Nick Kyrgios prefers doubles or team events to the loneliness of singles. Illustration by Paul Rogers

Nick Kyrgios, the twentieth-ranked tennis player in the world, stepped to the baseline. He briskly bounced the ball and rocked forward to begin his serve, his arms swinging. He has a narrow waist and strong shoulders, a greyhound’s look, and a greyhound’s air of languid indifference. Kyrgios, a twenty-two-year-old Australian, is the only active player ever to defeat Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic in their first meetings; he has beaten Nadal and Djokovic twice, in fact, and came within a few points of a second victory over Federer earlier this year. “I think Nick is the most talented player since Roger jumped on the scene,” Paul Annacone, a former coach of Federer and Pete Sampras, has said. Kyrgios is also the most mercurial. Jon Wertheim, the executive editor of Sports Illustrated, once called him “tennis’ id.”

It was the second round of the Open Parc Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Lyon, a small tournament in the run-up to the French Open. There was a charge in the air, as there always is when Kyrgios plays. He is known for his spectacular shots: he has the skill and the imagination of Federer or John McEnroe. His matches have also featured epic displays of ranting, racquet-wrecking, and trash-talking. Kyrgios once flagrantly tried to lose a match, bopping in a serve like a beginner, and starting to walk off the court before it bounced. At some point in almost every match, he tends to do something brilliant—or he snaps.

Twisting, eyes wide, he opened his shoulders and tossed the ball. Then he reared up and whipped his racquet toward the toss. It is an efficient, brutally effective motion. In a match in March, Kyrgios aced Djokovic, the greatest returner in the history of the game, twenty-five times in two sets. He hits flat serves more than a hundred and forty miles per hour. He slices the ball so that it skids the line. He can put on so much spin that the ball arcs in at eighty-four miles per hour and then leaps up above the returner’s head, as if the ground were a trampoline.

Across the net from Kyrgios was Nicolas Kicker, a twenty-four-year-old Argentine who is ranked ninety-fourth in the world. Serving at 5–2, 40–15, Kyrgios already had five aces. This serve, down the T, made it six. His forward momentum carried him toward his chair, as if that were his destination all along.

It was a lovely afternoon—mid-May, the golden hour—but something seemed wrong. Kyrgios winced and grabbed his hip. An old injury had flared up in Madrid two weeks earlier; he’d been forced to withdraw from a tournament in Rome. He started to shorten points, to limit the strain on his hip. He hit drop shots from well behind the baseline which died on the net. He went for aces, on both first and second serves. Kyrgios, who has an unusually aggressive game, often uses such tactics to great effect. But as the match wore on he appeared to be exhibiting not strategy but impatience. After one error, he bounced his racquet in disgust and caught it on the handle. The crowd murmured expectantly. They were ready for a meltdown. Instead, he bounced the racquet and caught it again, and again, as if to distract himself.

Kicker, serving for the set, hit a drop shot that hung in the air on the bounce. Kyrgios has tremendous speed; ordinarily, he could have covered the ground. Instead, he took only one step into the court, ceding the point. A few minutes later, he served and rushed the net, letting Kicker’s return fly by him; the ball landed well inside the lines. Point, Kicker. Down set point, with a second serve, Kyrgios went for the ace. It clipped the top of the net. Double fault. Kyrgios spent the changeover flipping a little Evian water bottle.

Kicker started swinging more freely. His serve got more pop. He hit several successful drop shots, testing Kyrgios’s sore hip. It started to look like the final at Roland Garros on Kicker’s side of the net, and an exhibition match on Kyrgios’s. Kyrgios ran around his forehand to hit a tweener—a between-the-legs shot—from the doubles alley, which Kicker easily blocked back into the open court. When Kicker broke his serve and took command of the set, Kyrgios slammed his racquet into the dirt. His hip seemed increasingly to bother him. So, perhaps, did his spirit; his grandfather, who helped rear him, had died a few weeks before. In the end, Kicker easily took the second and third sets, beating a top-fifty player for the first time. Kyrgios trudged to the net to shake his hand.

Half an hour after the match, I was waiting for the elevator in the lobby of my hotel, when I heard Kyrgios request a new room key. He was still in his kit: black shorts, a magenta Nike top, shoes smeared with ochre clay. His beard was trimmed tight along his jawline, his dark hair shaved on the sides of his head and sculpted on top like a flame.

He stared at his phone as he shuffled to the elevator. As he stepped inside, he looked up. We had met the previous day, and he sounded surprisingly cheerful as he greeted me. “Sorry about the match,” I said.

He gave a quick, harsh laugh, and then his voice lightened. “It’s all right. It’s not a big deal,” he said.

He stepped out of the elevator, and I watched the doors close behind his slumped shoulders. There are message-board threads dedicated to Kyrgios’s posture, with dozens of comments debating whether the curvature of his upper back requires surgery, interferes with his hormone circulation, or is a faker’s lazy pose.

Kyrgios says that he doesn’t want to be Federer. So what does he want? When you’re a tennis player who claims not to like playing tennis, when half the world (including most of Australia) seems to have an opinion of your character, and when you’re twenty-two years old, the answer can be complicated.

People tend to tell one of two stories about Kyrgios. Either he is a talented kid who is wasting his gift with a bad attitude and a terrible work ethic, or he is a talented kid who has struggled, sometimes severely, with his motivation, but who is maturing. A column in the Sydney Morning Herald was headlined “Nick Kyrgios Is a National Embarrassment.” Other people believe that he could be the future of men’s tennis.

“I think he has the most talent of anyone twenty-five and under,” Brad Gilbert, an ESPN commentator and Andre Agassi’s former coach, told me. “If you put the total package around him”—coaches, trainers, focussed practice sessions, strenuous training blocks—“and he embraced that, I would be shocked if he didn’t win multiple slams and become top two in the world.”

“People tell me I need to change, but it has to come from me,” Kyrgios told me before playing Kicker in Lyon. We were sitting in the hotel restaurant, with his agent, John Morris, in the lull between breakfast and lunch. Kyrgios wore long blue shorts and a Vince Carter jersey with a chain tucked into the neck. He drank a tiny glass of orange juice.