There is a lot that happens in the five milliseconds before Milos Raonic smashes his tennis racket against the ball he just tossed above his head. The head itself (with once wild, now professionally coiffed, hair) is locked back in rapt attention. Six thousand sets of eyes in the arena are focused on that little yellow ball, so it might be hovering by collective mind power. They are mainly the eyes of Canadian fans, as this branch of the Davis Cup is being played in Vancouver; and there is hope in their eyes, since the Canadian team, of which Raonic is undoubtedly the star, is far outmatched by their French adversaries. The Canadians have lost their first match, but Raonic is one point away from evening the score. Fully stretched to make the serve, his six-foot-five frame becomes a kind of bow—bent in a single, tense concave, and arcing from the top of his Wilson to the toes of his size-14 shoes. Even the drunken yahoos who have been calling to him like he’s their younger brother—“We love you, Milos!” “Milos, use the Force!”—have for this moment, at last, shut up. The world holds its breath.
Raonic has a serve that’s been clocked at 249 kilometres an hour—the second-fastest serve ever recorded in professional tennis. It’s easy to imagine it breaking bullet-style through his opponent’s racket altogether. Two hundred forty-nine kilometres an hour. For the record, that’s 80 kilometres an hour faster than the hardest slapshot ever taken in the NHL. This is only one element, though, in Raonic’s skill set, and he’ll tell you as much. “I have the weapons to win,” he says while we drive through a sun-dazzled downtown Vancouver. “It’s just a matter of learning how to use those weapons.” With his cracking voice and barely a beard to shave, it’s bizarre to imagine that this 21-year-old is now the greatest tennis star in Canada’s history. He is the 25th-best player in the world. As we talk, his eyes graze up at the glass towers that slip by his window, and he leans perpetually forward in his seat, legs apart like a man on a jumping horse. Yet there’s no showmanship in his words at all; he speaks softly, if pointedly. What must it feel like to be barely able to order a beer in some parts of the world, but also know that you’re better at this one thing than nearly seven billion others?
Watching Raonic play, one is aware of a coolness, an almost Zenlike quality, which belies his youth. On the court he doesn’t grunt or bare his teeth the way his opponents do. He puts one in mind of a Jedi master, batting missiles away with his eyes closed. “I’m at my best,” he says, “when I have a serenity. So I work to not get fired up. Every time I get emotional, I make mistakes.” In fact, there’s a calmness about Raonic off the court, too. Like most men accustomed to being the tallest person in the room, he has a blameless mixture of confidence and shrugs. He doesn’t make much eye contact—when Raonic was interviewed after the Australian Open, the interviewer had to stop the camera at one point and ask the young champion to look him in the eyes, instead of staring straight into the lens. But that’s more a sign of Raonic’s careful speech than anything else. He has dropped the guffawing, anxious talk that most men his age employ. Does he meditate to achieve his rare calm? “No, but I bring a chair into the shower and sit under the water for an hour.”
The coolness is backed up, of course, by real—and relentless—work. It started at the age of eight, when a tennis club full of 12-year-olds wouldn’t let him in. Raonic worked against a ball machine from 7:00 to 8:30 a.m. every day before school, and then from 9:00 to 10:30 p.m. afterward until, six months later, the club let him in. Today he’s still usually the youngest, the upstart; the average player on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) world’s top 100 list is five years older than Raonic. And though he’s already breached the top 30, he’s a year younger than anyone else in that bracket.
Statistically speaking, Raonic shouldn’t be anywhere on the ATP world rankings list at all. And not just because of his age, either. What makes Raonic a real anomaly is the country he calls home. Tennis players are from France, or Switzerland, or the USA, or Serbia, or Spain; they can be from Sweden or Germany or Ukraine. But Milos Raonic hails from Thornhill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, a place that has the same reputation for producing great tennis players as Iceland or Melanesia—which is to say, none.
