Barty and Kyrgios: If this is the future of Australian tennis, sign me up

Nick Kyrgios gives his broken racquet to fans after winning his second round match against Frenchman Ugo Humbert

If this is the future of Australian tennis, sign me up.

The sugar and slice and all things fiercely nice about Ash Barty. The most charismatic lone-wolf player of all time in Nick Kyrgios. The Betty Cuthbert-sized heart of Alex de Minaur. The V8 engine inside Thanasi Kokkinakis. Things haven’t been this interesting since Lleyton Hewitt and Pat Rafter were winning majors and Mark Philippoussis was having a kiss and a cuddle with Anna Kournikova out in the car park. Give me a pen, show me the dotted line. I’m in.

When Barty played Daria Gavrilova on Rod Laver Arena on Thursday, I was munching on popcorn like I hadn’t eaten in a month.

Nothing was more certain than Barty eventually picking apart Gavrilova with the precision of a surgeon in possession of scalpel, but Gavrilova has a whole lot of spunk, if shaky confidence, and she might quickly return to the higher echelons if she can overcome her achilles heel – which just so happens to be her achilles heel.

Barty won 6-1 7-6 (8/6) after being hampered by leg strapping so thick she looked like she was getting through the second half of State of Origin. She was spooked by a crowd who had no idea who to cheer for, so they cheered for nobody. Barty was guaranteed to mention “this beautiful court” in her post-match interview. She says it every time. Every time! But she didn’t say it this time … Talk about being out of sorts.

Kokkinakis was next up against Stefanos Tsitsipas. Again, count me in. He lost in five sets to the world No 6 but there’s something potentially great in Kokkinakis still bursting to get out if he can overcome his achilles heels, which is a propensity for injuries and illnesses serious enough to flatten any Australian/Greek god.

He was best mates with Kyrgios until the latter took the opportunity during a match at the Montreal Masters to tell Stan Wawrinka and a global television audience about Kokkinakis’s past love life. He’s a likeable young bloke and a heck of a player when he’s not in a hospital bed, and more power to his comeback from here.

In this new potentially perfect age of Australian tennis, yin and yang everywhere, Gavrilova and Kokkinakis and Ajla Tomljanovic would all be in the top 20, clawing their way ever higher.

De Minaur was playing on Thursday night. At the time of writing, you would have backed him in. Regardless, the pup is already ranked in the 20s and while he doesn’t possess the firepower of Kyrgios nor the classicism of Barty, he has heart and legs and flat groundstrokes that skid like Shane Warner’s zooter.

He’s from the Harry Hopman, Pat Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt school of trying your guts out. De Minaur shouldn’t really be as good as he is, which is very good, and there’s a fascination in seeing exactly how far he can take it.

And then there’s Kyrgios. Ah, Nick. The daft bugger. I watched his first major match at the 2013 French Open. Sat near the flower beds at a back court and watched this skinny teenage nut bag blow apart Radek Stepanek. I thought right then, count me in. He beat Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon like the Harlem Globetrotters had joined the NBA and beaten Jordan’s Bulls.

I saw him at a Sydney tennis centre fetching cups of tea for his mother. I was so in. Then came the ridiculousness. The aggro. The nastiness. He behaved terribly against Richard Gasquet at The All England Club. Count me out.

He was a brat against Wawrinka at Montreal, humiliating Donna Vekic more than anyone else. Count me out. He spat at an umpire. Count me out.

He kept complaining about a job that earned him five million bucks a year while most people were busting a gut just to keep a roof over their heads. There was tanking, verbal abuse, misconduct so severe he was suspended by the ATP Tour and fined $113,000. It was tiresome and ugly. A lover of tennis, I checked out.

Then at last year’s Australian Open, Kyrgios started showing a bit of heart. He got the ball rolling for fundraisers for bushfire victims. He shed a tear for the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and wore a Lakers’ singlet onto RLA. He was still fire and brimstone but apart from the odd smashed racquet and telling his entourage what pains in the neck they were, the nastiness had eased. COVID-19 came along and forced him onto his sofa for a year.

Now? Nobody wants Kyrgios to be a goody-two-shoes. You want the expression and volatility and emotion and individuality, but you want them complemented by appreciation of his day job and competitiveness. He views himself as a lone wolf, him against the world, but he’ll be surprised how large the supporter base will become if he conducts himself in a manner that does himself justice.

“I never doubt,” he said. “I know many people don’t think I have a heart or compete as hard as they want me to compete from time to time. But I have been through a lot. I didn’t just put my hand in a lucky dip and appear here. I put in a lot of hard work when I was young.

“I’ve gone through a lot. Nothing’s really been handed to me. I’ve won all the matches on my own. I don’t have a coach. I do everything basically on my own.

“I’ve always got myself. I’ve always got my own back … I was just like, ‘dude, just keep pushing and maybe something special can happen (against Humbert) … dude, this could be one of the most memorable matches of your career and you owe it to yourself’. Like, I have put myself in a position to have moments like this. Somehow I keep surprising myself.”

Kyrgios reckons there’s been too much negative press in the past. That’s a load of old codswallop. It’s only been negative because he’s done some spectacularly negative stuff. When he spat at an umpire, for example, what did he expect? A glowing review?

“As you know, the media doesn’t hold back on me,” he said on Wednesday night. “When I’m match point down, second-round exit, I was almost afraid. I was afraid to come into this (interview) room, you know, go to my Airbnb and just read about it and take it all in, take all the negativity in that I have already taken.”

Perhaps there’s two phases of Kyrgios’s career. The pre-COVID Kyrgios was all over the shop. The post-COVID might be Kyrgios 2.0. A more palatable powder keg. I say that with trepidation. It might all implode again on Friday night when he takes on US Open champion Dominic Thiem, a cage fighter of a tennis player who hits the ball one of two ways. Hard or harder.

But Kyrgios is a fighter’s chance if he’s prepared to put up his dukes. I stopped watching him for a couple of years. The interest had gone.

But the thriller against Humbert was such grand theatre and spectacular tennis that I’m in all over again when he gets to grace – or disgrace? – his own beautiful court of John Cain Arena on Friday night.