Kokkinakis: My mate Nick, Netflix, hitting rock-bottom, bouncing back
Thanasi Kokkinakis goes deep on his personal struggles and his relationship with Australia’s most enigmatic star.
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He wasn’t much smaller than he is now, but just as loud.
And when he hit the ball, it was just so clean.
BOOM!
People would look on in awe.
Who the hell was this kid?
Thanasi Kokkinakis can still remember the first time he saw his close mate and “Special K” doubles partner Nick Kyrgios up close.
“He’s a year older than me, so when we met I was nine, he was 10,” he says.
“We met at a kid’s cup event in Canberra.
“And yeah, I just met him there and he was just hitting the ball.
“But he was just hitting the ball real clean.
“He was loud. Pretty much the same guy that he is now.
“He was so much bigger and so much better than everyone that he could afford to be.”
Kokkinakis sat down with Mark Soderstrom on the eve of his title defence at the Adelaide International for an in-depth chat for the SodaRoom podcast about his life, his close mate Kyrgios, his own career highs and lows, and what it meant to win in front of a home crowd last year (and what it would mean to win again).
He talked about his own aspirations, his rise from champion junior through the rankings, and back down again, balancing the tough tennis circuit, a brutal stretch of injuries and the sacrifices he will need to make to be mentioned in the same breath as a Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal, both of whom he clearly respects.
Kokkinakis, who on Monday advanced to the second round of this week’s Adelaide International with a tense win over American Maxime Cressy, knows Kyrgios better than most. He loves the blokes and understands him. He also is realistic enough to admit that his mate, who has more recently been involved in a public feud with Lleyton Hewiit after his late withdrawal from the United Cup, is sometimes his own worst enemy.
“I remember him at all the national tournaments getting in trouble with the people working there. Like he’d play poorly and throw the pool balls everywhere,” Kokkinakis tells the SodaRoom.
“Like he is the same guy now, 100 per cent.
“There’s just a few more cameras on him now.”
Kokkinakis says Kyrgios is often hamstrung by the conservatism surrounding the men’s game.
“He’s one of a kind, especially around the tennis scene,” he says.
“I reckon in other sports there would be a few more like him but because the tennis scene is so clean cut and everyone is moulded the same way and conservative, he definitely doesn’t fit that mould.”
But the truth is, off the court he’s a very different bloke.
“He’s pretty quiet off the court, he’s pretty relaxed,” he says.
“He’s very competitive and I think that’s where you see his reaction and anger come from. It’s just because he wants to win all the time.
“So a lot of times even when it looks like he’s not trying or he doesn’t want to try, it’s just a way of dealing with it. I think that.”
Kokkinakis this week said he and Kyrgios, known as the “Special Ks” would be defending their Australian Open doubles title this year, and, at press time, organisers remained hopeful Kyrgios would take part in the second stage of the local event next week, but an ankle injury had put this in doubt.
But his mate also makes him laugh. He recalls their extraordinary run through last year’s Australian Open and the second round doubles match up with the Olympic gold champions from Croatia, Nikola Mektić and Mate Pavić.
“There was a lot of heckling. A lot of sledging. The Croats were going nuts for them,” he says.
“Nick hit one of the players, which is totally fair game, but what I didn’t see at the time – I just see him hit the guy and he’s like ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ – and then turns to the Croatian fans and starts flapping his tongue at the crowd.
“But I didn’t realise that till after because I was wondering why they were pissed off.
“ … So we walk into the gym (after the match) and their fitness trainer has a foam roller and he’s right next to their players at the back end of the change room and he’s crushing the foam roller, like, heavy and hard as he can against this pillar in the gym.
“I’m like `Holy shit, look at this bloke, he’s going nuts, (I’m thinking) he’s about to lay into their players”
“He sees us, walks straight up to us and he goes `So you think you have big balls now?’
“And Nick’s like ‘Mate just relax, just get on your 747 back home to Croatia’.”
And speaking of cameras, Kokkinakis is expecting their close bond, which made international headlines last year, will again be the talk of the town with a new Netflix series, Break Point, set to launch on January 16. The new docuseries is from the same team behind the worldwide smash hit Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
“So he (Kyrgios) actually called me the last couple of days about this Netflix documentary that’s coming out,” Kokkinakis tells Soderstrom.
“The first episode is mainly me and Nick.
“I don’t want to give it away too early but it kind of starts with his upbringing a little bit early and then it goes into our doubles and there’s behind the scenes interviews.
“But if it has any impact like the Formula One (documentary) does, I think it can only be good for tennis.”
He wasn’t sure if the run-in with the Croatian trainer would make the cut.
Last year was the undoubted highlight of Kokkinakis’s career, but there have been plenty or low points for the now world No. 93, who at one point was as high as 69.
He talks openly about his descent into depression which followed a string of mishaps in the wake of a shock ATP tour win over Roger Federer in Miami in 2018.
It would be 492 days until he won another ATP match and he would subsequently be sidelined long-term by a torn pectoral muscle which ruined his 2019 Australian Open campaign.
From there, it was a rapid fall.
“After that it was brutal. I did my full off-season to start the next year. I got glandular fever, missed the Aussie Open, lost 14 kilos, had my tonsils out, was on all these meds and then Covid hit,” he says.
“At that point I had serious depression. I was like this is f — d”
He says he would often walk around his Seacombe Heights neighbourhood and be crippled by anxiety,
“My anxiety was off the charts. I didn’t feel happy to walk around the block,” he says.
“There’d be someone like watering the garden 100m away and I thought they could see me and I was getting judged.
“It was a weird feeling, something I’ve never experienced before.
“So literally walking around my local park in Seacombe Heights, I thought people were looking at me.
“Even though they’d be like, “Who is this bloke”. They’d have no idea who I am.
“But it was just a crazy feeling.”
He got better through the support of his tight-knit family, friends and coach Todd Langman.
He threw himself into the gym and slowly started to hit balls again.
Something clicked.
“The times that I ended up spending on court I forget about all the other stuff,” he says.
He entered 2021 in a different mindset and came to Adelaide at the start of 2022 on the back of a great off-season.
He made the semi-finals in the first of the two back-to-back ATP events, and won the second, beating Arthur Rinderkech in three sets to win his first singles title on the tour.
“Everyone who’s been part of my journey growing up was there,” he recalls.
“Family, mum, dad, brother, sister, all my friends from school, some junior coaches, cousins … like literally everyone, and then just a bunch of local South Australians who just wanted to see me do well.
“That was definitely an emotional period and definitely the highlight of my career, for sure.”
For now, his eyes are on the next few weeks, then the Australian Open. Beyond that, Kokkinakis wants to see how far he can take things.
And he’s using one of his opponents in Adelaide, Novak Djokovic, as an inspiration.
“The tricky part is the tennis life isn’t for everyone and there’s times where I battle with it, years in, years out, weeks in, weeks out, for sure,” he says.
“You look at a lot of guys (at the top) and that’s why my respect for these guys is so high; after all they’ve achieved they’re still so hungry.
“Djokovic won an ATP finals, he’s won Wimbledon, he probably would have won the others if he was allowed there, but he’s come here a week early preparing for an Adelaide 250 which, in the scheme of things, doesn’t matter for his points or ranking or anything like that, but just shows how dialled in and how focused he is.
“That’s where I need to go.
“I get distracted sometimes by other things and you know, these guys are so professional and they just love it.
“They walk around and you can just tell they’re solely focused on just getting better.
“And I think I need to try and reach a certain point of that to help me take the next step.
“I’m trying to get to that point, but it’s tough.
“It’s something I battle with all the time. Like what do you actually want from the sport? It’s like do you just give up everything completely? And just focus on that the whole time?
“Or do you try and enjoy life and kind of play with tennis as well and try and kind of make that balance.”
That changes in 2023.
“So this year, I’m gonna try and commit a little bit more to the other side of it, where I’m just focused in and just seeing where I can get to ranking-wise,” he says.
“But who knows? Who knows? It might be good, it might not be good. It might not suit me. “But yeah, I’ll give it a nudge.”
Listen to Thanasi Kokkinakis on the SodaRoom Podcast.
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