Exclusive: Operation Kyrgios has been running for 18 months in an underground Canberra gym.

Its focus has been on obscure ligaments and sinews of Australia’s most outrageously talented tennis player.

And its success will be measured by whether multiple medical experts can be defied by returning Nick Kyrgios to the Grand Slam circuit, beginning with the Australian Open.

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Kyrgios was in a bad way when he started training at The Den after undergoing radical wrist reconstruction surgery normally reserved for plumbers and other tradies who’d sustained a contact injury on a worksite.

“I wasn’t even able to hold grocery bags or twist the doorknob,” Kyrgios explained to A Current Affair.

“It wasn’t even about tennis. I wasn’t able to live without pain.”

The pain was coming from the scapholunate ligament in his right wrist which stabilises the joint.

He’d injured it at the 2015 Indian Wells tournament when he fell during a match with Grigor Dimitrov.

Kyrgios was told at the time that if he didn’t get immediate surgery, he’d only have to undergo even bigger surgery later in his career.

“I was 19 years old, I wasn’t going to have wrist surgery,” he said.

He gambled that he could keep playing using the two undamaged wrist ligaments.

By 2022, the injury was excruciating.

An MRI found the bad tear had become a full-blown rupture of the ligament.

“Multiple surgeons said that whatever surgery you want to get on this wrist, it wasn’t going to be likely that you’re going to come back playing high level tennis,” Kyrgios said.

Four holes and a piece of string

He secretly went under the knife of Adelaide surgeon Dr Michael Sandow who used three-dimensional anatomical mapping to stabilise and heal Kyrgios’ wrist by stitching four of his carpal bones with fine thread.

Or, as Kyrgios, 29, describes his wrist: “It’s a bit bionic now. It’s got four holes in it, and a piece of ‘string’ that they put in there, holding it all together.”

The job of trainer Mick Mackell, co-owner of The Den, and physiotherapist Will Maher has been to devise ways of resurrecting Kyrgios’ reconstructed wrist into the weapon that took him to the 2022 Wimbledon final.

Mackell and Maher told him to be patient, but six months out from the surgery he was still experiencing pain. Nine months in, the pain subsided.

The trainer and physio have tailored his exercises to steadily strengthen the newly-knitted wrist.

Kyrgios drags a sled with a 100kg weight up and down the side wall of the gym.

Mackell then attaches a giant rubber band to a hand grip and Kyrgios uses his exquisite footwork to play an invisible backhand before switching to an elegant forehand swish.

Despite the industrial set-up, it’s working to restore the poetry to Kyrgios’ movement.

“His fitness is great – really, really good,” Mackell said.

“He’s improved enormously. From what he says and from what his physio Will says, it’s the fittest he’s ever felt.”

But as ever for Nick Kyrgios, tennis isn’t just a fight on the court, it’s the one upstairs too.

“I’ve got serious demons in my head,” he says. “I definitely deal with them better now than I have, but yeah, it’s always been a bit of a roller coaster out there, especially when I’m playing in the Australian Open or Wimbledon.

“It’s four or five hours out there on your own, you start hearing some voices in your head, and you can have some pretty dark conversations with yourself.”

‘Super-talented, out of shape and a smart arse’

The game in which he is a genius is a lonely one, and yet Kyrgios has always preferred team sport.

Basketball is his great love.

So he surrounds himself with friends and fellow players to spur him through gym sessions and then two to three hours on indoor courts at Lyneham.

Multiple surgeons said that whatever surgery he had on his wrist, it wasn’t going to be likely he would come back playing high level tennis.

Childhood friend and fellow tennis player James Frawley, 30, is the closest Kyrgios has to a coach.

“Frawls”, as Kyrgios calls him, trains alongside him and is there to “make sure I don’t go off the rails”.

He has other regular company including Melbourne’s Stefan Vujic, 26, and 18-year-old rising star Charlie Camus from Canberra.

They help with the routine and you get the impression that without them he wouldn’t train so hard or so regularly.

They joke around a bit but they go hard too, measuring each other’s effort in sweat.

For a sporting lone wolf, Kyrgios has always needed a pack.

When he was a teenager and top junior player, Kyrgios remembers a tennis scout describing him as “super-talented, out of shape and a smart arse”.

That was 13 year ago, Kyrgios says, “and nothing’s really changed – except I’m pretty much in shape now”.

But this inveterate larrikin knows what it’s taken to get him match-fit for Grand Slam tennis.

Which, he says, is why he’s been so outspoken on doping, saying tennis was “cooked”.

“After everything that I’ve gone through the last year and a half, I would never dope in tennis,” he said.

“It’s a bit of a middle finger to people like me that have had almost career-ending injuries and doing it correctly.”

Both the men’s and women’s number ones have faced doping probes this year and Kyrgios is doubtful that the game’s integrity unit will properly deal with offenders.

“I don’t know if I have the faith that they’re going to get what they kind of deserve in a way,” he said.

Mortality knocks

Losing the 2022 Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic despite being a set up and then tumbling into a long lay-off through potentially career-ending injury has brought a new maturity to Kyrgios.

Or at least a sense of mortality.

“I know that the window that I have at the moment is extremely small,” he said.

“Just having my two feet in those stadiums, seeing all the crowd cheering and just those emotions, that’s what I took for granted earlier in my career, where now you might not have it happen again, because I know how quickly it can all be taken away with an injury.”

So how long does he have left?

“I would say two more years, absolute max. But for me personally, I would love to just go out, play one more year, enjoy it, and go out on my own terms, not be forced (by) another surgery or another career-ending injury,” he said.

“I’m completely OK with this maybe being the last year of my career. You know, I never did want to play past 30 anyway. So it worked out well.”