"It was like f**k you, I'm gonna behave worse" - Nick Kyrgios opens up about his relationship with tennis & how it has evolved

Nick Kyrgios is famously known as the bad boy of tennis. While he dismissed that nickname and dislikes it in general, his behavior over the years has simply earned him that reputation which isn't going to go away on its own.

He's been far more professional in recent years, though there are still moments when he sort of reverts to his former self. One such moment happened during a conversation with Alexander Bublik and Patrick Mouratoglou for a UTS feature.

In the feature, Kyrgios talked a bit about his relationship with tennis and how he ended up playing a sport he didn't particularly care about, not even to watch it casually.

"I mean, I didn't even watch it. I wasn't passionate about it, nothing. 24/7 with basketball. I was pretty good at tennis and I just played it. That was it. I wasn't passionate about it at all. It was crazy. Just happened. Overnight," Nick Kyrgios said.

This story isn't that unfamiliar to most Kyrgios fans because he talked about it openly before. He loved basketball but he was really good at tennis and he somehow ended up playing tennis.

In the continuation of the conversation, Nick Kyrgios also mentioned how he became a sort of villain in the sport because that approach, him bashing the sport he plays publicly, didn't really sit right with a lot of fans.

"The tennis world was like 'No you can't behave like this!' It was like, 'F**k you, I'm going to behave worse'.

Nick Kyrgios reached a career-high ranking of World No. 13 in 2016 and made it to the Wimbledon final in 2022.

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Alexander Bublik on embracing tennis in coversation with Nick Kyrgios

On the other side of the conversation was Alexander Bublik, who famously replaced Nick Kyrgios as the poster boy of a tennis player that hated playing tennis.

It happened early on in his career when he once said that he really doesn't like tennis and that he was simply playing for the money. In the video, Bublik explained how he went from a player that said those things to a player that now embraces tennis.

"For me, everything changed in tennis when I simply reminded myself that that was what I wanted all the time. You know me when I was just 19 and I was saying this: I don't want to play tennis. I don't like that. I want to play for money and all these things. And then I saw them all and I was like, okay, is it me?"

The stance that Bublik has these days is that he truly enjoys tennis because when he was younger, this is the dream he pursued. He wanted to become a tennis player and he did, so now he's living the dream, so to speak. That made him realize that he has to respect it and he does now.

"Is it really me that is saying that? Then I said, okay, do I like it? Because in that moment in 2022, I could finish and I can leave off peacefully. So I said, do I like it? Yes, that was my dream. Yes. Then I have to respect that, I have to respect that kid that was standing next to the mirror."