Nick Kyrgios has it all – except the title he wants most. Major champion

Nick Kyrgios has a sorry old record at the slams. It’s a wrong he desperately wants to right at the Australian Open.

Nick Kyrgios trains for the Australian Open. Picture: Mark Stewart

Nick Kyrgios has flunked at the slams, and he knows it. Winning a major is fuelling his last roll of the dice in tennis. It’ll be on for young and old when the wild thing plays his first match at the Australian Open in three years on Monday.

Every point provides the ­opportunity to prove his point.

Here we go again, folks, over the top, to pinch a line from The Angels, because there’s no Melbourne Park scene quite as intoxicating, exhilarating, unpredict­able and unmissable as Kyrgios on John Cain Arena.

It’s Splendour in the Grass without the music, a rock ’n’ roll show without the stage-diving, featuring a volatile, mercurial, perplexing, crowd-pulling, show-stopping Australian who’s raised the roof while consistently falling short in the only tournaments that really matter. The slams.

“Honestly, this is probably the best I’ve felt in two years,” Kyrgios said in the lead-up to the Open. “I’m coming back because something is keeping me around the game. I’ve beaten pretty much every person that has been put in front of me, won multiple titles, made money.

“The one thing that is now my target is a grand slam. That will be the only thing that will shut ­people up at the end of the day.”

Kyrgios has packed stadiums in Paris, London, New York and Melbourne while invariably packing his bags too soon, reaching only three slam quarter-finals and a Wimbledon final in 13 years of inconsistent toil and trouble. He’s been called every name under the sun, good and bad, except major champion. He knows he should have done better. He believes he still can.

Which is why he’s back.

Kyrgios packed Court 16 when hitting with Cruz Hewitt on Sunday. He threw the 16-year-old son of Lleyton Hewitt under the bus last week with an anti-Jannik Sinner tweet that went down like a lead balloon but no damage appears to have been done.

“Thought we were boys,” Kyrgios posted after Hewitt trained with Sinner, the softly spoken, defending champion Italian at the centre of a doping scandal.

Kyrgios and Hewitt Jr were all nods and winks and giggles in their session. Boys will be boys.

Let’s not compare Kyrgios too closely to Jack Nicholson in The Shining. His villainy ain’t that extreme. And yet you can imagine striding into the locker room and saying to his peers in a Jack ­Torrance tone “Hello, boys! I’m baaack!”

Kyrgios and Britain’s Jacob Fearnley are scheduled for John Cain Arena at 7pm. Lollapalooza between singles lines.

Nick Kyrgios trains with Cruz Hewitt in Melbourne. Picture: Mark Stewart

The 29-year-old Canberran has been as high as world No 13 on the rankings, made $20m in prizemoney, earned enough in endorsements to afford his next cuppa and filled arenas around the globe, but he’s been found wanting at best-of-five set majors, which reward the tenacious as much as the ridiculously talented.

The coin toss at this year’s Open won’t feature heads or tails. That’s so 1975. The options will be AO and John Newcombe on the 50th anniversary of his triumph in the final over Jimmy Connors.

Beneath Rod Laver Arena on Sunday, Newcombe told The Australian: “Nick has always done pretty well in two-out-of-three set matches. But his grand slam record is a bit disappointing considering his ability. If he were to look back, I think he’d be the first to say ‘I should have done better at the slams’; I don’t mean winning, but for a player as good as Nick, there should be a better record in the number of quarters, semis, finals he’s reached. And even a win here and there.”

Here we go again, over the top. Three-times Australian Open champion Mats Wilander says of Kyrgios: “He’s revolutionised the sport in many ways. He’s competitive, the level is high, the mental attitude is brilliant. The repertoire and variety of shot-making and the jokes he cracks – no one has ever done it all. Nick Kyrgios has a chance to do it all.”

The first phase of Kyrgios’s career coincided with the domination of the Big Four. Novak Djokovic won 24 majors. Rafael Nadal grabbed 22. Roger Federer pilfered 22, Andy Murray pickpocketed three. Nadal, Federer and Murray have been put out to pasture, Djokovic is on old, wobbly legs. Twenty-somethings Carlos Alcaraz and Sinner shared all four of last year’s slams.

“It’s definitely the changing of the guard,” Kyrgios says. “When I was playing some of my best tennis, I had to get through four of the greatest of all time, in their prime, trying to chase their legacy stats. I’m not saying I always ran into them but realistically, what are the chances of me winning a slam if you’ve got to beat all those guys in their prime?

“Virtually impossible.”