—“Last night it was a bit tough to get some sleep knowing that I was going out there,” Kyrgios said after beating Federer. Yet at the beginning of this clip, Kyrgios shows no sign of being intimidated by the moment or the opponent. He hops up and sticks his finger out to indicate that a Federer backhand is wide, and lets out an aggressive “Come on!” after making a backhand pass. The most important intangible in tennis is self-belief. More than anything else, you want to know: Can a young player treat every opponent the same way, and play with the same brazen, possibly illogical confidence against the best of them?
Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, to take two recent examples, could both do it as teenagers. Even as a kid, Nadal was especially good at acting as if he had no idea who was on the other side of the court. Kyrgios does the same thing, in his own way. He says that Federer is his idol, but he plays this match as if he’s unaware that a player of Federer’s stature is across the net from him. From a competitive standpoint, this is the upside of the Kyrgios act, and a big reason why, at 20, he already has wins over Nadal and Federer.
—Down 4-5 in the first set but up 0-30 on Kyrgios’s serve, Federer hits a backhand drop shot and follows it to the net for a backhand volley winner. He goes on to break Kyrgios’ serve and win the set. Federer once said he didn’t like to use drop shots, but to my recollection, he has tried them throughout his career. I can even remember being frustrated, in the days before Federer became THE Federer, watching him try, and often miss, drop shots at precisely the wrong times. Here he tries one at the right time, when he’s ahead in a game, and standing inside the baseline. The quickness he shows in following the ball forward is remarkable. Federer is 14 years older than Kyrgios, but you wouldn’t know it from watching them move around the court.
—Then, in the first-set tiebreaker, we see the inevitable downside of the Kyrgios act, when he stops the match cold to argue with Lahyani. Around this time, there was a lot of talk about whether Kyrgios was “good for the game” or not; the Wawrinka incident gave us a temporary answer, but the question will surely come up again. To me, Kyrgios is entertaining during points, not between them. His game is good for tennis; his act isn't.
By the end of the year, John McEnroe was talking about ways that he could help Kyrgios, and you can see the connection between those two loose cannons in this clip. McEnroe, in an act of competitive displacement, typically aimed his frustration at the chair umpire; his opponent often seemed to be an afterthought. For a long stretch in this match, Kyrgios appears to be more concerned with forcing Lahyani to admit that he misinterpreted something he said than he is in playing points against Federer.
Despite their best efforts at self-distraction, McEnroe and Kyrgios share an ability to play well when they’re angry. After ranting away the first-set tiebreaker, Kyrgios bounces back to win the second set. And while it’s (rightly) forgotten now, Kyrgios' anger-fueled play against Wawrinka in Montreal was as brilliant as it was off-putting.