Last week, Nick Kyrgios posted an apology on Instagram. He had tested positive for cocaine, from a sample taken in Mallorca back in June, and the ITIA provisionally suspended him with immediate effect from the 4th of August. He said he made a huge mistake and he takes full responsibility for it.
I read it and recognised the shape of it immediately, because I have been on the other side of that exact headline and reading about it is a completely different thing to living through it.
I have watched one of the biggest personalities and most high-profile players I ever worked with test positive for cocaine. The club had only just been informed, as had he, and what none of us knew was that he had agreed to go live on Sky Sports News to talk about it himself, before the press got hold of it. The journalist who was about to interview him rang me directly, giving me five minutes’ notice before he went on. She refused to tell me what was going into the interview.
His agent had arranged the interview without telling the club and, what burnt the most, without telling me. I understood why they might recommend that decision, because if the press got there first he would be caught on the back foot and lose control of his own story entirely. But equally, he knew I had only ever had his best interests at heart. What it said to me was ‘we don’t trust you’. I rang him and just about managed to ask “are you okay?”, before the agent took the phone from him and cut the line off.
My office was five minutes from the stadium with no television in it, so I picked up my laptop and ran down to the ground, and sat in the player’s dining hall watching the interview unfold.
My phone rang off the hook during the interview and long after it too. It rang so many times that it drained the battery completely.
Still to come: the moment inside the clubhouse, the argument I lost with the CEO over how he was treated, what happened to a second player that same year, and the question about proper care in sport that I still don’t have a clean answer for.
