Top 10 Stories from the 2017 Australian Open

9. Nick Kyrgios’ Latest Implosion

Australia has long been searching for their next champion. In recent years they’ve had two young men, both showing promise, but both also prone to bad behavior. Nick Kyrgios is the second of these. He’s made a couple of slam finals and is currently approaching the top ten. But he’s faced accusations of lax play, and last year so openly tanked one match the tour suspended him eight weeks for it. He’s also said borderline offense things both on and off court.

Playing in the second round match against Andreas Seppi, a player he was very much supposed to beat, he was at it again. He won the first set easily. The second set proved harder, but he took it in a tiebreak. But in the third, things suddenly went south. His game went down, he started yelling, particularly at his box, and ended up with code violations for both obscenity and racquet abuse. The second cost him a point, not that it really mattered, since by then he wasn’t really even trying to play well anymore, his movement on the court half-hearted.

He did make a last gasp in the fifth set, and even provided a highlight, when he won a point with an impressive “tweener” shot between the legs, when Seppi was serving for the match. He even broke Seppi back then. But ultimately, after he’d lost a match point of his own, it ended with him booed off the court as the loser, the audience angry at his clear lack of effort. Media criticism followed, with John McEnroe on ESPN even calling him “a black eye to the sport.”

At least he spoke afterwards about maybe getting a new coach. Though it would take a good one to solve the problem of Nick Krygios.