Krygios Serves Something Different: Recapping Break Point - Episode One
A recap of "Maverick," the first episode of the Netflix docu-series about pro tennis
Last summer, over a period spanning from the final set at Wimbledon (London, England, July) to the first round of the National Bank Open (Montreal, Canada, August), Nick Krygios, the mercurial tennis phenom, went 73 consecutive service games without once losing his serve. This streak of dominance peaked with a pair of titles at the oppressively muggy Citi Open, in Washington D.C., where the 27-year-old Australian’s serve cut scythe-like through the swamp humidity and his shellshocked opponents, the shot his single biggest weapon as he became the first male player to raise both the singles and doubles trophies in the tournament’s 52-year history.
No two serves in tennis, at any level, are quite the same—compare, for a glorious contrast, the bafflingly involved service motion of Federico Delbonis with the ruthless, replicable service efficiency of Novak Djokovic—but Krygios’s serve distinguishes itself from its contemporaries by being fastest in two different yet equally astounding respects. First, it’s one of the fastest on the ATP Tour in terms of the ball’s actual speed through space, averaging around 120 mph and topping out at 150 mph as it skids flatly towards its unlucky returner. Second and more notably, Krygios’s serve is the fastest because he hits as many serves as possible, as quickly as possible, at an in-game frequency higher than every other current pro. This elevated firing rate grants Krygios a massive competitive advantage, albeit one without much strategic planning behind it, since for him winning the game feels like a secondary concern; his priority is getting the chore of playing tennis over with. (For evidence, see this representative game against Ugo Humbert from 2021, which Krygios won in 43 seconds. Four serves, three aces1.)
Krygios’s serve, in the longstanding tennis tradition, acts as a distillation of his personality off the court; his play and conduct are infamously volatile, capricious, punctuated by alternating flashes of immature cruelty and endearing, unguarded vulnerability. Given that his mother maintains a collection of his smashed rackets, it is easy to understand why Netflix would frame the premiere episode of Break Point, its new docu-sports series, around Krygios’s experiences at last year’s Australian Open. Krygios may not always play consistent, world-class tennis, but his game and theatrics are consistently entertaining, primed for the high-low pleasures of streaming TV. Blessed with more talent than perhaps any other player of his generation, he strikes his serves and forehands with a purpose and violence that cannot be looked away from, his irreconcilable love and hatred for the game literalized and floating before his eyes in the form of a fluffy yellow ball that, maybe, if he just hit it hard enough, might detonate upon impact and, like a family curse broken at last, release him from the maddening prison of his own superhuman abilities.
Break Point was conceived and produced by Box to Box Films, the production company behind Netflix’s acclaimed Formula One series, Drive to Survive. Professional tennis, in terms of popularity in the United States, ranks somewhere above dirt bike racing and below professional wrestling, so in theory Break Point would function for American audiences as a similar introduction to a niche, somewhat stuffy sport whose foremost centers of enthusiasm are still mostly European. The best tennis players, in another parallel to F1, have for over two decades come from Europe, and Break Point’s main narrative on the men’s side concerns the attempts of the born-post-1995 cohort to finally topple “the Big Three” of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. As of this writing, those three players have won 63 Grand Slam singles titles combined. Enter Nick Krygios, who defeated all three of them by age 22. (His Grand Slam singles title count? Zero.)
The stylistic and structural influences of Drive to Survive are apparent from the opening sequences of “Maverick,” Break Point’s episode about Krygios trying to scale the singles and doubles ladders of the 2022 Australian Open. In addition to Krygios, the series’s initial five installments follow seven other players from the men’s and women’s tours, but to simplify the proceedings (and make room for a few ineffective explanations of tennis’s wacky scoring system), the focus remains on Krygios and his status as the sport’s biggest pariah. (It’s a curious angle to take as Djokovic, then the World #1, was being deported from Australia for his refusal to get vaccinated against COVID.2) As potentially more interesting narratives loom, we are told about Krygios’s not-uninteresting background in the Australian capital of Canberra, his meteoric rise to tennis stardom at 19, and, at least until the Netflix camera crews started following him, the relative squandering of his on-the-court promise. The visuals are sleek and seductive, the stakes outlined clearly. An overdue Changing of the Guard is underway in men’s tennis, a moment of inflection as gripping and consequential as a break point in a close match. If only the show would tell us what a “break point” is.
What gradually becomes apparent, watching Break Point, is that the formula honed in Drive to Survive, which uses the backstories and struggles of the racers to enhance the competition on the track, doesn’t transfer seamlessly to the 11-month schedule and on-court rhythms of tennis, however cinematic and compelling the sport may be. An F1 race pits 20 drivers and their teams against one another over the course of three days; each of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments sees 128 players battling it out over two weeks, to say nothing of the qualifying rounds and the dozens of precursor tournaments distributed throughout the clay, grass, hardcourt, and indoor seasons. Winning a Grand Slam singles title demands a player to triumph for seven matches in a row, to run multiple tough mudders within a longer marathon, and all of these two-to-six-hour matches are their own self-contained dramas replete with emotional mountains and valleys, circus shots, physical and psychological anguish, grueling rallies, evolving tactics, strengths neutralized, weaknesses exploited, crowd reactions and interactions, and the question of when it would be most advantageous to request a bathroom break. Even for players eliminated in the early rounds, an hour-long episode feels like an insufficient container.
Consider the scenes that precede Krygios’s first-round match against Liam Broady, a likable journeyman player whose ATP ranking hovers around 125 ± 50 in the world. In the lead-up to the match, Krygios talks about how, well into his teenage years, he was a chubby un-athletic little troll. A home movie shows Krygios awkward and chunky, in a bike helmet and superhero cape, singing and giving the middle finger to whoever is holding the camcorder. You begin to realize that Krygios is what might happen if Eric Cartman had a growth spurt, picked up a racket, and discovered a preternatural gift for groundstrokes. With sufficient information about Krygios and Broady, a storyline would begin to take shape, then cohere on the court: The bullied acquires the power to bully others; how will he wield that power?
Krygios defeats Broady summarily, in a more-or-less effortless win that features Krygios deploying between-the-legs “tweener” shots, threatening to hit the forever-taboo underarm serve, and generally toying with Broady as a future serial killer would a gerbil. Whether or not this is acceptable gamesmanship is debatable, but it’s undeniable that Break Point fails to adequately capitalize on one essential element of the match, its internal tensions, and the appeal of tennis in general: that’s the opponent; in this case, Liam Broady. As diehard fans know (and newer fans should be made aware of), the financial difference between making the first and second rounds at a Grand Slam, for a player outside the Top 100, can mean the difference between another year on the circuit and giving lessons to toddlers, middle managers, and retirees at a country club until you die. That Break Point breezes through the match in a matter of minutes feels like it’s denying the audience a chance to deepen its investment in Krygios, Broady, and the smaller points and matches that accrue into the sport’s awesome moments of catharsis. Solitary as tennis may be, no match happens without a human being on each side of the net. The first round of the Australian Open, though the casual viewer would be hard-pressed to know it, was Liam Broady’s final3. A potentially fascinating chapter in the story becomes a footnote skimmed for minimal comprehension.
On the singles side, Krygios flares out in the second round, dispatched with little fanfare by Daniil Medvedev, the reigning US Open champ who would go on to play Nadal in the final. Thankfully, it is here that Break Point stops forcing its narrative on reality and starts reacting to it, turning its lens to follow Krygios and Thanasi Kokkankis, his childhood friend and countryman, on their deep run as a doubles partnership. Playing with Kokkankis, whose own poignant and unfortunate injury history gets glossed over by the show, seems to unlock an uncharacteristic joy and self-control in Krygios, a known basketball obsessive who has repeatedly said he prefers team sports to the one he plays professionally. All of a sudden, Break Point can replicate what makes Drive to Survive so engrossing and affecting, as we see tiny signs of progress in Krygios’s game mirror and complement the steps forward in his personal life. He seems to take one nanosecond longer between his serves, allowing the teeny earnest part of himself to relish the chance to share the court and his talent with his oft-disappointed fans and Kokkanakis, his best mate. Krygios and Kokkankis reach the Australian Open doubles final, and they win it. The frenzied crowd is so in their corner that you’d never suspect their opponents, Matthew Ebden and Max Purcell, are from Australia, too.
One of the unique draws of contemporary pro tennis in the era of Hawkeye computer-assisted line calls is how the court has become, at least in terms of the judges and linesmen, a rare space evacuated of human error and folly. Though mistaken in-or-out calls (and their resultant arguments) were a regular part of the sport for over a century, cameras and sensors and instant replay now guarantee that every last ball, down to the millimeter, gets called correctly. No referees are seeing a phantom foul in the closing seconds; no umpire identifies a strike as a ball, swinging the momentum of a game or series or season. In tennis, it isn’t uncommon for the player who wins fewer points to eventually win the match, and yet it is one of society’s few examples of a pure meritocracy. So, it is important to note that Rafael Nadal, the then-20-time Grand Slam champion, won the Men’s Final at the Australian Open 2022, staging a comeback so dogged and inspiring and improbable that the sense of awe it evokes, like all of the most transcendent moments in sports, lies many heavens beyond the purview of our language. (You can see for yourself, starting at the 4:50 mark of the video above.)
A sports documentarian could not in a thousand lifetimes wish for a moment more weighted with spectacle and dramatic irony than Nadal beating Medvedev in a 5-hour-24-minute final. “That surely is the decisive point, the defining moment for Daniil,” says the commentator, as if prophecy has foretold Medvedev, after pummeling Nadal into almost certain submission, is about to suffer the most brutal imaginable loss. You cannot blame the producers of Break Point, likely limited by resources and access and release dates, for underplaying Nadal’s win, but the choice still feels like a disservice to every viewer regardless of their knowledge of tennis. In a show about the era of Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal coming to a close, the aging legend wrestles the title—and the mantle of the scrappy underdog—away from his sport’s inevitable inheritors. The producers of the show find themselves in a conundrum similar to the one faced by nearly all the male players in pro tennis. How do you upset the hierarchy in a true meritocracy? How do you chronicle the end of an era that refuses to end? A good place to start would be asking who is celebrating when the last point is played45. Then you can look to who’s on the other side of the net.
Textbook Definition = “A serve that successfully lands in the service box and does not touch the receiving player's racquet.” Layman’s Definition = “a serve hit so insanely fast and hard that it cannot be returned or even touched.”
Pickleball Holocaust still entertains the possibility that Djokovic was lying about his vaccination status, and leveraged tennis’s strict pandemic regulations to regroup after his humbling straight-sets loss to Daniil Medvedev in the final of the 2020 US Open.
Note: Liam Broady, currently ranked #165 in the world, still took home a not-insignificant ~$103,000 for his loss to Krygios.
