John Newcombe is now 77 and he has lived in a completely different era of tennis, but he still has some ideas on how to recover Nick Kyrgios.
Kyrgios has been awarded with the Newcombe Medal for the most Australian player in 2014 among controversies (why not) and probably John is regretting that a bit…
Nastase was the same…
John thinks that Nick’s situation is similar to Ilie Nastase’s in the 70s. Apparently the Romanian was so bad that he was literally ostracized in the locker room by the other players. “We’ll talk to you again when you shape up.” was the message to Ilie “I think back to Nastase when he was having a great year in 1972-73 and he was behaving so badly that we all ostracized him in the dressing room for a year. No-one would talk to him, and so he had to change his ways,
There were quite a few Australians at the top in that time, and Americans. Ilie loved to have a joke, and he’d come up and talk to you and you’d tell him to f-off. No-one would pay him any attention until he changed his ways.”
… Kyrgios needs to change
Then Newcombe added “If he continues playing and has that sort of attitude on the court, it’s not going to be very pleasant for him. The respect of your peers is pretty important, and when you have players like Federer, Nadal and Djokovic saying that they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to create a reputation for the sport and they don’t appreciate what’s going on, you’ve got to sit up and take notice, haven’t you?”
A new way to go on?
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