Culture
Nick Kyrgios and Alex de Minaur, the two poles of Aussie tennis at the Australian Open
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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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