#SPORTS_BUSINESS

[tsportsday]

WASHINGTON — The Prince of Potomac Yard spoke of water.“When I first came to this site,” Ted Leonsis said Wednesday, “and stood on top of the roof of the building next door, and looked over, we forget the power of having two rivers flow right into this community. And, iconic real estate is incredibly important. We have access — you can see the Washington Monument from here, Washington, D.C., the border’s one-and-a-half miles from here.”That must be cool! So nice that the billionaire owner of the Wizards and Capitals will have a swank view of the Potomac and Anacostia confluence from his soon-to-be floor-wide offices in Alexandria, where he will center his entertainment and sports empire. It would be unfair to say he literally will be looking down upon the people who are financing his JerryWorld, his BallmerVille, in Crystal City, or National Landing, or whatever name they prefer for their community across the river. But it will be a swell view.It is, nonetheless, a view for one, for an audience of one. Which, in the end, is how anyone who cares about and loves the District of Columbia should view this seemingly imminent departure of the Wizards and Capitals for Virginia.Some of us are old enough to remember the “done deal” between Jack Kent Cooke and Virginia state representatives from a generation ago on that very same property for a new football stadium that came apart like cotton candy. So, maybe, the Virginia General Assembly will raise objections to this new project that will be too great to overcome. Maybe NIMBYs in Alexandria will make their voices loud and annoying enough to force reconsideration.But, I doubt it.“Hold me accountable,” Leonsis said Wednesday. OK.This is about one man’s grandiosity, and readiness to leave when the city that has provided him so much over the last decades needed someone with his voice and influence to say, post-COVID, and post-Jan. 6, and which is grappling with crime outbursts throughout the city that have so many ill at ease, “You know what? Some things may be bad here right now. But I’m blessed enough to be financially secure enough to ride it out with you. I want to be part of the solution. So, I’ll be slightly less rich. I’m staying.”Don’t tell me rich men don’t do this. That’s precisely what Abe Pollin did, when he built what is now called Capital One Arena downtown, transforming the city, in 1997 — mostly with his own money.By contrast, Leonsis went for the bucks. Which, as I’ve said and written dozens of times over the years, owners of pro sports teams are perfectly within their rights to do. They can play wherever they want their teams to play. They can make whatever deals line their pockets, and allow them to create the kind of multi-use “entertainment districts” that will bring the well-heeled and well-connected to their new playgrounds. No one doubts that Virginia will build Leonsis a state-ahead-of-the-art arena to be envied and admired.But, it will be hard to take at face value any future talk from Leonsis about his love of the District.Because he knows how the Wizards, no matter their current lot, mean to generations of basketball fans in D.C. I am well aware that the Wizards were once the Bullets, who once played in Baltimore — and, before that, Chicago. I am well aware of the history of franchise roulette, in many cities, with many teams. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, deeply, when your team leaves town. When the Senators left, first, for Minnesota — and then, when the team that replaced them left for Texas, it hurt this city, badly. Some of us then followed the Orioles, because they were the closest team. We did not love them.And when the then-Redskins left for Landover, Md. even though it was just a few miles from the D.C. line, it felt awful. It still does.Add this to the ledger.Because Leonsis knows, more than anyone, that the crowds who come to Wizards games, and have come to them for the last 25 years, are among the most diverse in the NBA – racially, economically, socially. Maybe Atlanta has similar types of crowds for Hawks games. Most of the league’s buildings, these days, are again full, post-COVID. But, in the main, their fan bases are very White and very rich. That hasn’t been the case here since I started covering the team, then playing at Capital Centre in Landover, in the late ’80s. Wizards crowds look like the District — at least how it used to look. They will not do so when the team moves across the river.(I’m not mentioning the Capitals’ crowds because the Caps regularly sold out Capital One. Caps fans have represented for nearly two decades. I can’t then imagine they won’t continue to do so in Virginia.)Every owner swears that his or her fanbase will follow the team “just down the road” to the new place. The Warriors swore that light rail and express transportation would mean most of their middle-class fans would come from Oakland, across San Francisco Bay, and follow the team to the new Chase Center in downtown San Francisco.They did not.To be sure, Chase is full — but not with the people who filled what is now called Oakland Arena for three decades. You have to pay for a $2 billion arena; you don’t do so with $15 tickets. You do it with six-figure suites and five-figure courtside seats. As John Salley, who won four championships back in the day playing for the Pistons, Bulls and Lakers, noted when the Pistons moved from downtown Detroit 31 miles north to the Palace of Auburn Hills in the late ’80s: “We used to play in front of the auto workers. Now we play in front of the executives.”It will be impossible to forget what now feels like appropriation of the city’s culture, by nicknaming Washington’s G-League team the Capital City Go-Go, and centering D.C. at every opportunity – plastering “For the District” and “The District of Columbia” on your Twitter feeds and the jerseys of Wizards players, or hawking this year’s alternate jerseys with breathless history about the city’s Boundary Stones, or slapping “D.C.” on caps and garments — only to walk away from all of that, for the sweetheart deal across the river, your Braves New World.And if there is any truth to the reporting that Leonsis was irritated by teenage kids performing … Go-Go music, outside of Capital One? Well, it’s hard to know how to process that. Buskers? That’s an issue?? Good Lord.(After this was initially published, I was informed that Leonsis’ issue is not with the street musicians who perform in front of Capital One on event nights, but there’s a concern about one person in particular who has been aggressive with passersby, both in front of the arena and other businesses nearby.)If you’re not from here, you may not understand why a Wizards/Capitals move to Virginia is especially difficult for D.C. residents to accept. It’s just four miles away from Capital One, Leonsis said Wednesday.It feels like the Grand Canyon, psychically.First, traffic. The dance of putting a 20,000-seat arena, practice facility, and new restaurants/entertainment venues into an area surrounded by Reagan National Airport, Amazon II and a large, busy mall, with many incoming and surrounding roads that are currently one- or two-laners, is daunting. Sources involved with the discussions said Wednesday that significant improvements to the roads surrounding the proposed site, along with increased light- and heavy-rail services, are part of the deal. It will be, nonetheless, a much longer commute for many — if they opt to come.Will fans who’ve taken a 30-45-minute Metro ride from the Maryland suburbs to Gallery Place downtown be willing to add another 20-30 minutes of riding time round trip to get to and from Alexandria? For 7 p.m. starts for Wizards or Caps games?Second … well, put it like this. The way that many Virginia residents feel about coming into the District for a night out, when they have One Loudoun or Reston Town Center available, closer-in? District residents feel the same way about going out to Alexandria for a night out, when we have Penn Quarter or Columbia Heights or NoMa to patronize. You don’t feel safe coming up here? Many of us don’t feel safe going out there. You have your reasons. We have ours.It just feels like, again, the District’s been kicked in the stomach – blamed, because COVID cut the number of offices operating downtown down like a scythe, leaving restaurants and bars with fewer patrons for lunch or dinner. Make no mistake, though: Mayor Muriel Bowser takes a Big L here. Her job was to prevent something like this from happening, because you can’t replace the Caps and Wizards, and the energy they’ve brought to downtown. I know it was difficult to find the kind of money needed to keep Leonsis from wanderlust. That, however, is the job. They cannot leave on your watch. They are leaving on hers.I don’t doubt that the decision was difficult, maybe even painful, for Leonsis. It would have been thus helpful to him to express what he was feeling Wednesday to reporters who asked to speak with him after the press conference, rather than rebuff them. And he and his team have ideas for how to transform Capital One, now freed from having to cross off dozens of potential days on the calendar every year for Wizards and Capitals games, to keep the building busy more often than not. Ice shows. Concerts. Activities in tandem with the D.C. Convention Center, and/or Events D.C. The return of the Mystics to Capital One, after playing at the Entertainment and Sports Arena in Southeast. (Speaking of which: what exactly does Leonsis plan to do, now, with ESA, about which he spoke so grandly, just a few years ago?)But, nothing replaces a sports team in a city’s soul. Nothing.You know one of the big reasons I came to The Athletic in 2018? I was in San Francisco in the spring of that year, watching the Capitals play the Penguins in the Eastern Conference semifinals, in my hotel room, while covering the Warriors and Rockets. If you’re from D.C., you knew, whether you Rocked the Red on the regular or not, how big a pain in the butt the Penguins were to the Caps for a decade, how desperately Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Bäckström wanted, needed, to beat Sidney Crosby and the Pens. It was Town Business.So when Evgeny Kuznetsov scored on that breakaway overtime goal to seal the series over the Penguins, and the broadcast cut to the cheering crowds outside of Capital One, in Penn Quarter, deliriously happy, and young, and diverse, having finally slain the beast, it did something to me. I said to myself, in that hotel room, “look at how happy the city is. That is awesome. I’d like to be a part of chronicling that.”And I was, as I witnessed first-hand the Nationals winning the World Series, and the Mystics winning the WNBA title behind “Playoff Emma,” within weeks of one another in 2019. And the joy that those franchises brought to my hometown was immeasurable, and forever.I love this city, my city. And my city was wounded, grievously so, Wednesday morning, when men and women on the other side of the river toasted their good fortune, their deal well done, and didn’t seem to give a damn about the pain left behind.(Photo of Ted Leonsis and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin: Win McNamee / Getty Images) !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '207679059578897'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

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[tsportsday]

How could this happen?That question swept through the offices of NFL teams last week after The Athletic broke the news that Amit Patel, 31, a former employee in the finance department of the Jacksonville Jaguars, allegedly stole more than $22 million from the team over a four-year period.Patel was a mid-level employee who worked for the Jaguars from 2018-23. He allegedly created fraudulent charges on the club’s virtual credit card and then covered his tracks by sending falsified files to the team’s accounting department. According to a charging document, he used that money to buy vehicles, a condominium and a designer watch worth over $95,000. He also purchased cryptocurrency, splurged on luxury travel for himself and others and used the funds to keep a criminal defense lawyer on retainer. Patel’s attorney said that the vast majority of the $22 million he stole were gambling losses; Patel allegedly placed bets on football and daily fantasy sports with online gambling sites.Patel is expected to plead guilty to multiple charges — wire fraud and an illegal monetary transaction — in a court appearance Thursday, his attorney, Alex King, said.In a statement, the Jaguars said that the franchise engaged “experienced law and accounting firms to conduct a comprehensive independent review, which concluded that no other team employees were involved in or aware of his criminal activity.” That fact makes the question people around the league were asking last week even more salient: How was Patel, working alone, able to steal more than twice the amount quarterback Trevor Lawrence counts against the Jaguars’ salary cap?The Athletic spoke to two people familiar with Patel’s work for the Jaguars as well as nine people who work or have worked in finance for NFL teams or other pro sports franchises. Patel was no mastermind, people who knew him said, but rather a guy in the right place at the right time. The Jaguars may be a franchise worth an estimated $4 billion (according to Forbes), but the team’s finance department was understaffed. And turnover in key positions and a switch to a new credit card system created an opening that Patel exploited. The people who knew him and others who work or have worked for NFL teams questioned why Jacksonville didn’t have better safeguards in place that would have made it more difficult for Patel to get away with what he did and for so long.“If you’re running a tight business, this would be impossible to pull off more than once,” said a former chief operating officer for an AFC team. “For (four) years, somebody was asleep at the switch.”“I know people won’t believe it. But he was super basic.”That was how one person who knew Patel during his time working for the Jaguars described him. That person and others who spoke to The Athletic were granted anonymity to discuss his work, which remains under federal investigation. Patel didn’t wear fancy clothes or flash his new expensive watch or brag about trips he took on private jets with friends. “Aside from the fact that he drove a Tesla, if you were to see Amit, you wouldn’t assume like, Oh, here’s a dude that is siphoning millions of dollars from his job,” the source said.Patel was friendly and well-liked in the office. His job required him to interact with many department heads, and the source said he had “really great connections with everyone across the organization.” Patel oversaw the budget activity for each department, and he was responsible for helping department heads code individual expenses. If an expense came through on a corporate credit card, Patel was the person Jaguars employees would go to to ask: Hey, where does this need to go?The staffing hierarchy for an NFL office is similar to any organization: coordinator, manager, director, vice president, senior vice president. Patel joined the Jaguars in 2018 as the coordinator of financial planning and analysis and was not promoted until three years later — to manager of financial planning and analysis. So the bulk of the alleged fraud occurred when he was a coordinator.Court documents detail how Patel helped prepare the Jaguars’ monthly financial statements, oversaw department budgets and acted as the administrator of various programs, including the Jaguars virtual corporate card program. In October 2019, Patel’s direct supervisor, the director of financial planning and analysis, moved to a role in a different department and was not replaced. Two sources familiar with Patel’s work for the team said two other staffers also left the finance department, forcing others, including Patel, to pick up their work. It was not uncommon for staffers to arrive at work at 8 a.m. and not leave until 9 p.m.“There was some transition in the organization which I believe created an opportunity for this to flourish,” said one source.Added King, Patel’s attorney: “They were short-staffed in those departments. Normally you’d have segregation of duties, those kinds of internal checks and balances and they had lost people through attrition. … You’re supposed to have Person A do this part and Person B do this part as a check and balance and segregation of duties and all of a sudden he was doing both roles.” Everbank Field, home of the Jacksonville Jaguars. (Sam Greenwood / Getty Images)The Jaguars switched to a virtual credit card system after Patel had been with the team for about a year. VCCs are considered more secure than having employees carry around physical cards, and they keep the card information private when making online transactions. However, it takes time for employees to transition to the new system, and the person introducing the system is relied upon to answer questions. He or she becomes the go-to, the trusted expert.Patel was that trusted person in Jacksonville. When he first started managing the VCC program, there was an employee from accounting who checked Patel’s submitted sheets, but then that employee left, and that layer of security also went away.“The number one rule you learn in accounting is you need to have dual controls for a reason,” said one source.The federal charging documents state that as the sole administrator of the VCC program, Patel had the power to create user accounts, approve new VCCs, request changes to the available credit for the VCCs, and classify all VCC transactions in the Jaguars’ general ledger. Each month, he created an “integration file” that listed each VCC transaction with cost coding information. But instead of accurately reporting the VCC transactions, Patel is alleged to have created fraudulent entries using a variety of methods to ensure that the total dollar amount of VCC expenses matched the balances paid by the Jaguars. Charging documents state that he “identified legitimate recurring VCC transactions, such as catering, airfare and hotel charges, and then duplicated those transactions; he inflated the amounts of recurring VCC transactions; he entered completely fictitious transactions that might sound plausible, but that never actually occurred; and he moved legitimate VCC charges from upcoming months into the month of the integration file that was immediately due to the accounting department.”People who might assume an NFL franchise would be a tightly monitored operation are not wrong. Still, in Jacksonville, that description only applied to the football side of the business, because the league office monitors each team for salary cap compliance.“We were so anal about everything,” said a former Jacksonville employee on the football side. “It went down to the penny. Constant communication with internal accounting, constant communication with the NFL management council, with player personnel (in) NFL headquarters, so by the time an official audit (from the NFL) came down, it was yesterday’s news.”Audits of the non-football side of the Jaguars did happen, according to a source, but they did not scrutinize every transaction. “The thing with any audit is everything is samples. So if they pull a sample and the support aligns and supports the transaction, then there are not that many questions.”In 2019, the FBI caught Sacramento Kings chief revenue officer Jeff David stealing $13.4 million from five companies by representing to them that payments they made were going to the Kings, when instead they were going to bank accounts that only he controlled. David was sentenced to seven years in prison but was granted an early release in September 2023.An ESPN article chronicling the mess in Sacramento described how it became a “cautionary tale” within NBA circles, with CFOs sharing different methods of internal stress tests at the league’s annual sales and marketing meeting. One NBA team president told ESPN the franchise “initiated a full audit of its operations” days after David’s fraud became public knowledge.David was a top executive stealing from other companies, not a lower-level employee allegedly defrauding his own organization. But the reaction from the NBA community mirrors what is now happening across the NFL.“We saw a mess out there with the Sacramento Kings, so it’s not the first time,” one current AFC team president said. “But you certainly step back and think, what do we have in place?”According to interviews with officials from other NFL teams as well as individuals working in finance at other professional sports franchises, the Jaguars may be an outlier in how little they were doing to monitor an employee with so much control over spending. Most of those interviewed were gobsmacked that one person would have unchecked oversight of the VCC setup.“Talk about having egg on your face. That’s a whole f—-ing omelet,” said a former finance specialist for an NHL team.A former finance employee for an NFC team said that their CFO ran the corporate card program, accounts payable received the statements for the cards, and then a manager approved each report. That finance employee reviewed the court filing that detailed Patel’s alleged crimes and said the sheer number of falsified transactions he created should have resulted in detection at an earlier point.“A lot of times a big number might not look like an outlier,” said a former chief administrative officer of an NFL team. “Usually, you have someone who charges a payment and then expenses it to someone else. Then the money comes back to the budget and you see the figure hitting your account as an outflow of cash. Someone would notice if they turned in a bill for $100,000 and it was paid out by someone else at $150,000.”But if one person handles multiple layers of the process, it can go “upside-down” quickly. “It certainly was a flawed system they had in Jacksonville,” he said. “Somebody was given way too much leeway and way too much trust.”A former NFL COO said in a text message that he had “never heard of an employee having that kind of access without layered controls in place. … Usually everybody up to and including CEO level has another party who has to approve expenses. Sometimes it might be at a certain level (say above $10k) but their situation sounds highly unusual.”Another former NFL COO said that Patel’s alleged fraud would likely have been detected at his organization because his fraudulent charges would have blown the annual budget. “Once a fiscal year was underway, each department head would receive a monthly update of expenses for the month versus the plan. Sometimes the actual spending might vary from the planned spending for simple timing reasons. Anything over a 5 percent variance would receive scrutiny from a number of sources including the finance department, the person that budget reported to and/or myself,” he said in a text message.The spreadsheet integration file Patel allegedly falsified might not have even been reviewed by superiors, said the former finance employee for an NFC team, but rather something that accounting merely uploaded to a server. “It’s accounts payable, so that’s not like a fine tooth comb. When it gets back to accounts payable, you’re under the assumption that it’s all taken care of, and it’s ready to be paid,” the employee said.A third former COO explained that teams often undergo three different audits annually: a league audit focused on compliance with the salary cap, then two others, one done internally, then another initiated by a banking institution (if the team borrows money). The internal audit would have been the one most likely to detect Patel’s alleged fraud, the COO explained.The finance people who spoke to The Athletic said they expected NFL teams to review their reporting structure and potentially beef up those internal audits in light of what happened in Jacksonville. The senior members of the Jaguars’ financial operations while Patel was there remain in their posts. According to the team’s website, the organization has increased the size of the finance department by six employees since Patel was fired in February. Two of those positions are new — a vice president of accounting, and a senior manager of accounting. The team added in a statement: “With the assistance of external experts, (the organization) has extensively reviewed its own policies and procedures, added staff to its finance department, and taken other measures to ensure the integrity of its financial controls.”As for Patel, his attorney said Patel checked himself into an inpatient recovery center this past spring and has cooperated with the government and the Jaguars. King said his client is remorseful, takes “full responsibility for his actions” and has opened a gambling addiction recovery center, where he plans to be “active in the treatment community.”He was also working for Uber, driving the black Tesla that is referenced in court documents as one of the spoils from his alleged crimes. (His attorney said Patel purchased the car with his own money.)A few days before his alleged fraud became a national headline, Patel picked up Chris Chaney, a product marketer from Cincinnati, and his wife from the Jacksonville airport and drove them 40 minutes to their Airbnb in Jacksonville Beach. They were in town to see the Bengals play the Jaguars.Chaney said Patel made small talk as he drove, pointing out the country club where he is a member and telling the couple he’d been a Jaguars fan since he moved to Jacksonville as a kid. Patel told Chaney he’d worked in finance for the team but was recently laid off because of some restructuring.(The Athletic’s Tim Graham contributed to this story.)(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: James Gilbert, Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '207679059578897'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

[tsportsday]

Nick Kyrgios is having a filtered coffee over ice at a Venice breakfast joint. No food for him, though. He’s not a big breakfast guy anyway, and he is going on a hike in the mountains above Malibu later and doesn’t want to feel full. He’s been in Los Angeles for a month, doing some commentary at The Tennis Channel, filming interviews with a handful of other renegade athletes and celebrities for a new “video podcast”. Here in southern California, he can walk the streets of Venice, or along the promenade by the beach in Santa Monica, or show up at an LA Lakers NBA game without the hassles of his Australian homeland.“I don’t really go days here without people coming up, say hello, stuff like that,” he says, “but then, you know, they let you go about your business.”He also has another big project cooking — a deal with OnlyFans, the subscription social-media platform best known for featuring self-made pornography now trying to broaden its appeal by signing joint ventures with bold-face names who want to make money from their content rather than just sharing it on Instagram. He promises he has no plans to become a porn star, though he flashes a devilish grin when his manager shows one picture with the back of his shorts pulled down slightly.“Behind the scenes,” he explains. “Relationship stuff.” Anything missing from this portfolio? Like, maybe, tennis? Not for Kyrgios. And not for another few more months, at least. His latest ailment in a year filled with them is ligament damage to his right wrist that required surgery in October. Nearly two months later, he still greets you with a left-handed fist bump rather than a righty handshake. Cranking 130mph serves and pasting lines with that nasty, whipping, curling forehand seems a ways away. Kyrgios being Kyrgios — the sport’s most enigmatic and beguiling player, a “tennis genius” in the words of Goran Ivanisevic, Novak Djokovic’s coach and himself a Wimbledon finalist (and winner) — he’s actually totally OK with that. Has been for quite a while, in fact.  “I played a full year last year, no injuries; had great results, had a great year,” Kyrgios says, wearing basketball shorts and a hoodie with a picture of Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle on it. “I barely played this year, two surgeries, and now still, I would probably say they’re both equally as fine, which is crazy. Most tennis players would be like, ‘This was just depressing’. People would be struggling, they would be like, ‘What do I do? Who’s my identity?’. This year, it’s been equally as enjoyable as last year. That’s just my personality and how different it is. That’s the crazy thing.”This is not how the plot was being drawn up 12 months ago after a startling season. That campaign included the men’s doubles title at the Australian Open, the singles final at Wimbledon, the singles title at the Citi Open in Washington, D.C., and the quarter-finals of Indian Wells and the U.S. Open. Most importantly, he was happy, newly in love, and seemed to have put his years of depression, self-abuse and heavy drinking behind him as he became one of the biggest attractions in the sport, a tennis spectacle drawing fans that had never been interested in tennis before. He’d even befriended Novak Djokovic, his polar opposite and one of his biggest critics. His behavior could still veer toward the boorish. A thrown racket nearly careened into a ball boy. Chair umpires penalized him for any number of offenses and he sometimes engaged in jawing matches. But he had also figured out how to use his tempestuousness strategically in the psychological warfare with opponents that is so much a part of the game. He drove Stefanos Tsitsipas mad during the third round of Wimbledon, pushing Tsitsipas to go head-hunting instead of focusing on winning points and games. Kyrgios won in four rowdy sets. Tsitispas called Kyrgios a bully. Kyrgios called Tsitsipas “soft”.The drama was irresistible. As the new season dawned, a dialed-in Kyrgios figured to be the most dangerous player in the game and a magic bullet for a sport looking to appeal to new and younger audiences. Kyrgios’ relationship with Djokovic has improved (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)Didn’t happen. Injuries. Burnout. Kyrgios played just one match this year, a straight-sets loss in Stuttgart in June to Wu Yibing. Maybe this was Kyrgios’ body psychosomatically shutting down after a 2022 season that had left him mentally depleted and wondering how the all-time greats such as Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer had survived on the tennis treadmill for so many years.“I just don’t think I could do three seasons like that in a row. I wouldn’t be able to play anymore,” he said. “I was spent after I got home after the U.S. Open, I was cooked. I was so mentally fried. I was just so tired. Physically, I felt fine but just mentally, I was over it. So maybe this year is a counterbalance.”Kyrgios’ left knee began swelling in the weeks leading up to the Australian Open. He withdrew before his first match and had surgery to remove a cyst and repair a tear in the lateral meniscus. The recovery, which was expected to take eight weeks, took longer than expected. Then, while training for Wimbledon in Mallorca, Spain, a pain in his right wrist, which has come and gone ever since a 2015 fall during a match against Grigor Dimitrov, grew intense. He dropped his racket, and hasn’t played since, pulling out of Wimbledon before his first match. He wasn’t exactly heartbroken, having told reporters the weekend before the tournament began that he had been dreading his return to the grind of his pro tennis existence, all those months on the road far from home and the intense scrutiny that left him depleted.Doctors initially advised rest and physical therapy. Further examination revealed ligament damage that required what his agent, Stuart Duguid, described as a “minor procedure” eight weeks ago, with a recovery expected to stretch through the first months of 2024.Kyrgios said he hasn’t played since dropping his racket on that Spanish practice court in the spring. “It’s been a minute,” he says, but he has no doubt his innate sense for the game has not gone away. “I still feel like if you put a racket in my hand it wouldn’t feel foreign at all.” With a long layoff and a blank schedule looming, Duguid asked Kyrgios if he had given any thought to what he wanted to do after his playing days were over. Kyrgios, who has done his share of sparring with the media, said he and his manager Daniel Horsfall, also a close friend, had discussed his desire to do television work — commentary, an interview show, finding ways to share the story of his unlikely rise and at times tortured existence at the top of the tennis world. “Why are you waiting?” Duguid asked Kyrgios. “Why not start to dip your toe in that world now?”It was a line of thinking that Kyrgios said was very un-Australian and part of the reason he sometimes prefers America to his native land.  “I feel more respected here,” he says, adding that Australians “don’t expect athletes to do anything else but play their sport, which is really weird. I definitely see myself coming back at some stage and playing at a high level again. But because of how intense last year was for me, this was a year to just balance it out”.Indeed, last month Kyrgios was behind a desk at The Tennis Channel’s Santa Monica studios providing analysis of the ATP Tour Finals in Turin, Italy. “Total pro,” Ken Solomon, the chief executive at The Tennis Channel said of Kyrgios. “On time. Actually, early. Well dressed. Did his homework, and gave insights that you can only get from a player at that level who knew the competition in a way few others do.”Kyrgios does not disagree. He is a fan of the commentary work of Jim Courier, the former world No 1 and Tennis Channel star. Others, not so much.“Sometimes it’s hard to watch these old heads kind of break down the game all the time for new fans. It’s like some of the stuff they say doesn’t make sense. Jim Courier is really good, the way he articulates things, but some of these other people, I’m just like, ‘What are you talking about?’. Like, ‘How do you know?’.”He holds in special contempt people who argue that stars of previous eras, even all-time greats such as Pete Sampras, could survive at the top of the hyper-athletic, modern power game.“The game was so slow back then,” he says. “I’ve watched Boris Becker and I’m not saying they weren’t good in their time, but to say that they would be just as good now, it’s absurd,” he says. “A big serve back then was like 197 to 200 (km per hour — about 122mph). People like me, we serve 220 consistently, to corners. It’s a whole different ball game.”Now Kyrgios is rolling…“I’m not saying they wouldn’t have found their way,” he says of the old-timers. “But serve and volley, to do it all the time now, you need to be serving 220, because if you serve anything less than 220, bro, Djokovic eats you alive. He eats you alive. Bro, Lleyton Hewitt destroyed Sampras one year at the U.S. Open. That was the first prototype of someone who could return serve. (Note to Kyrgios, Andre Agassi had a pretty good service return, too.)  “He made Sampras look like sh*t. And what would Djokovic do to someone like Sampras? It would be a cleanup. If Hewitt was doing it, Djokovic would destroy him. He would eat him alive.”More recently he’s been filming a series of episodes of an interview show called Good Trouble. Naomi Osaka, Frances Tiafoe, boxing’s Mike Tyson, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and Jay Shetty, the author and podcaster, have sat with him for an initial season that Duguid says will drop on YouTube early next year and hopefully attract a distribution partner for a second season.“It’s full-on — 30 minutes of one-on-one intimacy talking about their struggles and making it through that,” Kyrgios says. “That’s my project.” It’s part of an ongoing effort to get people to know him beyond the artifice they see on the tennis court. He recalls a recent interview with Piers Morgan, when the British broadcaster admitted to Kyrgios that, before meeting him, he hated him. “I was like, ‘You didn’t even know me at all’. Crazy.” Kyrgios is sure he will play again (Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)Then there is the OnlyFans deal he’s been gathering content for.(He and Horsfall are at first somewhat horrified that I need them to explain just what OnlyFans is. But they do not hold it against me. “I love that,” he tells me.)“Everyone initially will think that maybe Nick’s getting into the porn industry,” Horsfall says. “Then they’ll find out, well, actually, it’s just (going) behind the scenes.”This is where his followers will get the most intimate look into his soul, his struggles with mental health, and his relationship with Costeen Hatzi, a social media influencer in her own right and interior designer.There’s Nick in the gym, at home with Hatzi, on a hike, giving wellness tips.Keily Blair, OnlyFans’ chief executive, said in a statement that Kyrgios, like her company, was “a disruptor, so it’s great to see him joining our platform, finding new ways to share his content and express himself. We can’t wait to see what he has in store for his fans”. Kyrgios said he plans to ask followers what they want to see from him and then deliver on that.At this point, it’s probably worth noting that there are an awful lot of people who would really like to see Kyrgios play more tennis. There are not a lot of players who hit trick shots through the legs mid-rally to throw off an opponent’s rhythm. Few have more pure talent and can make a tennis ball dance the way Kyrgios can. But tennis can get complicated for Kyrgios. He will play again, he says, but he is not shy about sharing the view that the 11-month tennis season is an exhausting slog no elite athlete should be subject to. If Saudi Arabia, or some other deep-pocketed investor, ever tried to organize a barnstorming league for the top 16 players that required far less of his time and energy, he is there for it.  “I would have been the first one to jump off,” he says. “I would have gone. I would have just let the ATP ship sink.” He doesn’t understand how just a moderately talented NBA player such as Kyle Kuzma of the Washington Wizards could sign a four-year contract this summer worth $100million — nearly as much as Roger Federer earned in prize money ($130m) during his entire career.“He’s not even a top 50 player,” Kyrgios said of Kuzma. He is firmly against merging the men’s and women’s tours. “If we’re merging, you merge the draws, you merge everything,” he says.He even has some issues with equal prize money at the Grand Slams, since the women play best-of-three-sets matches while the men play best-of-five. “I played for four hours at the A.O. (Australian Open), then (Elina) Svitolina played for like 40 minutes and we both got paid the same,” he says.He says he loves watching Coco Gauff, Serena Williams, Osaka. They and a select few others, such as Iga Swiatek, would be valuable assets for such a barnstorming male/female tennis show if it ever happened. “But why is tennis the only sport that deals with this stuff?” he asks. “If the WNBA said, ‘Let’s merge’, the NBA would ridicule them.”Add it to the list of things that make the life of a professional tennis player excessively complex to Kyrgios.If playing tennis for a living was as simple as going out on the court and playing and competing and having fun, he’d be back on the tour in a heartbeat. There are few things better than pulling off a trick shot or hitting a clean winner against the best players in the world and hearing the roars of a packed stadium descend over him.But because of his talent and the spectacles that his matches often become, he attracts an outsized degree of attention whenever he competes. Fans love to celebrate his show and his victories. A few consecutive wins whet the Australian nation’s appetite for the moment when he puts it all together and delivers on the promise of his skills. However, when he loses his temper or falls in matches, critics revert to the narrative of so much talent wasted on an unserious mind. He then picks up his phone, heads down the rabbit hole of social media commentary, and tennis becomes misery once more. “I’m just acting all the time,” Kyrgios says. “It’s exhausting.”He will be back. He’s sure of it. “Somewhere next year” is the target, he says. Still a year and a half shy of turning 30, he should have several good seasons left if he can get healthy. He will not set a deadline like he did earlier this year with his knee and rush to meet it, though. The knee never got to where he needed it to, and maybe that ended up putting more stress on his wrist. He has spoken with Osaka, another player who has struggled with mental health and who gave birth to her first child in July, about her time away from the sport. He has watched her plot her comeback and taken notes. Like Osaka, Kyrgios wants to spend enough time on the practice court to regain his confidence. Then he will set himself to the work of getting mentally prepared to commit to the tennis life and all the ambivalence it stirs in him. “It’s like, are you ready to go on a four-month trip?” he said. “I won’t come back until I’m ready to do something like that.”(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton) !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '207679059578897'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

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