NO matter who wins the main prizes this weekend, no matter the drama that unfolds in the men's or women's final, there's a fair chance that Wimbledon 2015 will be primarily remembered as the year that Nick Kyrgios emerged onto the world stage.

It's not his first time here, of course, and in fact he got a round further last year, reaching the quarter-finals. But every day this fortnight, whether he has been playing or not, whether he has won or lost, the 20-year-old Australian has generated a ton of publicity.

Some of it has been about his tennis, which at its best is sensational. A lot more has been about his character and attitude: at times needlessly confrontational both on court and off, at others engaging, endearing, and vastly entertaining.

The received wisdom around these parts is that if Kyrgios is going to make the most of his vast ability, he will need to temper the petty, attention-seeking, quarrelsome side of his personality. Or at least, that's what veteran commentators on the tour reckon. Ask younger fans what they think he should change and they might well say 'Nothing at all'.

After all, if Kyrgios had just been good at tennis, of course we would have heard of him, but he would not be nearly so much fun, or a tenth as marketable as he is now. If he had been a self-disciplined performer, well behaved and respectful towards his elders, including umpires and the like, he would have been just another Milos Raonic: world class at his profession, but one-dimensional, and incapable of appealing to a far wider constituency than the one that normally follows his sport.

It should be said, though, that it's not just boring old killjoys who want Kyrgios to cut down on the distractions and concentrate on winning more matches. He is thinking along the same lines himself, even if he might have a different idea about the amount of extraneous behaviour he needs to cut out.

But he definitely knows he gets too easily distracted, and said as much out on court during his fourth-round defeat by Richard Gasquet. "External bulls***!" he roared at one point. At the time we thought it might be just another random comment, because he does a lot of apparently random things, but afterwards he explained it was a reference to all the distractions he had to contend with.

"There's a lot of things going on at the moment that aren't focusing on actual tennis," he said. "There's just a lot of stuff going on."

Some of that 'stuff' is evanescent and therefore easily dealt with. The row about Tennis Australia's suspension of Bernard Tomic from their Davis Cup team, for example, will soon be over and done with. And Dawn Fraser's racist remark that Kyrgios and Tomic should "go back to where their parents come from" - Greece and Malaysia in the case of Kyrgios, Croatia and Bosnia in that of Tomic - was quickly condemned.

But Kyrgios is a divisive personality, who will continue to attract animosity and adoration in equal measure. He will need to learn how to turn all that "external" nonsense to his advantage, and probably cut down on some of his more intemperate outbursts. But he should do that without compromising the character that makes him the most rock'n'roll tennis player since Goran Ivanisevic - someone else, incidentally, who in the early part of his career was stereotyped as the bad boy of his sport.

Because tennis is about more than hitting a ball from one side of a net to the other. It's about the pressure that the leading players are under. It's about the lengths they go to in order to become fit enough to compete in matches that routinely go on for three or four hours. And above all, it's about their personalities.

And not just tennis, either. Every sport has its big, attractive names who can reach out to a far wider audience than normal, and they do that by using the external stuff to their advantage.

David Beckham did that in football, for instance. If he had got rid of all the nonsense that surrounded him, he would have been a whole lot less marketable, reduced to a slightly better-looking Paul Scholes. That's no disrespect to Scholes, who is regularly rated as the best player in the English league for the past 20 years or so, but he simply never had the reach of his Manchester United team-mate.

In football that doesn't matter too much, because hundreds of millions of kids follow it anyway, without the need for big personalities to draw them in. But tennis needs to fight far harder to broaden its appeal - and in Kyrgios, it has its best chance for decades of winning that fight and becoming more popular than some of its rivals..

That's why the tennis authorities have to tread a fine line when it comes to the young Australian. In public they cannot condone some of his behaviour. But in private they must know he is a goldmine.