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In his right hand, he clutches a Wilson Blade 98 racquet with a 4.5-inch grip.

At six-foot-five, he has the lanky, long-limbed physique that nowadays seems all but indispensable among top international tennis players. He wears size 14D shoes.

He approaches the service tee at the baseline — his “executive office,” as sports pundits might say — and prepares to unleash what many consider to be the most formidable serve in the game today. Possibly ever.

First, he shifts his weight forward onto his left foot. Next, he bounces a Yonex tennis ball six times with his left hand, before briefly cradling the racquet’s neck with a couple of his left-hand fingers. He rocks back onto his right foot once, twice . . . and wham.

Ace.

Fifteen-love.

If you blinked, you would have missed it. Even if you didn’t blink, you would have missed it.

After all, Andreas Seppi missed it though he’s the best tennis player in Italy and No. 18 in the world.

Meanwhile, the crowd goes wild, just as they have been doing all afternoon.

Roughly 6,000 strong, they’re packed into the stands of the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre on the campus of the University of British Columbia, and they roar their approval every time Milos Raonic of Thornhill, Ont., earns another point. One musical enthusiast blasts away on a trumpet, and the drum line from Sardis Secondary School in Chilliwack pounds out a frenetic, adrenalin-rousing beat during each and every pause in play.

The noise is damned near deafening, something you hardly ever experience on the regular professional tour. But this is the quarter-final of the Davis Cup, an annual contest that pits nation against nation, and the code of spectator etiquette, if there is one, tends toward the loud, the rude and the raucous. It’s the first time Canada has ever got this far.

Just now, it’s the 10th game of the second set, and the 22-year-old Canadian is ahead five games to four. All he needs to do is hold his serve once more in order to take a commanding two-set lead in this best-of-five encounter (for a primer on tennis scoring, flip to this eRead’s epilogue).

If Raonic goes on to win the match, that will be it. This country will advance to the semifinals of the elite Davis Cup World Group in September — another first — thereby earning a place among the four top tennis-playing countries on Earth.

Canada’s newly awakened national tennis pride — not normally a discernible, much less pervasive, commodity — rides on the outcome of this match.

When you consider the fearsome nature of Raonic’s serve — not to mention the slick quality of this specially constructed indoor tennis surface, installed in what is normally a hockey arena — it would take a highly risk-prone gambler to bet against the Canadian.

“He’s got one of the best arms on the tour,” observes former professional player Frédéric Niemeyer, who coached Raonic during his early days on the pro circuit. “It’s close to being the best serve of all time.”

Just ask Seppi, who has been struggling with the Canadian’s delivery all afternoon.

Still, you never know. Raonic might be in command of the match now, but tennis is a game of sudden momentum shifts, and his Italian opponent is among the most resourceful players on the planet. Seppi could definitely turn this around, just as he did on the first day of the tie. After falling behind by two sets to Vancouverite Vasek Pospisil, the visitor roared back to win that match three sets to two. If he could do it then, he could do it now.

The fiercely pro-Canadian crowd is doing its best to make sure he doesn’t.

After all, their country is on a roll, thanks in some measure to this very tennis court, designed with Milos Raonic and his serve foremost in mind. Two months earlier, on this same court, the Canadians bested highly touted Spain, and that was a huge accomplishment (even if the Spaniards did show up without several of their best players). Now Italy stands in the way — and the Azzurri are hardly pushovers. They’ve demonstrated that already, splitting the first two matches of the tie. After Seppi beat Pospisil in the opener, Raonic made a defiant stand in the second match, prevailing over Fabio Fognini — ranked No. 24 in the world —three sets to love.

The score in the tie stood at Canada 1, Italy 1.

A day later, Pospisil teamed with veteran doubles specialist Daniel Nestor in an epic struggle that lasted well over four hours and drove the spectators almost berserk, partly with excitement and partly with sheer, nail-biting anxiety. The two Canadians finally eked out a thrilling, five-set victory against Fognini and partner Daniele Bracciali, stealing the fifth and deciding set by the narrowest of margins — 15-13 — to give Canada a lead in the overall score: two matches to one.

All the host team needs to do now is win one more match, and they’ll have made history. But they aren’t there yet, and a crack seems to be opening in Raonic’s game. After pulling ahead 40-15 on a service winner, the Canadian hits a wild forehand and then double-faults on his next serve.

The game score is tied at deuce, 40-40.

Raonic briefly towels off before returning to the baseline to serve what appears to be an extremely timely ace. But Seppi challenges the call, and the radar shows he’s right. The serve was out. Possibly rattled by this reversal, Raonic faults on his second serve.

Advantage: Seppi. For the first time in the match, the Italian has a break point.

Once again, Raonic prepares to serve — and, when the young Canadian prepares to serve, the gods of tennis prepare to smile.

“He has the best serve in the world now,” says Robert Bettauer, former head of player development at Tennis Canada, the sport’s governing body in this country, and a frequent TV commentator on the game. “When you’ve got a weapon like that, you’re in every match. It’s confidence-building.”

And confidence is vital. You’re not going to beat many top players unless you believe, deep down, that you can. A big serve can surely help in the confidence department, but it’s not enough on its own. Fortunately, Raonic’s tennis game consists of more than a big, booming delivery. His forehand is also a punishing stroke, he moves well and his volleys are good and getting better. His backhand is probably underestimated.

Already among the world’s 20 best practitioners of the game, Raonic at just 22 years of age has scaled heights that no man playing for this country has managed before or, at least, not in singles. His best ranking so far is 13, and there is no reason to think he’ll stop there.

“I actually think that Milos will get to No. 1,” says Casey Curtis, who coached Raonic as a junior.

Just by climbing as far as he has done, Raonic has already realized a long-shot dream that thousands of youngsters undoubtedly share but rarely achieve. He is one of the best. And he’s Canadian. How did an immigrants’ son from the former Yugoslavia manage to reach this rarefied place — the uppermost rung of the global rankings in a difficult and solitary sport at which Canadians have never exactly excelled?

There are no easy answers to that question.

“If there was a right way that worked for everyone, we would all do it,” says Judy Van Raalte, a sports psychologist at Springfield College in Massachusetts. “And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Another sports psychologist — Kim Dawson at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo — agrees.

“It’s a million-dollar question,” she says. “It’s not the same formula for every child.”

True excellence in sports, like true excellence in almost anything, is as much an art as a science. What works in one case will likely fail in a thousand others. And yet almost everyone agrees that there are some common elements — call them rules of thumb or touchstones — that do tend to distinguish the developmental paths traced by extraordinary athletes. In the pages that follow we will explore some of these patterns as they have figured in the career of Milos Raonic (pronounced MEE-lohsh ROW-nich).

But first, there’s a service game to complete in Vancouver.

Down a break point for the first time in the match, Raonic returns to the baseline and, just like that, serves an ace to bring the score back to deuce. He then fires another ace for game point. Suddenly, far from being in trouble, he finds himself only a serve away from winning the set. On the next point, Seppi wings a groundstroke into the net, and Raonic is on top with a commanding lead — two sets to none.

The crowd, of course, goes crazy.

Now the Canadian needs only to maintain his focus for one more set while continuing to exploit his punishing serve. If he can do that, Canada will win the tie and become one of the final four nations contending for tennis supremacy.

With most of his pro career still ahead of him, it’s an open question how much further Raonic can rise. Canadians will gain yet another hint of an answer later this month, when Wimbledon — probably the sport’s most illustrious tournament — gets underway in London on June 24. But let’s put that question aside for now and instead ask this: how did Raonic get to where he already is?

“It was March break,” remembers Dusan Raonic, looking back to the spring of 1997 and his son’s inaugural encounter with a sport called tennis. “We were living in Brampton.”

That spring — 16 years ago now — Dusan and his wife, Vesna, were on the lookout for some activity to occupy the youngest of their three-child brood during school break. What happened next was either purely fortuitous or else there is at least one god of tennis who hasn’t forgotten Canada. The couple stumbled upon a flyer advertising a week-long tennis camp at the Bramalea Tennis Club, a winter-proof facility in Chinguacousy Park.

At the time, the Raonic family had been living in Canada for three years, after immigrating from what is now Montenegro, formerly part of a mongrel state called Yugoslavia.

Three years old when his family arrived, Milos was by then all of 6. As they gaze back on those formative times, Dusan and Vesna are ensconced in the VIP area of Vancouver’s Thunderbird Sports Centre, where the Davis Cup quarter-final tie against Italy is being contested. The dark, carpeted oasis is decorated with long bolts of red and black fabric and has an ersatz casbah-like air. A hot midday meal is being served, buffet-style, in arrays of chafing dishes mounted upon refectory tables set out end to end, while clusters of very important and possibly not-so-important people mosey about for food or gather at plastic garden tables to chat and nosh. You need a special plastic wristband to gain admittance here.

Dusan and Vesna are seated at a table of their own, and they are reminiscing now about the years they spent rearing a young family on the outskirts of ɫɫ�� and about their role — a long and critical one — in the development of Canada’s best-ever men’s singles player. Dusan recently retired after working for many years at Atomic Energy of Canada. Vesna is a senior associate at BMO Financial Group. Neither of them played tennis while growing up.

As it happened, young Milos took to the game at once, and Steve Gibson — then and now the head instructor at the Bramalea club — recognized immediately that this kid was special.

“Steve offered to work with Milos,” recalls Dusan, an electrical engineer by profession. “We took Milos to the club once a week.”

Little did they imagine then — to use a hoary locution that nonetheless seems apt — that those weekly, hour-long sessions marked the beginning of a journey that would eventually bring them here, parents of the anchor Canadian player in the Davis Cup World Group quarter-finals.

The truth is, it’s an extremely rare athlete who reaches the elite, world-class level in any sport. For every youngster who succeeds, there are thousands of others who must eventually reassess their early ambitions — not a tragedy, necessarily, but a sobering lesson in the sometimes harsh ways of an unforgiving world. Those who do realize their sporting dreams seldom do so on their own. Even the most gifted youngsters probably need a deeply committed parent or two in order to keep the faith and summon the discipline required to progress. The parental role may well be especially important in a game like tennis, which is not exactly every Canadian child’s first choice as an athletic pursuit. Hockey, anyone?

“Kids don’t typically wake up and say, ‘I want to play tennis,’ ” observes Kim Dawson in Waterloo. “Kids have to be introduced to it.”

Beyond making the introduction, there’s a lot that parents can do right on the parlous road to international sports stardom — and just as much that they can do wrong. Unfortunately, there is no clear distinction between that which helps and that which harms. What’s right for some will just as surely be wrong for others.

For every Rafael Nadal, the fleet and indefatigable Spanish ace — who continues to be coached by his Uncle Toni — there is a Roger Federer, the elegant Swiss star, whose parents have always stayed away from the court and in the background of his career. More than a few players — for some reason, mainly on the women’s side — have had complicated and sometimes traumatic relationships with parents who doubled as coaches. Yugoslavian-born Jelena Dokic and French player Mary Pierce are two among many, and both eventually had rancorous breakups with their dads. On the other hand, Americans Venus and Serena Williams seem to have only benefited from being coached for many years by their father, Richard, although it’s worth noting that both split with him in his coaching capacity quite a few years ago. American star Andre Agassi, now retired, had a stormy relationship with his hyper-intense father, described in his 2010 autobiography, Open. But that didn’t stop him — and it just as likely helped him — on his climb to the top.

What works for some might well be anathema for others, and that is just a part of what makes it so difficult to be a tennis parent. But professional tennis coaches seem to agree that parents — God love ’em — do not belong on the tennis court, not when their children are training. If the coaches are right, then the Raonic parents handled themselves just about perfectly. They gave their son every support and encouragement, but they stayed clear of the technical stuff.

“Milos’s father made a commitment to me,” says Casey Curtis, the tennis coach who did more than anyone to craft what is now Raonic’s big power game. “I would be 100-per-cent in charge of the tennis side. He and his wife would not stick around just to watch. They would go and do things for themselves.”

In other words, they got Milos to the courts, but what happened while he was there was up to him — and the experts.

“We believe in professionalism,” says Vesna, who holds university degrees in mechanical and computer engineering. “We are professionals in our fields. We have great respect for professionalism.”

Every tennis coach who has worked with Milos over the years affirms this to be true.

“His family in my opinion are role models,” says Hatem McDadi, vice-president of tennis development at Tennis Canada. “They sacrificed. They got up early. They also stressed education.”

In fact, education was half of the deal. If Milos wanted to devote his life to tennis — and he surely did — then he would also have to excel academically.

“Our only condition was ‘good in school,’ ” says Dusan. “Great marks.”

“An honours student,” pipes in his wife. “Below that? No way.”

A smart kid on and off the court, Milos kept his side of the bargain, and his parents kept theirs. They supported his tennis without interfering in it. That’s an arrangement that many parents, in similar circumstances, find impossible to sustain.

“The parent-as-coach in tennis has happened on a number of successful occasions,” says Van Raalte. “But it’s often hard to be great at both roles. They’re in conflict.”

According to Curtis, the interfering parent is a common trope in the sport, and usually a troublesome one.

“It gets confused,” he says. “The grown-ups start to think they understand the game.

“It’s very important that the kids take ownership of their game. If you ask why Milos is so successful, well, Milos and I were left alone to work together for almost 10 years.”

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just Milos’s parents who contributed off the court. His older siblings — brother Momir, who’s nine years his senior and earned a degree in information technology and business from York University, and sister Jelena, who’s 11 years older and holds a master’s degree in international trade and finance from Ryerson — also did their share of the driving, not to mention the various other chores that go hand-in-hand with having a top-ranked junior tennis player for a brother. Dusan refers to the resulting family collaboration as “Team Raonic.”

But, Milos points out, Team Raonic had strictly defined roles. “Even to this day,” he says, “my parents will not give me tennis advice.”

He has professionals to do that.

After one hour and 11 minutes of play, Milos Raonic leads Andreas Seppi two sets to love. Now the third set is about to commence. Seppi to serve.

The Italian holds his service game comfortably, and the two players change ends.

Raonic begins the next game much where he left off in the first set, with an ace. But then he falters. Whether it’s nerves or a loss of intensity — he’s got a healthy lead, after all — it’s hard to say. Or maybe, after two sets, Seppi is starting to get a better read on the Canadian’s serve. In any case, Raonic loses the next point, and then double-faults. In both cases, he challenges the line call and in both cases, the slow-motion replay proves him wrong.

Seppi wins the next exchange and suddenly Raonic is down 15-40 while his opponent has two break points. The Canadian saves the first of these and then prepares to serve at 30-40. Seppi caps the ensuing rally with a powerful forehand deep to Raonic’s backhand that lands practically at the Canadian’s feet. Raonic tries to dig it out but can’t.

Game: Seppi.

The Italian suddenly has a service break in hand and leads the set two games to love.

The crowd doesn’t waver, though. The fans make as much noise as before, exhorting Raonic on.

Still, it suddenly seems there might be trouble ahead. On two occasions during this tie so far, the Canadian side has been ahead two sets to love, only to falter. In once case, Vasek Pospisil lost to this very same Andreas Seppi in five sets. In the other case — the doubles match — the Canadians managed to squeeze out a narrow victory in the fifth and final set. But it was awfully close. Could the same kind of turnaround be taking shape now? It’s not as if Raonic is invincible. For all his mental and physical strengths, the Canadian has weaknesses, too.

“Where he has difficulty is tight to the body,” says player and coach Robert Bettauer.

That isn’t surprising, given Raonic’s height and lankiness. Hit the ball straight at the guy, and it’s a challenge for him to get out of the way. Seppi’s winning point on his break of serve seemed to illustrate exactly this aspect of Raonic’s game, possibly opening a chink in the Canadian’s otherwise extensive armour.

But the crowd cheers their hero on. Only with difficulty does U.K. umpire Alison Lang manage to quiet them down.

Now it’s the Italian’s turn to serve.

Vesna Raonic has a revealing story to tell about her tennis-playing son.

When Milos was still just a tyke, maybe 9 or 10, she and her husband took turns driving him to the Blackmore Tennis Club in Thornhill, near where they had recently moved from Brampton.

They delivered him to coach Casey Curtis by 6:30 each morning, just as the other parents did with their promising young players. In Milos’s case, however, there were a couple of differences. Rather than dawdle behind, as the other youngsters sometimes did, Milos strode out in front of his parents on his daily march across the parking lot, eager to get to the courts. And, unlike many of the other kids, Milos insisted on shouldering his own tennis bag, massive though it was, rather than let his parents do the lifting.

“Milos was always there, carrying his own bag,” remembers his mother. “You could have put him in the bag.”

If the entrance to the club was locked — as it sometimes was at that hour of the morning — Milos would pound on the door and call out for someone, please, to open up now and let him in. He was that keen to play tennis.

“Casey noticed the difference between Milos and the other kids,” says Vesna.

Tennis was never forced on Raonic. More than many other talented young players, he fully embraced the game — right from the start in Brampton, when he was 6.

“He stood out,” recalls Steve Gibson, who for a time conducted weekly, hour-long group sessions with Raonic at Chinguacousy Park in 1997. “He was very energetic. He wanted to be there.”

But soon the Raonic family moved to Thornhill. Before they left, Gibson had some parting words of advice.

“Steve said, ‘Find a tennis club because Milos has potential,’ ” recalls Dusan, Milos’s father.

It turned out, however, that nearly two years would pass before the boy picked up a tennis racquet again. Instead, he played street hockey in summer and did some snowboarding in winter for physical recreation. But tennis must have been running through his mind all that time. Around the start of the school year in 1999, an 8-year-old Milos approached his father and asked if he could try his hand at that racquet sport again. And the gods of tennis smiled down on the Raonic clan once more. As it happened, neither Dusan nor his wife had any idea where the game was played in or near Thornhill. So they did what people in Montenegro do when they have a problem than requires some serious research and counsel.

“In our country,” says Dusan, “We go to the barbershop to get information.”

At an Italian hair parlour in Thornhill, the parents learned that the best bet for their boy was a local tennis facility. The teaching pro at the Blackmore Tennis Club just happened to be a certain Casey Curtis, a transplanted American, then 44 years old, who was at the time — as he remains now — perhaps the leading tennis guru for junior players in the ɫɫ�� region, if not the entire country. In those days, he was running a program for advanced youngsters. This was either sheer blind luck or else divine intervention. Either way, the central motor of the drama was Milos’s own desire to play tennis. No one forced him to take up the game.

Curtis agreed to take a look at the kid and liked what he saw, even at that early age. It didn’t seem to matter that Milos had held a racquet only a couple of dozen times in his entire life — and not once in nearly two years.

“Casey asked me, ‘How many matches has he played?’ ” remembers Dusan. “ ‘How many tournaments has he played?’ I said, ‘Zero.’ He just looked at me.”

Meanwhile, the other youngsters in Curtis’s program for promising juniors were all a good deal older than Milos was — mostly 13 or 14— not to mention far more experienced at the game. Talented as he was, the Raonic kid was not ready to join them. First, he had some catching up to do, with his dad.

“It was the end of September,” says Dusan. “Casey told me the best way to start was with the ball machine.”

Terry Redvers, owner of the Blackmore club, offered the family a deal. For $200 a month, Milos could have access to the courts early or late in the day — when they were apt to be empty — as well as unlimited use of a ball machine.

And so Team Raonic got up and running.

“I was collecting balls and selecting speeds on the ball machine,” recalls Dusan. “Casey was observing Milos. Really, we never missed a day.”

It took Milos just two months to prove himself ready for admission to Curtis’s advanced program. That was December 1999, around the time the boy turned 9. That might seem young, but for a child with hopes of rising to an elite level, age 9 is at the late end of the scale.

“I think it’s within the window,” says McDadi of Tennis Canada. “Age 6 or 7 is the ideal. Nine? It’s in the range of a later initiation.”

It would have to do. Late initiation or not, tennis quickly began to change the boy’s life.

“I wanted to be playing all the time,” says Milos now. “I really enjoyed it.”

The principal at Thornhill Elementary School agreed to let Milos reduce his hours of study — he still had to complete all his courses — and his days soon revolved around a seeming infinity of fuzzy yellow balls and a tennis racquet.

“The hard work — for me, I never questioned it,” Milos says during an interview with the Star at the Thunderbird Sports Centre before competing in the Davis Cup. “All my parents had to do was wake me up on time.”

In fact, it seems they didn’t even have to do that. When she recalls those sometimes dark and frigid early mornings and the prospect of yet another cold, snowy drive to the tennis club, Vesna remembers things the other way around.

“We didn’t need to wake him. He was waking us. Sometimes, we would try and stay in bed, and he wouldn’t let us.”

The boy flat-out adored playing tennis. In a way, it’s as simple as that.

Here is another story that Vesna tells, an anecdote that powerfully suggests the way Milos’s young mind was working. She doesn’t remember his exact age at the time, but it was probably around 10 or 11. It was a weekend in winter, and the three of them — Dusan, Vesna and Milos — found themselves in a sports equipment store. The plan had been to buy the young boy a snowboard. They’d even picked one out, and now they were waiting in line at the cash register to complete the purchase.

It was then that Milos changed his mind. He announced to his parents that he did not want a snowboard, after all. He was concerned that he might break his wrist — a common mishap among snowboarders — and that such an injury would prevent him from playing tennis. Much as he wanted a snowboard, it just wasn’t worth the risk.

“That is a rarity,” says Kim Dawson, a Waterloo-based sports psychologist. “Kids usually aren’t singularly driven at that point. They aren’t able to see what the consequences of their decisions are.”

The Raonic kid was an exception.

“For sure, he gave up a lot of things,” says Vesna. “He gave up hockey and snowboarding, because he could hurt himself.”

Meanwhile, he played a huge amount of tennis. He trained at Blackmore from 6:30 every weekday morning until it was time for school. In the afternoon, he finished classes early, at 2, and someone was waiting in a car to drive him back to the courts, where he practised some more, usually till 5:30. At home, he had dinner and then did homework. Saturdays meant more tennis. His only day off was Sunday, unless he was competing in a tournament.

This may seem like an awful grind, and at times it probably was. But Raonic insists that tennis was always what he most wanted to do. If the game demanded sacrifices, he was more than willing to make them. “I did not want anything getting in the way of my achieving my goals,” he says.

At the same time, he was not exactly a prisoner to the sport. He had an active social life. “Obviously, there would be parties with friends,” he recalls.

Vesna Raonic says her son was popular at school and didn’t forgo the usual array of experiences that go along with growing up in a southern Ontario suburb. “I would say he had a normal life, with some exceptions. He didn’t hang out in malls.”

But he wasn’t a monk, either. “Girls were all over him,” says Vesna, clearly meaning the comment in a good way.

Still, those years were not exactly what you would call an effortless cycle of unmitigated pleasure.

“There were frustrating times,” Milos says. “There were disappointing losses.”

He did not always take those disappointments lightly. As a junior playing tournaments in Ontario, Raonic was notorious for his angry outbursts when he wasn’t playing well or when his opponent was simply playing better. He recalls those episodes now as “hours of rage” that he soon got over. So he did, and for one overarching reason.

As Raonic sums it up now: “I just wanted to play tennis.”

Leading two games to love, Seppi prepares to serve.

The Italian quickly goes up 30-love, but on the next point Raonic carves a beautiful, bending sliced shot that dips just in for a winner. He then takes the next two points, for a game point and a chance to break back. But Seppi ties the score at deuce, and Raonic nets the ball on the next exchange. Advantage: Seppi. And now the Italian enjoys a little payback, a service ace of his own that puts him ahead three games to love.

Three games to love . . .

The score sounds more lopsided than it really is. After all, Seppi is up only a single service break. But what matters even more is momentum, and it feels now as if the momentum has shifted in the Italian’s favour, as if history might be about to repeat itself: first, the home team goes up by two sets to none, then the visitors turn the tables and claw their way back. They’ve done it twice in the tie so far, once successfully and once damned close. When asked about this pattern during a press conference after Italy’s hard-fought doubles loss the day before, Italian coach Corrado Barazzutti chose to be coy. All he did was tell his players to focus, he said. Nothing more than that.

Just “focus” and nothing more?

It could be true, but it’s difficult to believe him. It’s much more tempting to think that some deeper insight is at play. If that is so — if Barazzutti possesses some special coaching mojo that he doesn’t want to share with Canadian journalists — then it seems to be working again.

On the other hand, there’s that deadly Raonic serve to consider.

Down three games to love, the Canadian returns to his executive office and promptly hits . . .

An ace.

Let’s face it: you are never going to become a world-class athlete in any physical discipline if you aren’t good at sports.

Milos Raonic was always very good at sports.

“The first time I met him was a beginner group for 6- to 8-year-olds,” remembers Steve Gibson, who served briefly as Milos’s first tennis coach. “Milos stood out because his athletic ability was far ahead of anyone in the group.”

Nowadays, tennis instructors often use special equipment and facilities when introducing youngsters to the game — foam-rubber balls, for example, and age-appropriate racquets. The reason is simple: most young kids haven’t a hope of playing the standard game. They’re too small, and they lack the necessary physical co-ordination.

But Milos was an exception.

“He didn’t need foam balls,” says Gibson. “With him, I went straight to normal balls. Again, he stood out. Most of the kids would be serving from the service line. I had him back at the baseline. He picked up the skills very quickly.”

At the time, Raonic was just a 6-year-old kid in a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, but it was clear he had an unusual gift for sports.

“He definitely . . . would have been one of the most athletic kids for his age that I’ve ever seen,” says Gibson, “and I’ve been doing this for 25 years.”

That assessment is echoed by just about everyone who’s been involved at any stage in Milos’s progress from an eager young kid lugging a tennis bag bigger than he was to a Top 20 player poised to crack the world’s Top 10.

“Any sport he touched, he was amazing,” says his mother.

Even at an early age, Raonic had something you can’t really teach — a rare combination of athletic abilities, including eye-hand co-ordination, physical agility, visual concentration (in other words, the ability to focus his gaze on a tennis ball and keep it there, rather than letting his eyes wander off toward other things) and quickness.

“It’s genetics,” says Curtis, who spent nearly 10 years crafting Raonic’s game at the Blackmore club in Thornhill.

In fact, both Milos’s parents excelled at sports during their high school years — Dusan at basketball and Vesna at volleyball. Older brother Momir was a gifted high school basketball player.

Talented as he was, Milos had some shortcomings, too. Curtis knows his pupil’s many strengths — and his one or two weaknesses — probably better than anyone in the world.

Consider Raonic’s height. The boy had a big growth spurt at ages 14 and 15 and now stands six-foot-five — very tall by just about any standard and somewhat above the height Curtis considers optimal for a male tennis player, six-foot-three. Those two extra inches exact a cost. A taller player tends to be less nimble in general and also has difficulty bending down to handle low balls.

“Milos has very long legs,” says Curtis. “He moves fairly well, but he’s maybe not the most natural mover on court.”

For the purposes of comparison, consider Swiss ace Roger Federer, who may very well be the most natural mover, man or woman, ever to have ambulated upon this Earth. Raonic isn’t a Federer in the department of sheer physical grace, but he is surprisingly agile for a man his size.

“Milos’s height is not a handicap,” says coach Louis Borfiga, who mentored the young Canadian during his later teens, when he trained at the National Tennis Centre in Montreal. “It’s not a handicap if you are moving well. At 16, 17, 18 and 19, he was moving very well.”

One area of relative weakness in Raonic’s game involves his use of backspin or sidespin — what tennis experts call “touch” or “feel.” This is the partly god-given ability to make a tennis ball do seemingly diabolical things, to bounce backwards or sideways or to come to an almost dead stop in flight. It’s a skill that requires exceptional wrist control — an attribute often referred to as “soft hands” — and that typically manifests itself when a player is at or near the net.

Raonic can produce this kind of magic, but he’s had to work at it.

“He doesn’t have the best touch I’ve ever seen,” Curtis says of his former protégé. “Most of his feel is trained.”

Great players with natural touch include John McEnroe in his heyday or French racquet wizard Fabrice Santoro, who recently retired from the game but only after producing match after match of joyously acrobatic tennis — an approach that stressed spin and control and feel, rather than outright power.

By contrast, Raonic has power to burn, combined with extraordinary hand speed — an almost uncanny ability to get his racquet on the ball, one way or another, and hit it hard. “Milos has probably the fastest hands I’ve ever seen,” says Curtis.

Think of Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid.

“He has power on every stroke,” says Frédéric Niemeyer, who coached Raonic not long after he turned pro. “He has very good tools to work with.”

As a junior playing tournaments in Ontario, Raonic was so good that he usually played one or two years above his age group. That was the only way to ensure he got the high level of competition he needed in order to elevate his own game. So, when he was 14, he played against 16-year-olds, and when he was 15, he played against 17-year-olds. Eventually, Curtis says, he was obliged to pay adult professionals to come in and hit with the kid. No one else playing junior tennis in Ontario could challenge him.

“You’ve got to keep the competition up,” says Curtis. “You need coaching and competition.”

And talent.

Raonic had all three, and the combination was enough to make him a dominant junior player, at least in Canada. But his world ranking as a junior was not what you’d call exceptional, never getting past the low 30s.

There are reasons for that, rooted partly in the nature of Raonic’s game. He’s what tennis coaches call an “all-court player,” a style of play seldom seen at the elite level anymore, although some believe the all-court approach is poised for a rebirth. All-court players — think of Roger Federer or Pete Sampras — are as comfortable blasting groundstrokes from the baseline as they are volleying at the net. They combine both skill sets for a richer, more varied brand of tennis — a style almost all the experts consider to be the ideal. But such well-rounded athletes have been outnumbered in recent years, and mostly outplayed, by aggressive baseliners — think of American Andre Agassi or Juan del Potro of Argentina — players who venture to the net only rarely or, as the saying goes, only to shake hands.

Neither Federer nor Sampras truly blossomed during their junior years, mainly because players with such a varied combination of skills tend to master the game more gradually than do those whose playing style has fewer dimensions. Raonic falls firmly into the Sampras-Federer mould. He, too, is a hard-working late bloomer, a player who didn’t really master his game until his final teenage years — an all-court player who now, at age 22, is still exploring and improving his talents.

There was another factor that may have held Raonic back as a junior. The problem in this case wasn’t technical. It was mental. Conspicuous nowadays for his calm demeanour on court, he had a very different temperament as a teenager. By all accounts, he was a firecracker.

“When I see him on court today, he’s so different from what I remember,” says Gibson, who initially coached the boy and also recalls him from provincial tournaments. “He was very animated. He would get frustrated.”

Curtis has the same recollection. “He was a bucking bronco. He had a wicked temper.”

In a way, Raonic’s on-court outbursts as a teen were further evidence of his passion for the game, but they were also a distraction that limited his progress. Although highly ranked in Canada, he never reached the top level internationally, not as a junior.

“We worked a lot on that temper,” says Niemeyer. “Once it’s there, it’s always going to be there. He’s always going to have to control his emotions.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian’s continuing ascent in the tennis rankings — already little short of meteoric — shows few signs of halting.

“I’m not surprised,” says Curtis.

After all, he’s got talent.

Down three games to love, Raonic wobbles on his service. Quickly, the score is tied at 30-30. But now he makes no mistake, unleashing a dramatic overhead to gain a game point and then closing the door with another big serve — not quite an ace but close enough. Seppi manages to get his racquet on the ball but can’t return it. The Italian now serves at three games to one, with a service break in hand. The two players alternate games, each holding serve, and the score unfolds predictably until Seppi prepares to serve for the set at 5-3. The Italian fights off one break point, struggles a little, but manages to hold serve, thereby taking the third set, six games to three. Seppi still trails one set to two, but the momentum seems to have shifted firmly to his side.

The players towel off and take a rest, and they both confer with their coaches, something that is not allowed in normal tournament play. But the Davis Cup is different. Seppi huddles with Barazzutti, while Raonic talks to Canadian coach Martin Laurendeau. It’s impossible to know what is being said. In any case, the exchanges last only briefly. Meanwhile, the drumming, trumpeting and roaring from the fans are as loud and impassioned as ever. The Italian may have narrowed the gap on the scoreboard while seizing the momentum in the match, but there’s no apparent letup in intensity on the Canadian side, or not, at least, in the stands. What happens on the court is up to Raonic. It’s the start of the fourth set, and the match resumes with both players quickly trading service games.

Raonic 1, Seppi 1.

Some might call it luck.

Some might call it divine intervention.

One way or another, when the parents of an aspiring tennis player named Milos Raonic — then all of 8 years old — were on the lookout for a tennis coach, the man they stumbled upon just happened to be Casey Curtis. For roughly nine years — from the time Raonic was 8 until he was just short of 17 — the man who obsessed over every aspect of his game was a tennis instructor long acknowledged to be among the finest trainers of elite young players in this country. Curtis probably did more than anyone else, apart from Raonic himself, to fashion the player now closing in on a Top 10 world ranking.

There’s a saying among tennis instructors that a young player requires 10 years — or 10,000 hours of practice — to master the game.

“In our case, it really was 10,000 hours,” says Curtis, now 58.

Who can say what might have become of Milos Raonic had he happened upon someone other than Casey Curtis in September 1999. Had the passage of events not worked out this way, it’s difficult to imagine the trajectory of Raonic’s career turning out as it has so far done.

“Casey was amazing,” Raonic says now. “He would work with me every morning privately. He was not really charging me for anything. He was a huge part of my development.”

As a result, by the time he was 17, Raonic was an unusually well-rounded player — still rough around the edges, maybe, with a weakness for kamikaze-style attacks that often ended badly. But he had plenty of tools to work with. Even then, he was more than just a huge serve.

“Everybody talked about his serve,” says Louis Borfiga, who first came across the youngster in 2007, shortly after moving to Montreal from his native France to take up a job as vice-president of high-level tennis at Tennis Canada. “But I was impressed by his baseline play. He had good control of the ball. His general technique was very good. He had a good coach. For sure, Casey made a great job.”

Even now, roughly six years after he and Raonic ended their formal tennis collaboration, Curtis continues to observe his former student intently. In his heart, he’s still coaching the kid from Thornhill, albeit from a distance.

“I’m a believer that the game is going back to the net,” says Curtis, meaning that he expects younger players to revive the attacking style of play that dominated the men’s game in the 1960s. In those days, points in men’s tennis were often dictated at the net and not from the baseline. “Milos and I spent a lot of time on his volleys. He should go to the net a lot more than he is. He should serve and volley a lot more than he is. He should definitely be more aggressive.”

Such remarks were likely intended as much for the benefit of Spaniard Galo Blanco — until recently Raonic’s full-time coach — as they were for Raonic himself.

It was in late 2007, shortly before Raonic’s 17th birthday, that he and Curtis finally parted company, but there was no acrimony involved. It was just time to move on. That year, Raonic had received an invitation to train at the new National Tennis Centre then being established in Montreal, a place where the finest young players from across the country could gather and refine their skills together. The scheme is based on a model that has worked well in France and Spain. This new arrangement would also enable Raonic to play far more international tournaments than he had done while based in Ontario, where most of his competitive play had been limited to local or provincial contests.

At this point in his career, Raonic was among the top-ranked juniors in the country, but he was a comparative non-entity on the world stage, where he was known mainly for his huge serve, if he was known at all. Even his father, Dusan, concedes that the boy’s competitive results so far had been good but “nothing spectacular.” The main rap against him was that he tended to lose important matches. Many of the coaches assembled at Montreal’s new tennis centre were inclined to write him off. In fact, they were apparently inclined to write off the entire crop of junior players then active on the boys’ side.

“I asked the coaches which of the boys were good,” recalls Borfiga, newly arrived from France. “The coaches said, ‘We have no good boys. We have only good girls.’ ”

But Borfiga insisted on judging for himself. Among the boys, he thought Raonic definitely stood out, an impression that seemed to be confirmed when the teenager had good results at a pair of tournaments in Florida.

“I thought, ‘This kid is not bad,’ ” says Borfiga, a diminutive man with a gentle but winning personality. “I thought, ‘I have to follow him . . . We have to try with him.’ ” For nearly two years, Raonic worked with coach Guillaume Marx, another transplanted Frenchman.

While in Montreal, Raonic boarded at a local household headed by Normand Chagnon and Isabelle Lecours, who quickly became a sort of second family, at least while he was in Canada. Most of the time, he was not. Instead, he travelled abroad for long stretches, competing in tournaments in Europe, Asia and the United States. “Montreal allowed me to be part of the competitive atmosphere,” recalls Raonic.

As he chats with a reporter in Vancouver, the young Canadian is wearing an orange tennis jersey with white trim and a pair of grey shorts. He has just finished a practice session on the nearby court where April’s Davis Cup tie with Italy will be played, and now he lounges on a red couch in a somewhat grotto-like trophy room whose walls are decked with hockey plaques and photos of UBC hockey teams. He responds thoughtfully to questions and often pauses before answering to consider what he will say. At his age, and given his on-court accomplishments, you might expect a bacterium of arrogance or condescension to have infected his manner, but there is no sign of that. He is polite and attentive while at the same time projecting an air of healthy self-confidence. He seems relaxed and happy — and normal.

Although a hard-court player by preference and by training — after all, he grew up playing on southern Ontario hard courts — Raonic spent a fair portion of his Montreal-based years training on clay, getting used to the long, grinding rallies that are typical on that surface, whose gritty texture slows the ball down, making it difficult to hit outright winners.

“We had a plan for him to play a lot on clay,” says Borfiga. “It was to make him more consistent. There is more physical training on clay. That would make him a better hard-court player. The goal with Milos was to build a game for the future.”

This was a strategy Borfiga had earlier used while coaching French ace Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, whose recent world ranking — No. 8 — speaks for itself.

Although he worked more directly with other coaches while training in Montreal, Raonic singles out Borfiga as an especially important influence during his late teen years.

“A lot of people didn’t believe in me,” he says. “Louis would always say, ‘Give him time.’ All those tough days, he would always support me. He has done a lot for me.”

Still, in the late summer of 2008, not a lot of people would have singled out Milos Raonic as one of the game’s future stars. After all, as he approached his 18th birthday Raonic had a world singles ranking in the low 900s — a respectable accomplishment but far from sensational — and he faced a crossroads. Either he would turn professional and take his chances on the tour or he would put aside that lifelong dream and instead head south to attend university in the United States.

He hashed out the dilemma with his parents at exhaustive length, and eventually it was decided he would accept an offer from the University of Virginia, one of several American schools offering him a tennis scholarship. He planned to pursue a degree in business. With two weeks remaining before classes began, he was already packing his bags.

But something felt wrong.

Either Raonic’s famously dominant serve is fading a little or else his Italian opponent is adjusting to the onslaught. One way or the other — or possibly it’s a bit of both — the Canadian is no longer dominating with his delivery as he was in the early stages of the match. Still, he manages to hold his serve after Seppi hits a cross-court forehand wide. Raonic is ahead 2-1, with the score still on serve. In the next game, Seppi also manages to hold his service, finishing off the game with yet another ace of his own. You can imagine him mouthing the words, “Take that.” Raonic responds with another ace — his first in a while — and then a service winner. On the next point, the Canadian hits a difficult half-volley that ends up deep in the opposite court, and Seppi nets his return, giving Raonic three game points. Raonic needs only one, taking the game with a beautifully executed inside-out forehand winner. Raonic leads 3-2, but the score is still on serve. Sooner or later, one of the players is going to have to break, or else this set is headed for a sudden-death tiebreaker. And who knows where that will lead?

There are many timeless verities in tennis, just as there are in life. Maybe this should come as no surprise. After all, as most dedicated tennis players know, the two concepts — tennis, life — are essentially interchangeable. It just happens that life mostly takes place on the surface of a small blue planet that orbits a medium-size star, while tennis unfolds on a plot of parallel or perpendicular lines, bisected by a net. Otherwise, they’re basically the same thing. What’s true of life is generally even truer of tennis.

For example: “It’s good to have something exceptional. You do need something special.”

The speaker is Hatem McDadi, vice-president of player development for Tennis Canada, and he is chatting with a reporter in the steadily filling stands at the Thunderbird Sports Centre in Vancouver. It’s the final day of Canada’s Davis Cup tie against Italy. In an hour or so, Milos Raonic will take to the court against Andreas Seppi, the top-ranked Italian player, in what could be the deciding match of the three-day contest.

“Milos is such a solid player in every part of his game,” says McDadi.

And he’s right. In just a couple of years, Raonic has rocketed up the men’s world rankings, from somewhere around number 160 to his present position, among the 20 best players in the world, challenging for a spot in the Top 10. His game has steadily improved, and it keeps getting better. But all of the other men at this exalted level are solid players, too. To crack the Top 10 and maybe the Top 5, it isn’t enough to be solid. You need “something exceptional.”

In other words, you need a weapon.

For Novak Djokovic, the world No. 1, it’s his forehand. For Rafael Nadal, it’s his superhuman footwork. For Scottish baseliner Andy Murray, it’s his extraordinary consistency. For Roger Federer, whom many consider the best player of all time, it’s an absence of weaknesses. For Milos Raonic, it’s his serve. When people talk about the rising young Canadian, they almost always concentrate on this aspect of his game, his merciless serve. You might think Raonic would grow tired of hearing about it, but he doesn’t seem to.

“I’m proud of the respect it gets,” he says. “It means I’m putting a lot of pressure, not only on my serve, but on my opponent’s serve.”

His logic is unassailable. If you plan to win a set against Milos Raonic, you had better be sure to hold your own serve, because there’s not much chance you’ll be breaking his. For Raonic’s opponents, this adds up to a case of constant pressure, no matter whether they are serving or receiving.

“He beats the guys he’s supposed to beat,” says former coach Casey Curtis. “He rarely loses to guys he’s supposed to beat.”

The main factor behind that record is the Raonic serve — and not only because of its withering pace.

“It’s a number of things,” says McDadi, quickly reeling off the manifold virtues of the Canadian’s most intimidating stroke. In addition to speed, these include variety, accuracy and disguise. “It’s all of those things.”

A dominating serve provides such a powerful advantage in tennis that you might wonder why more players don’t take the time to develop one. The answer is simple. Serving well is hard.

“I wouldn’t underestimate how much he worked on it as a kid,” says McDadi.

The serve is unlike any other stroke in tennis. On the one hand, it’s the only stroke in the game that a player is able to hit entirely on his or her own terms. Every other shot is influenced to a greater or lesser degree by an opponent on the other side of the net, someone who hits the ball to you so that you have to adjust to whatever that ball does — or doesn’t do. But the serve is different. It’s what sports experts refer to as a “closed skill,” like an arrow shot in archery or a pitch in baseball. With other tennis strokes — groundstrokes, volleys or overheads — a player generally doesn’t get the chance to do exactly what he or she wants. But when serving, and only when serving, a player is able to determine everything about the upcoming stroke — the stance, the timing, the ball placement, the mechanics involved in striking the ball. Everything.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the serve is also by a considerable margin the most complicated stroke in tennis. If you don’t believe this to be so, just wander out to some public tennis courts one weekend afternoon in summer and watch. Most of the players — even those who are otherwise fairly accomplished at the game — will possess truncated and clumsy service motions, combined with weak, inaccurate delivery. For most people, it’s very difficult to serve a tennis ball, or at least to do it well.

How did Milos Raonic manage to become so good?

The short answer is practice — an ungodly amount of practice. “It comes from a massive amount of time on the court getting it right, and he did that,” says Curtis. “We did a lot of drills with ball cans or pylons as targets. He would knock them down, and I would put them up again.”

Of course, all top players practise their serve — maybe as much as Raonic — but they still can’t serve the way he can.

“The one thing I would really point out,” says Curtis, “is the efficiency of his movement. It has a lot to do with the efficiency of his movement.”

If you watch Raonic’s serve closely, you will notice that his motion is actually quite compact — and extremely quick. Other players with lesser serves have far more impressive-seeming mechanics. Consider Djokovic or Raonic’s Canadian teammate, Vasek Pospisil. Their service motions are things of grandeur, more impressive esthetically than Raonic’s delivery, and they’re effective, too. Players such as Djokovic or Pospisil do manage to hit the ball very, very hard.

But Raonic hits it harder. As Curtis says, his movement is extremely efficient. In other words, it’s quick and it’s simple — a combination that is deceptively difficult to achieve. Merely consider what a tennis serve entails (because a tennis serve entails much more than some might think). Superficially, it might seem that a right-handed tennis player executes a serve by using his right arm to hit the ball with his racquet. Well, as they say in the more intellectual tennis circles, duh. Of course, that’s what happens. But that is not the half of it.

In fact, the power in a serve is mostly generated, not by a player’s hitting arm, but by his legs. If you think about it, this only makes sense. Most people’s legs are much larger and far more powerful than their arms will ever be. Watch an accomplished server in slow motion, and you will see that his or her service action begins with a deep knee bend, combined with a torque, or rotation, of the upper body. Ideally, a player should rotate his torso so that his back is almost turned to his opponent on the other side of the net. What follows is a chain reaction: the bent legs straighten quickly, producing a powerful reactive force that drives up through the hips, causing a counter-rotation of the torso. The same force now flies through a right-handed player’s right shoulder, flinging his or her racquet arm toward the ball, a sequence that culminates in a wrist snap as the racquet strikes the ball. But the initial power comes from the legs. The other parts of the player’s body, along with his or her racquet, serve primarily to transmit that force, step by step, until the strings connect with the ball.

Thwack.

This is roughly the same process that’s involved in the cracking of a whip, an exercise in physics that can generate colossal speed. The sharp, sudden report that resounds at the end of the sequence when a whip is cracked — analogous to the wrist snap in a tennis serve — is actually the sound of the lash breaking the sound barrier. This might be hard to believe, but it’s true. (Actually, there is some debate on this subject. Some scientists believe it is the loop near the end of the whip, rather than the lash itself, that breaks the sound barrier. Either way, something goes faster than sound.) Now, no one can make a tennis ball fly at supersonic speeds, not even Milos Raonic, at least not without first climbing aboard a high-performance jet. But the Canadian regularly hits serves that clock well above 220 kilometres an hour, and that is very, very fast. Not even the best returners in the world enjoy facing a succession of those.

Practice had a big impact, no doubt about it, but other factors are also at work, including genetics and physique.

“What Milos has is fast-twitch fibres, the ability to control muscles quickly,” says Curtis. World-class sprinters and pitchers in professional baseball share the same attribute, he says.

The third factor is height. If Raonic were shorter, he would not be able to serve as effectively as he does. There are two reasons for this, one a matter of mechanics and the other a function of angles. Because of his height, the physical levers that Raonic uses to fire his serve — his calves, thighs, torso, upper arm and forearm — are all longer than average. If deployed efficiently, the extra length of those moving parts translates into greater speed. To demonstrate this effect for yourself, just take two sticks — one long, one short. Waggle them both up and down, at the same speed, and observe which one travels further through the air.

But there’s more. Because he stands six-foot-five, Raonic plays the game as if from atop a raised platform. This is especially beneficial on his serve. Hit from a greater than normal height, the ball races into the opposing court at a more acute than normal angle, causing it to bounce higher than a ball would normally do. This makes it even more difficult for an opposing player to hit an effective return. There’s still more. Not only does Raonic generate huge speed on his serve, but his delivery is also unusually accurate, varied and deceptive. Once again, immense amounts of practice have paid off, enabling Raonic to hit the ball to any target he likes while using a wide range of spins — topspin, slice, flat — each of which produces a unique challenge for the receiver.

“He’s got ’em all, and he can hit ’em all, anytime he wants,” says Curtis.

Possibly even more important, he can disguise his intentions from his opponent. This is partly a matter of pace.

“When the ball is coming at 228 kilometres an hour, it’s very difficult to read,” says Corrado Barazzutti, a former touring professional who now coaches Italy’s Davis Cup team.

But it’s also a question of deliberate disguise. Even at the elite level of the sport, most servers telegraph the direction and spin of an upcoming serve because they vary the placement of their ball toss according to the kind of rotation they intend to apply to the ball — a different toss for each kind of serve. Ball straight out in front? That’s a flat serve. Over to the right for a right-hander? That’s a slice. Off to the left and directly overhead? Topspin kicker.

“Your opponent knows pretty much which serve is coming,” says Curtis.

But, just as his hero Pete Sampras used to do, Raonic tends to use the same all-purpose toss for every serve, a feat that’s extremely difficult to master but that gives him a huge advantage. His opponent has no idea what is coming and therefore has to guess. If he guesses wrong, well, that’s another ace for the Canadian.

“His location, his precision, are incredible,” says Niemeyer. “He has all the serves you can imagine in tennis.”

Just ask Fabio Fognini, who faced Raonic in the second match of the Davis Cup tie in Vancouver, losing in straight sets, 4-6, 6-7, 5-7. At a post-match press conference, someone asked Fognini — who was aced 25 times during the match — what the toughest aspect of Raonic’s game was.

“The serve,” he said. “What do you think?”

In Vancouver, evidence of the patented Raonic serve is finally returning. After Seppi evens the fourth set at three games apiece, Raonic unleashes a pair of trademark aces in quick succession and easily holds his serve to sneak in front, 4-3. On his serve, Seppi returns the favour, tying the set at four games all. The players continue to trade service games until it is the Italian’s turn to serve again, down five games to six. Seppi takes his place at the baseline. Meanwhile, the crowd urges Raonic on with chants of “Break! Break!”

This, of course, is easier to say than do. Some believe Raonic’s return of serve is among the weaker aspects of his game, and maybe that’s so. Against top players — and Seppi surely qualifies — the Canadian seems to play a lot of very long sets, with few breaks either way. Still, if there is going to be a break in this set, now seems like a good time. Seppi clobbers a groundstroke wide to go down love-15. The next point features a long graceful exchange of deep, sliced cross-court backhands, till Raonic surprises Seppi with a down-the-line winner. Just like that, the Italian is two points away from losing the match. The crowd once again is electric, but eventually quiet returns. With the score at love-30, Seppi prepares to serve.

Two weeks before heading to Virginia to enrol in business school, Milos Raonic had a sudden change of heart.

The year was 2008. He was all of 17. And he was one of the 1,000 best men’s tennis players in the world — but only just.

Most people would call his decision a long shot, probably a very long shot, but he decided to stay true to his dream. He decided to turn pro. His parents agreed, with one condition.

“We told him, no problem,” recalls his father, Dusan. “ ‘But you have two years to get to the top 100.’ ”

Here was the deal: if he failed to achieve his goal within the two-year timetable, then Milos would say farewell to the professional tour and head back to school. Just to be on the safe side, he agreed to start taking university courses by correspondence at the University of Athabaska in Alberta.

“It was a tough, tough decision,” remembers Dusan.

“Our main concern,” says Milos’s mother, Vesna, “was the possibility of injury.”

It was a legitimate worry. After all, Milos might spend a year or two on the tour before possibly suffering a chronic, career-ending injury (not uncommon in tennis, with its grindingly repetitive physical stresses). In that event, he’d be washed up as a pro and no longer able to attract a U.S. athletic scholarship.

But both parents trusted their son’s judgment. They believed in him.

Raonic spent the following year touring the world, competing in entry-level professional tournaments known as “challengers” and “futures,” vying for small-time prize money and the all-important ranking points that he hoped would eventually lead to the big time. It was a sort of tennis purgatory that included almost as many defeats as victories. But gradually, the Canadian improved his world ranking. In the summer of 2009, he served his first clear notice that better days were to come. Back home in Canada, he played in the qualifying tournament for the Rogers Cup, which that year was being contested in Montreal. He was hoping to make it through to the main draw, and he did. Along the way, he defeated Teymuraz Gabashvili, a Russian player then ranked No. 77 in the world, as well as a formidable French player, Michaël Llodra, who was much tougher than his ranking at the time (No. 113) would suggest.

In the first round of the main tournament, Raonic drew one of the top players in the competition — Chilean Fernando Gonzalez, then ranked 10th in the world — and very nearly beat him. Raonic dominated most of the contest and even held a match point, but eventually lost in three hard-fought sets.

“He probably should have won that match,” says McDadi. “He was unlucky to lose it.”

That performance was surely a confidence-builder, but it did not buy Raonic a free pass into the main draws of the big tournaments. He continued to compete on the satellite circuit or else duked it out in the preliminary duels, known as qualifiers, that serve as a testing ground for the many journeymen, newcomers and has-beens who populate the less exalted regions of professional tennis.

Raonic was ranked around 400 in the world in late 2009 when Niemeyer took over as his coach. A fellow Canadian who had only recently retired from the tour, Niemeyer had the same vision for Milos’s game as Casey Curtis had long promoted back in Thornhill — an aggressive, all-court style that combined baseline power with frequent attacking forays to the net.

Under Niemeyer’s tutelage, and with the moral support of Louis Borfiga at Montreal’s National Tennis Centre, Raonic inched his way further up the world rankings. By late 2010, he stood at number 230, a big improvement but still a considerable distance from making good on that promise to his parents. Meanwhile, Niemeyer was growing tired of the itinerant life of a tennis professional — an endless and sometimes monotonous blur of airports, tennis courts and more airports. He longed to return to Canada to live, more or less full-time. By mutual agreement, the two Canadians parted company. Raonic signed on with a new coach, Spaniard Galo Blanco who, during his competitive days, had risen to the Top 40 in the world.

To explain what happened next, it might be enough to say the two men clicked from the start. Or maybe every young tennis player’s career proceeds according to a unique timetable — some slower, some faster — and now it was Milos’s time to flourish. Or maybe it was the Barcelona effect. During the off-season that year, Raonic and his new Castilian coach headed to Spain’s second city, site of that country’s national centre for tennis. There, Raonic meant to train intensively while also taking full advantage of an opportunity nearly unique to Barcelona — an unparalleled concentration of sensational tennis players. Spain, after all, has more Top 100 men’s players than any other country, and they tend to congregate in Barcelona during the off-season.

“One day, Milos phoned me from Spain,” recalls Curtis. “He said, ‘I was in a tiebreak today with Almagro.’ I said, ‘How did you get on a court with Almagro?’ ”

It was simple. Raonic and Nicolas Almagro — then a Top 20 player and lately ranked No. 12 in the world — both found themselves in Barcelona, along with a host of great Spanish players, including David Ferrer, Feliciano Lopez and others.

“I was surrounded by Top 10, Top 30 players,” Raonic recalls now. “I could practise against them every day. I knew it was something that would help me. It was an opportunity.”

One way or another, the chronometer lodged somewhere in Milos Raonic’s tennis-crazy soul suddenly began to race ahead at a vastly accelerated pace. In January the next year, while ranked around 156, the Canadian entered the qualifying rounds at the Australian Open, one of the sport’s four vaunted grand slam tournaments. These preliminary rounds — the qualifiers or “quallies,” as they are known — are a sort of pre-tournament tournament that gives low-ranked players a chance to claw their way up into the main draw, to test their skills against the sport’s elite practitioners. Only a few of the lesser lights ever manage to make their way through, and they usually don’t stick it out in the main draw for long. This time, Raonic got through. Next, he proceeded to reel off an almost surreal string of victories in the main draw. He became the first qualifier in more than a decade to reach the fourth round of a slam. Along the way, he beat a Top 10 player, Mikhail Youzhny of Russia, before finally losing to Ferrer in four.

So he didn’t win the Australian, but the kid from Thornhill had definitely made a statement. He was on the way up.

Raonic proceeded to soar through the rankings. By May of 2011, he was No. 25 on the planet, easily meeting the condition set by his parents when he decided to turn pro. At the end of that breakthrough year, he was honoured as the top newcomer on the men’s professional tour, and his fortunes have continued to rise since then.

“If he believes in himself, then we believe in him,” says his father, Dusan.

Maybe it was only a matter of time before Raonic made good on his early promise, but he’s certainly doing that now, thanks in large measure to that indispensable factor — his belief in himself. He now has confidence on his side, along with all those other attributes — talent, desire, a cannonball serve and years of hard work combined with plenty of excellent coaching. None of those ingredients on its own could have propelled Raonic this far. Top-level athletes need a mix of factors, a critical mass of innate abilities, lessons learned and opportunities seized, something Raonic demonstrates just about every time he steps onto a tennis court. He’s not perfect, by any means. He still loses some heartbreakers. And he still has to keep a close watch on his temper.

Economically, his circumstances have been hugely altered. In 2012, he earned $2.48 million in prize money from both singles and doubles competition. He has product-endorsement deals with New Balance, SAP, Rolex, Wilson, Rogers and Commerce Court. When on tour, he is accompanied by his coach, his physiotherapist (Juan Ozon), his business manager (Austin Nunn) and, for the major tournaments, his trainer (Toni Estalella). His family joins him sometimes.

“When he needs us, we come to be with him,” says his mother.

An affable young man, Raonic seems to be gaining poise and confidence in social situations as his on-court success continues. He kibitzes at times during practice sessions and seems to enjoy bantering with journalists in post-match press conferences. During televised, on-court interviews — typically conducted after he has just won a match — he at times manages to seize control of the exchange from the interviewer, without seeming overbearing.

Like other highly ranked tennis players, he leads an enviable life in terms of creature comforts, living mainly in expensive hotels and flying first-class. “I think I live one of the most pleasing lifestyles,” he says. But already, at just 22, he is actively “giving back,” as the saying goes. He recently established the Milos Raonic Foundation to raise and donate money to benefit disadvantaged youngsters. Its first grant was announced in February — a donation of $40,000 to ɫɫ��’s Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation that will potentially support the careers of “future paralympians.”

An inveterate tweeter, Raonic (@milosraonic) has more than 90,000 followers, with whom he regularly shares details of his personal life, his thoughts on tennis, his diet and his taste in movies. While competing at Roland Garros in Paris in May, he lamented that summer flicks such as Hangover III and Into Darkness, the new Star Trek opus, were not yet being screened in France. Watching movies is among his favourite off-court activities, along with listening to music and reading. In other words, he’s a pretty normal twentysomething. As for dining rituals, a steak dinner is a sure sign that he has a match the next day. Otherwise, his favourite dish is moussaka. Earlier this spring, while competing in the European clay-court tennis season, Raonic took time out from tennis more than once to tweet his encouragement to the ɫɫ�� Maple Leafs during their first-round encounter with the Boston Bruins. (Unfortunately, it didn’t help.)

Raonic’s personal motto, as set out on his official Twitter page, has an air of uplift and melodrama: “Working hard. Aiming to be the best. This is my dream. This is my journey!”

One important advantage that Raonic lacked during his early development was a Canadian role model, a singles player from this country who had already blazed a champion’s path, demonstrating that it is possible for a Canadian to rise to the top of the tennis world. True, Canada has produced several very accomplished women’s players, including Carling Bassett-Seguso, who reached No. 8 in the world in 1985. And no one should discount the achievements of doubles specialists such as Grant Connell or Glenn Michibata or, especially, Daniel Nestor, who is surely among the finest doubles players in the history of the game. On the men’s side, however, at least in singles, the nearest Canada has come to producing an international star is a former Montrealer — Greg Rusedski, another big server who played professionally in the 1990s and 2000s. But Rusedski enjoyed his greatest success after switching passports and competing as a Briton. He was never a role model for Raonic.

And role models do have an impact. Back in the 1970s, a hugely talented Swedish player exploded onto the men’s circuit. During an all-too-brief career, Bjorn Borg won 11 grand slam singles titles, tying him with Australian Rod Laver for fourth best of all time. (Only Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and Roy Emerson have more.) Borg retired early, at age 26, but his phenomenal success attracted thousands of younger compatriots to the game and marked the beginning of a long run of sensational Swedish players.

Already, there are signs that Raonic may be starting to exert a comparable effect in Canada. Consider British Columbian Filip Peliwo, now 19, who last year was the No. 1 junior player in the world on the men’s side. Or Montrealer Eugenie Bouchard, now among the Top 100 women’s players on the planet, at only age 19. Or Françoise Abanda, 16 years old and also from Montreal, who was the fourth-ranked junior girl in the world as of early May and the youngest female player ever to crack the Top 10 of the junior rankings. Their success probably flows in some measure from Raonic’s example. After all, if one Canadian can do it, then another can, too: it’s largely a matter of belief. And, if Sweden is any precedent, there are many more promising young Canadian players still to come, thanks to the path still being blazed by Milos Raonic. He might not have had a Canadian role model of his own, but he is well on the way to becoming one.

“We definitely have a few who have potential,” says Niemeyer, who now coaches top under-14s at the Montreal tennis centre. “We definitely have a good group.”

As for Raonic, he’s only 22, he’s still improving and he has plenty of ambitions yet to fulfil. He isn’t ruling anything out.

“I want to win the big events,” he says. “I want to be the best.”

Suddenly, it’s double match point.

At 15-40 in the fourth set, Andreas Seppi serves to stay alive, but it’s almost as if the outcome of the match is now a foregone conclusion. The contest ends with a netted groundstroke by the Italian, and the Thunderbird Sports Centre erupts in a frenzy. For his part, Milos Raonic is leaping like a madman, his eyes agape, mouth open wide, fists balled at his sides. Soon, the rest of the Canadian team is on the court — players, coaches, managers, even Spanish coach Galo Blanco, who seems to be pretending to be Canadian. They’re all embracing one another and bouncing in circles. It isn’t graceful, but it’s proud.

In a dramatic gesture, Raonic spreads a Canadian flag out on the court and then yanks off his red tennis jersey with its white maple leaf emblazoned on the chest. He places the shirt on the court alongside the flag and stands back while the crowd continues to roar — as well they might. For the first time in history, their country is in the semifinals of the Davis Cup. Led once again by Milos Raonic, Canada will meet Serbia — headed by world number one Novak Djokovic — in September in Belgrade to fight for a place in the finals.

Before that, Raonic will have plenty of tennis to play, including Wimbledon, his favourite grand slam event, which begins on June 24, followed by a string of hard-court tournaments, including the Rogers Cup in Montreal in August and the U.S. Open in New York around Labour Day.

Stay tuned.