Nick Kyrgios says the physical anguish Andy Murray put himself through to prolong his tennis career was “not worth it” and that he deserved to retire “more gracefully”.
The Scot, a three-time Grand Slam winner, retired in August following a straight-set defeat alongside Dan Evans in the Olympic men’s doubles quarter-finals.
Murray, 37, had major hip surgery in 2018 and 2019 and the Scot was openly talking about retirement at the 2019 Australian Open.
He managed to play for a further five years but failed to make it past the third round of any of the four majors.
Australian Kyrgios, who has not played competitively since August 2023 amid his own injury problems, says he has no plans to retire but will not put his body through the same turmoil as Murray did.
“I look at how Andy Murray’s doing it now, and how Rafael [Nadal] is going out, I don’t want to be like that either. I don’t want to be kind of crawling to the finish line in a sense,” Kyrgios said on The Louis Theroux podcast.
“What Andy Murray’s achieved in this sport is second to basically no-one… unless you are Novak [Djokovic], [Roger] Federer, or Nadal, like, the next person is Andy Murray.
“It’s like you’ve achieved everything. You deserve to go out, I think, a little bit more gracefully than he’s done.
“I think that the surgeries, the pain, it’s just not worth it, in my opinion.”