‘Make it like a bullfight arena’: How tennis is amping up the shock and awe

″In Australia, people are smacking beers, and they’re cheering and face-painting, flying flags; I feel like that is what sport is, and I think tennis misses that a little bit.” Daniel Horsfall, the self-described “manager of Nick Kyrgios Tennis phenomenon”, is recalling the box-office bedlam Kyrgios and doubles partner Thanasi Kokkinakis brought to Melbourne’s Kia Arena last January.

Images of audience members cradling life-sized inflatable kangaroos, mugging into cameras, chugging what you can only hope is beer from tennis shoes, drift across the screen. Kyrgios and Kokkinakis surf the soccer-crowd vibe like rodeo clowns, chest-bumping, tumbling to the court in a victory clinch.

Of all the relationships at the heart of Netflix’s latest sports docuseries, Break Point, their bromance is perhaps the most touching. It’s a quintessential modern Australian story: two kids of immigrants, growing up in the suburbs, who end up transcending the limits of their individual careers via that most Australian of clichés: mateship. “We’ve come a long way,” an unexpectedly thoughtful Kyrgios reflects as the camera pans across cracked suburban courts. “If I showed a picture of [the] courts around from my house … and now we’re playing a Grand Slam title!”

It’s no coincidence that Kyrgios kicks off the 10-part series – the first five episodes of which drop on January 13 – covering six of the biggest tournaments of the 2022 tennis calendar, including the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Arriving Down Under ahead of last January’s Australian Open (AO) to scout talent, producer Paul Martin was on the hunt for backstories more than top rankings.

“You basically see a man falling back in love with tennis. I don’t think we thought that Nick Kyrgios would get to the Wimbledon final.”

“We felt like [Kyrgios] was a character that was worth exploring,” says Martin, a London-based Brit who produced the Diego Maradona documentary and Drive to Survive, the surprise Formula 1 hit credited with bringing a whole new audience to the sport. “At that point he was a little bit out of love with tennis, and tennis people were a little bit out of love with him,” he recalls. “We had no idea how the year was going to pan out.” Kyrgios had not played for months. He is clear at the start of the episode titled The Maverick that 2022 might be his last AO. “You basically see a man falling back in love with tennis,” Martin says. “I don’t think we thought that Nick Kyrgios would get to the Wimbledon final, which gets a lot of focus later in the series.”

After he lost to Daniil Medvedev in the second round of the AO singles, Kyrgios and childhood friend Kokkinakis turn a bit of a lark into that longed-for Grand Slam victory – and a whole new kind of spectacle, closer to inspired amateurism than old-school tennis. As Kokkinakis explains in the doco: “We are not professional doubles players, we are singles guys that play doubles … it’s very technical, and that’s something that me and Nick are so off thinking about, and I think that’s what makes it fun.”

The comeback story of “Mr Box Office himself”, as a commentator dubs Kyrgios, is more broadly emblematic of the year of flux that Break Point captures. If jeopardy is the essential ingredient of any good story, tennis was rotten with it in 2022, particularly in Australia.

AO director and Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley was instrumental in persuading the six tournaments featured in the series to participate. “Because of the calendar, Australia had to go first,” Martin says. “They had to take the biggest leap because none of us had done this before. It really needed strong support from Craig and his team to really get this over the line.”

There could hardly have been a worse time to have a documentary crew roaming Melbourne Park than last January, you might think. But the Novak Djokovic visa saga is dispatched of in the opening credits of the second episode. Instead, the series focuses on following the story of a male and female player at each tournament.

One features Ajla Tomljanovic, the woman who would end 2022 as Australia’s highest-ranking female player after beating Serena Williams at the US Open, and her then-boyfriend Matteo Berrettini, seen at the time as a contender at that year’s AO (in the end he was knocked out in the semi-final).

Shot largely in the claustrophobic theatre of their hotel room, the messiest in a series that sometimes seems to be all about messy hotel rooms, the episode captures the nail-bitingly human toll of tennis. This is, after all, a sport that is all about learning to lose, as pointed out by one of the series’ surprise stars, American number one men’s player Taylor Fritz, captured as he triumphs at his home tournament of Indian Springs.

It is through those stories that we watch the larger tale of a whitewater year in which many of the marquee names that have kept the game’s fortunes aloft for a decade – from Federer to Williams, Barty to Djokovic and Nadal – retired or were stopped in their tracks by everything from injury to COVID-19 rules.

All of this makes Break Point the perfect set-up for the Australian Open, which is billed, not coincidentally, as a chance to watch the “young guns lead the charge”, as the “old guard” battle to maintain their ascendancy. We aren’t just talking the extremes, either, such as 36-year-old Rafael Nadal losing to 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals of the Madrid Open in May last year (Alcaraz recently pulled out of the Australian Open due to injury). As Matteo Berrettini, then 25, says in episode two after seeing off Alcaraz in a breathtaking match: “There are so many players coming up that are so young … the generation behind is not going to wait for us.”

Nor is it just the generations that will battle it out at this year’s AO. It’s the eras, types and tribes that make up contemporary tennis. At the populist, polarising end is the adult jumping castle that is the 5000-seat Kia Arena, unveiled in 2022 as part of the Victorian government’s $972 million Melbourne Park redevelopment. As AO director Craig Tiley has said, “My whole vision was to make it like a bullfight arena, a place of unbelievable energy and partying. I wanted it to explode with energy.”

A festival atmosphere will be further maximised in the grounds around the courts via everything from a giant shade cloth to an extended music festival and two-storey “beach bar”. A new AO tennis camp will host the first Australian Padel Open finals on a purpose-built court also within the Melbourne Park precinct. Played with solid racquets in a smaller, enclosed court, the Latin American-Spanish mash-up of tennis and squash is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. It’s as far again from the gracious lawn courts of the AO’s 1970s home, Kooyong, as the cracked concrete courts of Kyrgios’ youth.

The redevelopment also delivered Centrepiece, a three-level events complex that opened next to Rod Laver Arena in 2021. The AO realised years back that it needed to diversify its revenue streams as it approached capacity on ticket sales. Centrepiece replaced the temporary infrastructure that previously housed the tournament’s food and beverage venues. “We’re now working with permanent kitchens that are well and truly fully equipped to be able to deliver a restaurant-quality menu,” says Fern Barrett, Tennis Australia’s head of product growth and innovation. Those offerings, which include Penfolds Restaurant and Shane Delia’s Maha, are this year joined by Melbourne’s Andrew McConnell (Supernormal, Gimlet) and Jason Staudt (Stokehouse) as well as Sydney’s Jacqui Challinor (Nomad) and Josh Niland (Saint Peter).

Sales of what the AO call “premium experiences” – mainly dining and entertainment packages – are up 10 per cent since 2020, despite a halving of capacity in 2021 due to COVID restrictions. Food-and-beverage sales and premium experiences now account for 10 per cent of AO revenue. All up, including ticket sales, Tennis Australia is hoping to generate a new record of $500 million in 2023, $50 million higher than its previous 2020 record, which would begin to repair reserves that dwindled from $80 million to
$30 million during the COVID years.

Last year, Tennis Australia announced record US and Australian broadcasting extensions, including a $425 million, five-year deal with 9Network, publisher of this magazine. Most of its sponsors, too, not only stayed through the pandemic but have since been “uplifted”, according to Tiley. They include Korean car company Kia, in its 22nd year, and Swiss watch company Rolex (whose global ambassadors include new-generation stars Carlos Alcaraz, Iga Swiatek and Stefanos Tsitsipas) in its 15th.

It is the AO’s larger quest for cash and crowds that Break Point plays to. For Craig Tiley, charged with funding and facilitating tennis at all levels in this country as the head of Tennis Australia, anything that increases interest in tennis and extends its reach in Australia is grist to the mill – even COVID, which bedevilled the AOs in 2021 and 2022.

A year ago, national sport survey AusPlay revealed participation in an activity seemingly made for social distancing had boomed during COVID. With more than 1.5 million Australians playing tennis in the year to June 2021, it had become the fastest-growing sport in Australia across all ages. With all its cross currents of cake and circuses, gladiatorial theatre and centre-court elegance, the maximalist 2023 AO is designed to sound all the notes of a game evolving as we watch.