MELBOURNE, Australia — Here on the island that was once the center of the men’s tennis world — the land of Laver and Rosewall, Emerson and Newcombe and other gods of the game — the strangest of dynamics has emerged.
The rest of the globe obsesses about Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. Down here, it’s all about their own tennis yin and yang.
One is a top-10 player who will do whatever he can to avoid controversy, while dedicating every ounce of his energy to the sport. The other is an unranked unicorn, most at home in the middle ring of a three-ring circus. One has ground his way to the edge of the sport’s elite. The other, according to just about every other player and some big names of the past including Goran Ivanisevic and Andy Roddick, has more natural tennis gifts flowing through his veins than anyone on Earth.
The 2025 Australian Open is abuzz with the latest doings of both.
Alex de Minaur, the world No. 8, and Nick Kyrgios, who is back after a two-year battle with knee and wrist injuries, are the headliners for their country at Melbourne Park. Kyrgios emceed the night session on John Cain Arena Monday, before De Minaur headlines Rod Laver Arena, the pantheon of Australian tennis Tuesday night.
They are both celebrities of the moment; they could not be less alike.
Kyrgios has returned to the center of the tennis world as only he can, toting his confidence like a broadsword and swinging it in the direction of anyone he encounters, whether they want to duel or not. He doesn’t even have a ranking after so long out through injury.
Yet although he is at the bottom of the pecking order among his countrymen when it comes to numbers, there is no doubting who fills stadiums. He’s spent much of the past months trolling Sinner, the world No. 1, about his doping case, plastering lurid allegations about conspiracy on social media and filling comments sections with needle emojis. That included posting them in the comments of a fellow Aussie, and son of Lleyton Hewitt, Cruz, who put a photo up of him and Sinner which likely represented the best moment of his tennis life.
Sinner is none too pleased about this, if indirectly. “I don’t think I have to answer this,” he bristled when Kyrgios’ jabs came up in a news conference Friday.
For Kyrgios, wildly talented but always ambivalent about life as a tennis professional — and always willing to turn matches into spectacles with rants at umpires, officials and those seated in his own player box, and taunts towards opponents — it was business as usual.
He has sought more nuance in other areas of his life. In early 2023, Kyrgios pleaded guilty to assaulting his then girlfriend Chiara Passari in 2021, but was not convicted. He has been open about living through depression, and has said that his mental health contributed to his behavior.
“We watch sport because we want personalities,” Kyrgios said Friday. “Every time I step out on court, I don’t know if I’m going to be super-controversial in a good or bad way. Throughout my career, it hasn’t always been good, but it’s added a lot of excitement to the game. I think it’s important.
“There’s so many good players on the tour now. I think there’s not so many contrasting personalities.”
How big a star is Kyrgios around here? He lost his first-round singles match to Jacob Fearnley of Great Britain (like Andy Murray, a Scot) Monday night in straight sets. He was carrying an injury throughout, which made much of the action provisional — and for him, coming back from 18 months out, it may well have been a warm-up act.
He will want to pack stadiums for the doubles, which he will play with his close friend Thanasi Kokkinakis. The duo — known as the “Special Ks” — won the title here in 2022, a run that played to raucous, beered-up crowds that turned the doubles competition into a national happening.
In his post-match news conference after being beaten by Fearnley, Kyrgios made a stronger admission: “I don’t see myself playing singles here again.”
Nick Kyrgios drew the crowds at Melbourne Park (Graham Denholm / Getty Images)
His contrast with de Minaur could not be more stark. Kyrgios is 6 feet 4 inches (193cm) tall, a master of trick shots and creativity with one of the best serves in the world. De Minaur is a good half-foot shorter, and given how slight he is, he presents smaller than that.
Always envied for his unmatched speed, de Minaur spent the first post-pandemic years lurking in the world top 20. He carried the hopes of his country into a fourth-round match against Novak Djokovic here in 2023. Djokovic said he used the moment to take some revenge on Australia for deporting him the previous year, over his refusal to get vaccinated against Covid-19. He annihilated its favorite tennis son, 6-2, 6-1, 6-2.
Then, last May, de Minaur’s career arc veered upwards.
He is half-Spanish and spent much of his childhood there, but has never had much use for clay-court tennis events. He can run like a deer; he can switch directions like a scrambling puppy dog; he has a massive engine. He is ideally suited to the physical, intense game that the surface demands, and he has never relied on a big serve that a clay court might neutralize for his success.
He beat Daniil Medvedev — who hates clay — to make the 2024 French Open quarterfinals in a miasma of rain and cloud, screaming to his friends and coaches, “I love the clay. I love it here. I can’t get enough.”
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He got a slew of ‘I told you sos’ from those coaches. Then he made the quarterfinals of both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, forced out of the former by a cruel stroke of bad luck when he got injured at the end of his fourth-round win. Balky hip and all, he battled his way into the year-end finals, entering the elite company of the top eight.
He was already a massive star in Australia. Beyond his homeland, he was best known as a star boyfriend, the guy who caught the next flight out of Acapulco, Mexico after winning the ATP event there last March to see his partner, English top-30 WTA player Katie Boulter, play her own final the next night in San Diego, California. The effort set the bar for all boyfriends, sports and otherwise, and crossed over from sports coverage into the television morning shows. He proposed to Boulter during the off-season. She said yes.
At the French Open last May, on a walk through the corridors underneath Court Philippe Chatrier at Roland Garros, he explained that he wanted to evolve from a grinder into someone with the extra oomph to hit the ball through the court occasionally. Maybe even get some easy points on serve. He was too easy to push around.
“I would get exposed and kind of bullied a little bit,” he said.
Alex de Minaur has risen to the top eight in the world in the past 12 months (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
When de Minaur arrived on the ATP Tour six years ago, he was a little more than 150 pounds (68kg) dripping wet. He’s now up to about 167lb after some gym work, and during the past year, his weight and strength hit a tipping point. Finally, he could push the best players in the world back onto their heels with a combination of newfound power and more revs on his groundstrokes.
“It’s always been about getting stronger, putting a little bit more weight on me,” he said. “My weight of ball is also a little bit bigger and ultimately that’s what I needed to compete against the top players in the world.”
He couldn’t win a match at those end-of-year finals. Still, he believed he had arrived.
“I’ve crossed a big barrier in my career, and now it’s about making use of my position,” de Minaur said.
Kyrgios doesn’t disagree. In his news conference Friday, he recalled the first time he hit with de Minaur, when the latter was a teenager tagging along to a Davis Cup tie as a training partner. Kyrgios decided to play some balls with him late one day. He brought a beer to the court, thinking it wouldn’t be too serious.
“I was like, ‘I’ll go out there and teach this little kid a lesson’. (But) It was a really close set. I was in my prime. He was only 17,” he said. “To see how well he’s taken it upon himself to be our No. 1 player for the last three, four years — he’s grown.
“ I was there. I didn’t always deal with it the best.”
No, he did not. Can he do it now? Can he again be the player that reached a Wimbledon final?
Kyrgios will never approach a match with much humility. He has said his sport requires a certain amount of delusion.
“If I’m playing my style of tennis, my unpredictability, I have a chance against anyone. That’s the mindset you need to have,” he said Friday. “If I walked out on the court for the first time against Nadal, Djokovic, Federer, and was realistic, I probably wouldn’t have won. A kid from Canberra going out there, and beating them… You can’t be realistic. You have to think, ‘I’m the best tennis player in the world.’ Is that realistic? Probably not. But I think that when I’m out there.”
Here lies perhaps the lone similarity between the two, even if de Minaur expresses the sentiment somewhat differently. He has said that with passing each Australian Open, he’s arrived as a better version of himself. He’s learned plenty. Winning has bred confidence.
“If it was strictly based on rankings, it would be quite a boring sport, but anything can happen at this stage,” he said. “We’ve seen opportunities arise, lots of doors opening up.
“There’s always a chance. Every time you step out for a tournament, you always got to think that there’s a chance.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullos)
