“Just hang in there. I kept telling myself that,” Jordan Thompson said.
A few minutes earlier, he had come back from two sets down to record his first win at the Australian Open, his home Grand Slam, in January of this year. “Just try to make as many balls as possible and keep going.”
Once upon a time, these were common refrains Down Under. From the legendary champions of the 1950s and 1960s like Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and John Newcombe, to the battle-ready standard-bearer of the 21st century, Lleyton Hewitt, Australian men’s tennis has always been about how you go about playing the game, rather than just how well you play it. Don’t draw attention to yourself, never give up, never make excuses: These were the core principles that defined the nation’s sporting ethos.
The refrain, it seems, has changed.
At Wimbledon this year, Australia’s No. 2-ranked male player at the time, Bernard Tomic, made headlines when he told reporters that he “felt a bit a bored” during his straight-set first-round defeat.
Tomic’s comments echoed those of the country’s No. 1-ranked player, Nick Kyrgios, who has admitted in the past that, all things considered, he’d rather be playing basketball.
So far this summer, Kyrgios’s body hasn’t given him much choice. At Wimbledon, he was gone after just two sets, the victim of a hip injury. On Wednesday, he made an even more rapid exit from the Citi Open in Washington, D.C.; this time a shoulder problem forced him to retire after 12 games.
But not all of the Aussie news from D.C. was dire. On the same court a few hours earlier, Thompson, a 23-year-old from Sydney who has been playing Kyrgios since they were 8, had pushed Alexander Zverev to the limit over three see-saw sets. At 6’0, Thompson was giving away six inches, 20 m.p.h. on his serve, and a lot of forehand firepower to Zverev. But he won the first set, came back from 1-4 down in the third, and led 5-4 in the third-set tiebreaker before losing the last three points.
