native Murray and said: “I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael is going out, I don’t want to be like that either, I don’t want to be kind of crawling to the finish line in a sense.
“What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no one, like, unless you’re Novak [Djokovic], [Roger] Federer, or Nadal, like, the next person is Andy Murray. It’s like you’ve achieved everything. You deserve to go out, I think, a little bit more gracefully than he’s done. I think, that the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it, in my opinion.”
During a recent appearance on The Louis Theroux Podcast (via the Daily Express), Kyrgios confided that Murray had noticed him self-harming during what he described as a “bad period” at Wimbledon in 2019.
“It was pretty hectic,” he said. “Just sharp things… yeah, I got bored. And then I guess just doing things like that. And then he noticed it, and I obviously couldn’t go on Centre Court of Wimbledon with it. So I had to put like a sleeve on. Yeah, no-one noticed. It was horrible. I mean, I almost kinda enjoyed feeling that way. And that’s when I knew I had to get out of it.”
The Australian previously opened up about his mental health struggles and admitted he “genuinely contemplated” suicide. Kyrgios spent time in a London psychiatric hospital both before and after his match against Nadal at Wimbledon in 2019.
“Well, they wanted me to stay for a bit, but I was like: ‘I have other duties that I need to fulfil,'” he recalled. “I nearly got him though. I nearly beat him.
“I was just struggling with being who I was, it was hard at that time and I didn’t feel like I could take a step back from the sport and kind of work on myself and get myself in the right headspace. I was just playing and playing and playing and kind of dealing with everything. And it was a dark time. Like I was drinking and I was spiralling out of control and I was continuing to play and travel. It was a lot.”
Kyrgios also revealed how his excessive drinking habits got out of control, saying he could knock back “20 or 30 drinks” a night. “I’d drink like a fish,” he explained. “But then just wake up and play Nadal the next day. Give him a good run for his money.”
Theroux quizzed Kyrgios about his current state of mind, to which the court sensation replied: “No, I mean, I fight it most days. Like, I don’t wake up feeling amazing… I feel like I know my steps to get me out of my bad thinking now.
“I feel like I could go back into those habits in an instant. That’s how it feels. I feel like I could do those things, but I don’t want to. Like, before, I didn’t have any resistance. I don’t want to do that now.”