Nick Kyrgios says he has no intention of ‘crawling to the finish line’ at the end of his career like Andy Murray did as he paid tribute to the Brit.
The Australian told The Louis Theroux podcast that Murray deserved to end his career in a more graceful manner than he did. The former world No.1 retired from tennis at the Paris Olympic Games where he teamed up with Dan Evans to play in the doubles event. In recent years Murray has suffered from a serious hip injury and contemplated retiring in 2019 before undergoing resurfacing surgery which enabled him to continue playing for another five years. He was also hit with other injuries but they were less significant.
Between 2019 and 2024, Murray never made it past the third round at any Grand Slam event and won only one ATP event, although he reached the final of an ATP tournament twice in 2022 and once in 2023.
“I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael [Nadal] is going out, I don’t want to be like that either. I don’t want to be kind of crawling to the finish line in a sense,” Kyrgios said on The Louis Theroux podcast.
“What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no-one… unless you are Novak [Djokovic], [Roger] Federer, or Nadal, like, the next person is Andy Murray.
“It’s like you’ve achieved everything. You deserve to go out, I think, a little bit more gracefully than he’s done.
“I think that the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it, in my opinion.”
Kyrgios, who reached the final at Wimbledon in 2022, is set to return to action at the start of next year following a long absence due to knee and wrist surgeries. He has been ranked as high as 13th in the world and is a seven-time ATP champion.
Looking ahead to his return to the Tour, Kyrgios has high confidence that he can still compete against the best players in the world. His first target will be the Australian Open in January.
“I could come back now and beat 50 per cent of players,” he said.
“But I don’t want to do that because my fans deserve a better version of myself that I am now on the court.
“When people say I’ve underachieved in my career, I’m like, my mum grew up in like a wooden shack [in Malaysia] and my dad came [to Australia] by boat. Is it really underachieving? Or is it just like finding a way through all this mess and making it work?
“It’s not like I just picked out professional tennis player from a hat and that was my life.”
