An Emotional Nick Kyrgios Broke Down In Tears After His Win Last Night As He Talked About All Those Impacted By The Australian Bushfires
As you may know the Australian bushfires have been ravaging Australia over the last few months. It's the biggest bushfire in the history of this planet. Just recently things have taken a turn for the worse. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, over a thousand homes have been lost, and at least 19 people have died, while dozens others are missing. It's terrible and supposedly things will be even worse this weekend. Look how wide spread this disaster is. It's insane.
(via USA Today)
As this is going on, the Australian tennis circuit is heating up with the ATP Cup underway in Brisbane. Nick Kyrgios, one of the more polarizing tennis players in the world, is an Australian native who has really stepped up with raising money for relief efforts. In the video up top he got pretty emotional about the fires and how his home, Canberra, is really being effected. A few days ago he reached out publicly to the Aussie Open to get something going.
In case you were wondering, Nick hits a fuck ton of aces. Last night in his first match at the ATP Cup he launched 20 of them. That's $4,000 just after one match. There are a lot more to go.
"It's tough to go out there and concentrate on tennis, to be honest. Every ace I was hitting that's all I was thinking about. Every time I stepped up to the line that's all I was thinking about."
Tennis Australia has pledged $700,000 and numerous other players have followed Nick with his ace money pledge. The Australian Open kicks off in two weeks and Nick's push has created an exhibition match in Melbourne days before the tournament gets going. I'd imagine every big name will be there (Fed, Djoker, Nadal, etc.) and they'll raise a ton of money to go towards relief efforts.
Not many people in the U.S. care for tennis or realize what's exactly going on in Australia, but it's awful and the players down there, mainly Kyrgios, are doing a helluva job raising money. Nick gets a bad rap for his antics during matches and how he yells at umpires, but he's probably the best thing that could have happened to the sport over the last 5 years. He brings attention and eyeballs to a sport that's run the old school way by a bunch of old, boring people. I, for one, love him and I'll never stop rooting for him. When he's got it going and is motivated like he is right now, he's must watch. As someone who is going to stay up ridiculously late to watch these matches over the next few weeks I'd love to see Kyrgios play for Australia and the victims and just dominate everyone in his path. When you can't sleep and there's tennis on late at night it's a fun thing to gamble on.
If you're down there in Australia reading this, hopefully you've gotten yourself out of danger and things begin to get better sooner rather than later. Really some scary stuff.
P.S. I remember Carl coming up to me at our Christmas Party and saying they were ranking the most normal people in the office and he thought I was top 5. I then told him that I frequently find myself watching tennis matches late into the night, and he then quickly put me on the top 5 weirdest people list. It was quite the turnaround.