If Thanasi Kokkinakis broke a mirror in 2014, his seven years of bad luck must be due to run out about now.
There can’t be a single player in the draw at Melbourne Park who’s endured a more wretched run of injury and illness than the Australian 24-year-old, who’ll face Greek star Stefanos Tsitsipas at Rod Laver Arena on Thursday afternoon for a place in the Australian Open third round.
The last time Kokkinakis set foot on the court at Rod Laver Arena to play a match, it was 2014 and he was a raw 17-year-old with talent to burn and nothing to lose against then-world number one Rafael Nadal.
The seven years between that match and the start of this year’s tournament yielded just one win for Kokkinakis at Melbourne Park — a cruelly low return for a player of such immense talent.
It’s not that the Australian has underperformed, it’s that his body has not given him much of a chance to perform at all.
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Knee, shoulder, back, groin, pectoral muscle — if there’s a part of his body that Kokkinakis hasn’t injured, it’s only because medical science hasn’t discovered it yet.
That horrendous run of injuries has restricted Kokkinakis to fewer than 80 tour-level matches over the course of his career so far, and just seven at Melbourne Park prior to 2021.
It’s a shocking run of bad luck that threatened to derail one of the most exciting prospects Australian tennis has to offer, outside of Ash Barty, and Nick Kyrgios.
In case the injuries weren’t cruel enough, Kokkinakis suffered a bout of glandular fever that forced him to abandon his 2020 Australian Open campaign.
After deciding not to travel during the pandemic, Kokkinakis set himself the goal for the year to “put some weight back on look respectable in public.”
The world number 267 arrived at Melbourne Park without a clothing sponsor, and bought his tennis shirts for $6 a pop from KMart — a far cry from his days as one of Nike’s star recruits.
“So it’s been really hard, but again, I look on the moments where I’ve had success and the feelings I got from being on-court and having good wins. I use that to kind of fuel me for as long as I can,” he said after his first-round win over Soonwoo Kwon.
“I know I can’t do this forever, so even if I’m just struggling at certain moments I kind of hang on those moments to kind of push me through and just give it a crack.”
The year before Kokkinakis played Nadal at Rod Laver Arena, he’d played in the boys singles final on the same court, losing a tight match against Nick Kyrgios, who was a year older and had already reached the number one junior ranking.
That was the career trajectory for Kokkinakis at that point — playing the junior final one year, then facing the world’s best 12 months later.
At the time, John Newcombe rated Kokkinakis a better all-round prospect than Kyrgios, who would go on to win his first Grand Slam match, at the French Open, just a few months later.
Kokkinakis and Kyrgios are playing doubles together at the Australian Open — it’s been rare that they’ve been able to play at the same events over the past five years, let alone on the same court.
Nobody was happier than the flamboyant Canberran to see Kokkinakis finally get another win at Melbourne Park.
“To see him go through what he went through and to get back healthy and finally play the tennis that he’s capable of, that was amazing. He had tears in his eyes,” Kyrgios said after his second-round win against Ugo Humbert.
“I’ve been one of his closest friends, and I’ve seen it all, and I’m so proud of that kid, I swear. He was going to give up but he stayed with it.”
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Kyrgios wasn’t the only big name who was happy to see Kokkinakis back on the big stage, with no less than Roger Federer slipping the Australian a congratulatory message on Instagram, which Kokkinakis was happy to share publicly.
A win over Federer in Miami in 2018 has been one of the few high points for Kokkinakis over the past few years, and the Swiss great doesn’t seem to hold a grudge, even though the result cost him the world number one ranking.
Indeed, few players on the ATP Tour would begrudge Kokkinakis a stroke of luck given his trials over the past few years.
He’ll need all the luck he can get against Tsitsipas, but if anyone in the draw is due a measure of that it’s Kokkinakis.