Thanasi Kokkinakis shook his head, smirked and was unable to offer an answer.
The much-hyped ‘other Special K’ – an hour separated from Tuesday’s five-set triumph over accomplished Austrian Sebastian Ofner – was outlining his motivation struggles away from Australia. He then added he felt he didn’t try his best in Brisbane, either.
Motivation struggles: Thanasi Kokkinakis.Credit: Eddie Jim
The difference between him and the tour pacesetters, Kokkinakis said, was they applied themselves better and more often because he found the tennis season too long and gruelling.
So how are you going to fix this, Thanasi?
“No idea. I’m 27 now, and I wish I would have figured it out by now,” he said.
The Kokkinakis story is well told. He was one of those teenage prodigies, and famously faced off with Nick Kyrgios in the Australian Open boys’ singles final in 2013.
Kokkinakis, a year younger than Kyrgios, later spoke of his envy at his close friend’s Wimbledon stunner the next year over Rafael Nadal, coinciding with him losing in the first round of a secondary Challenger event in a small US town.
All these years later, Kokkinakis never caught up to the man he won the 2022 Australian Open doubles title with.
Kyrgios is a Wimbledon finalist, boasts three other grand slam quarter-final appearances, seven ATP Tour titles, wins over Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, and made it as high as No.13 in the rankings.
Kokkinakis, on the other hand, captured his hometown Adelaide title in 2022 in the clear-cut highlight of his career but has never made it beyond the third round of a slam or been ranked better than 65.
There were fits and spurts of his immense potential – top-10 wins over Federer, Milos Raonic and Andrey Rublev among them – but he has more often fallen short of expectations.
The asterisk for several years, of course, was the horror, at-times barely believable run with injuries he endured, including shoulder, abdominal, pectoral, knee, elbow and ankle setbacks. A severe case of glandular fever wiped him out of the 2020 Australian Open.
Kokkinakis revealed on the Ordineroli Speaking podcast two years ago that the injury toll impacted his mental health.
“Depression was a real thing. I’d walk into cafes and get really bad anxiety, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’” Kokkinakis said.
“I’d just get really nervous – I could feel my heart racing. Real strange stuff, stuff that I’d never had growing up. No positive thoughts ever came in and if they did for a second, it would switch back off really quick.”
Kokkinakis has largely been free of injuries the past three years, coinciding with his decision to hire renowned strength and conditioning coach Jona Segal, and bring him on the road for chunks of the year.
The biggest roadblock now, it seems, is Thanasi himself.
Kyrgios is widely derided as an underachiever who happily admits he will never be a workhorse like, say, Nadal or his countryman Alex de Minaur.
But was what Kokkinakis said after the Ofner match much different? What is different is less is expected of Kokkinakis than Kyrgios because the latter has achieved more.
There is plenty of sympathy for what he has gone through, and possibly – only he can say – those brutal experiences have left him jaded with the sport.
“I find it, to be honest, very difficult to kind of bring my intensity and level sort of week in, week out as the year gets longer and longer,” he said.
Kokkinakis might be scratching for answers on how to find motivation, but one way to do that might be asking himself whether he is satisfied with what he has done.
His own confession about his application might help answer it for him.
At 27, Kokkinakis’ career is almost certainly more than halfway over, but that doesn’t mean it is too late to change – starting with Grigor Dimitrov on Thursday.
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