What you're hearing is tape of a professional tennis player named Nicholas Kicker,

playing at a tournament in 2015.

He's playing on a clay court, and in the video, there's just something off about it.

Neither of the players are hustling toward the ball, and they keep making really easy mistakes.

The game never hits a rhythm.

Can you tell me about that match? I mean, I watched it, and it's so lackluster. Like,

it looks kind of like they both forgot how to play tennis.

Yeah, it's comical, yeah. I mean, when I spoke to Nicholas about this, I said, you know, how did he feel after the match? And I think he said to me, look how obvious it is. You don't have to watch the video. And, you know, you can see Nicholas throughout the whole match looking at the umpire because I think that he knows. It's pretty obvious. The video isn't just comical. It's weird.

Two top tennis players playing what looks like an amateur game.

Serves are going straight into the net.

Easy volleys are getting hit out of bounds.

Nicholas is playing a rival named Giovanni Lepente.

But it was a situation where Lepente could not have, with respect to him,

been playing any worse.

But Nicholas had to try and lose this match.

So he had to take extreme measures that were, you know, very, very obvious.

That's journalist William Ralston, who recently wrote a cover story about Nicholas for F.T. Weekend magazine.

He spent a lot of time speaking with Nicholas about the experience.

Immediately after the match, he told me he was in his hotel room, and he was, you know, he locked the door because he was worried the police were going to come and get him.

He was panicking at this point.

There was reason to panic. The match was suspicious. And in May of 2018,

after three years of investigation, Nicholas was found guilty of match fixing and suspended from

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