The Murray match wasn’t Kyrgios’s lowest moment. That remains the incident in Montreal last summer, when he told the Swiss star Stan Wawrinka between points that his girlfriend had slept with another player. (Kyrgios later apologized.) Still, his desultory Wimbledon performance left the tennis world scratching its head. Before the tournament, there was much talk about Kyrgios’s need for a coach; he’d been without one for more than a year. Afterward, some observers, including Murray, gently suggested that perhaps what Kyrgios needed even more than a coach was a psychologist.

Presumably, though, Kyrgios would tell a shrink the same thing that he tells journalists: His problem is tennis. “I don’t love this sport,” he said during the Wimbledon press conference. When we spoke in Florida, Kyrgios insisted he was being honest about this: “If I won a Grand Slam, I’d say the same thing.” He told me that he almost never watches tennis (“no chance, Jesus, I’d rather watch Piers Morgan”) and that he plans to quit playing it by age 27 (“that’s the absolute max”), after which he can pursue his true passion: basketball. He hopes to play professionally, perhaps in Europe. He played competitively as a kid and still plays every chance he gets. During a visit to Nike’s Oregon headquarters, he spent all his free time on the basketball court; at tournaments, he organizes pickup games with other tennis players. His style on the tennis court, with its no-look passing shots and between-the-legs razzmatazz, sometimes makes him look as if he’s trying to play basketball there too.

People around the game have trouble believing Kyrgios is really as down on tennis as he claims; they figure the ambivalence is just his way of deflecting pressure. The expectations for him are huge, and not just because he is so talented. Tennis is approaching a period of transition. Federer just turned 35, a step closer to retirement. The Williams sisters are in their mid-30s. Kyrgios, with his billboard looks and outsize personality, is seen as the one emerging star who can attract new fans and keep old ones from drifting away. (He’s terrific with fans — funny, charming and unusually generous with his time, even working the crowd during matches.) His agents are convinced he could become the sport’s most bankable star yet. Justin Gimelstob, a former player now working as an analyst for the Tennis Channel, put it succinctly when I asked him about Kyrgios: “He’s box office.”

Ever since the retirements of McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, it has been fashionable to claim that tennis lacks “personalities.” In tennis, the word connotes rogues, rebels and freethinkers, although Martin Amis had a point when he wrote that “personalities” was just tennis-speak for “a seven-letter duosyllable starting with an A and ending with an E.” (It’s almost exclusively applied in men’s tennis. The women’s game has had plenty of charismatic figures but not so many racket-smashers and potty mouths, thanks in part to the usual double standards about acceptable behavior — double standards that Serena Williams’s occasional outbursts are just beginning to challenge.) It is certainly true that McEnroe and Connors, along with Ilie Nastase, set standards for lewdness and irascibility that no one since has come close to equaling. But it’s not quite true to say the game hasn’t produced any colorful characters in their aftermath: Players like Andre Agassi, Marat Safin and Goran Ivanisevic were tortured figures whose matches often turned into psychodramas.