Kyrgios, who has played only one match in the past two years, said he is determined to finish his career “more gracefully” than Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal. (Reuters)
Eccentric Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios has revealed that he was spiralling out of control with his drinking as he continued to play and travel.
Speaking on The Louis Theroux Podcast, the 29-year-old who announced this month that he was planning to return to the court at the World Tennis League event in Abu Dhabi in December after recovering from a string of knee and wrist injuries since losing to Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon final in 2022, said he would have almost 30 drinks a day.
“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. Twenty or 30 drinks. I’d drink like a fish. Then I’d just wake up and play (Rafael) Nadal the next day and give him a good run for his money,” he said.
“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,” Kyrgios told Theroux.
The extent of his addiction and mental strain reached such a stage that Kyrgios checked into a psychiatric facility during Wimbledon in 2019 but left after one day as he was due to play Nadal again in the round of 64. He went on to lose in four sets.
“They wanted me to stay for a bit, but I was like, I have other duties that I need to fulfill. I nearly got him (Nadal) though. I nearly beat him,” he said.
Kyrgios, who has played only one match in the past two years, said he is determined to finish his career “more gracefully” than Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal.
“I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael [Nadal] 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,” Kyrgios said. “What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no one, like unless you’re Novak, Federer or Nadal, 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 the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it,” he said, before adding that he wanted to win a maiden singles grand-slam title as it was “the only thing that will shut people up at the end of the day”
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