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)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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