Best Canadian Sports Writing

By ECW Press

38 pieces that will be remembered for seasons to come

For 25 years, sports journalists south of the border have been collected in best-of anthologies. With Best Canadian Sports Writing, editors Stacey May Fowles and Pasha Malla offer a long overdue rejoinder from the North, showcasing top literary sports writing from diverse homegrown talent.

This extraordinary anthology of recent writing mixes columns and long-form journalism, profiles and reportage, new voices and well-known favourites such as Stephen Brunt, Rachel Giese, Eric Koreen, Morgan Campbell, and Cathal Kelly. The assembled pieces offer polished prose, unusual perspectives, and rare insight into their subjects, whether it’s a Filipino basketball league in the Yukon, the rise and fall of ski ballet, or a field trip to the Mexican hometown of the Jays’ Roberto Osuna. With its many voices and approaches, Best Canadian Sports Writing expands the genre into more democratic and conversational territory, celebrating the perspectives of both fans and experts alike.

These remarkable pieces offer lasting insight that, like sport itself, excites, inspires, and never fails to reveal the truth about ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773050867

Book preview

2017

SAM RICHES

HOME COURT

Filipino Hoops in Canada’s Frozen North

---

The Classical, December 31, 2013

Gavin Diore is doubled over with his hands on his hips, sweat gleaming on the tip of his nose. The searing white fluorescent lighting unique to high school gymnasiums reflects harshly off the hardwood beneath his feet. It’s early evening on a Saturday, on Easter weekend, and the gym is full. Spectators spill from the mouth of a blue steel-framed doorway and more wait in the hallway, craning their necks and peering over shoulders. Inside, people cluster in the four corners of the gym, while others gather along the sidelines, leaning against the white brick walls. On the stage adjacent to the court are a few other fans, legs dangling above the glowing hardwood. Each team has a cheering section of its own; pods of scurrying children tear along the baseline, adorned in replica jerseys of the men on the court. A frail, elderly man sits in a blue chair at the edge of the doorway. He leans forward when the action reaches the far end of the gym, propping himself up with his cane and wincing each time.

Diore’s team leads by seven points with three minutes to go when he picks up his sixth and final foul. He’s not happy about it, and the two referees wait unblinkingly with whistles in their mouths as Diore throws his arms up in frustration, pleads his innocence, and finally storms off the court and into the locker room. Minutes later, he returns in street clothes with a camera to his eye and a large smile on his face. His team, the Pilinians, go on to win, and Diore films the final minutes of it.

It’s shortly after 8 p.m. when the next set of teams files out of the blue locker room doors, forming layup lines as Top 40 blares from the sound system. The winner of this matchup, which pits Kentucky Fried Chicken against Viernes Janitorial, will face the Pilinians in next week’s championship.

Who will win? says the woman behind the microphone, a Filipino accent thickening her words. The flying chickens or the flying brooms? If Kentucky Fried Chicken seems to have an especially raucous cheering section, and it does, it probably has something to do with the fast food empire’s recent arrival in this frozen corner of Canada and the rows of cars that idled in wait for the greasiest mass-production chicken north of 60. Romy Gayangos, the general manager of the league, sits beside the PA announcer, smiling. The sound system along with the electronic scoreboard are new additions this year, purchased after months of fundraising efforts netted more than $2,000. The teams that finished earlier return to the sidelines to watch the next group. This is basketball in Canada’s Yukon.

~

Whitehorse is the capital city of the Yukon. Forgotten by most Canadians and unknown to most everyone else, this is a place where winter lasts eight months and the temperature routinely plunges past forty below zero and stays there. During the dim depths of winter, depending on how far north you get, the sun barely rises above the tree line; get far enough north and it won’t rise at all. Fly into the airport a couple times, and you’ll be on a first name basis with everyone working there. It’s strange to think that any space so vast could be so insular, and in fact you can leave in any direction you want; it will just be hours until you reach the next town. The territory, taken as a whole, is almost 30,000 square miles larger than California and home to just 35,000 people, most of whom live in Whitehorse. There’s a border with Alaska on the west, the Northwest Territories on the east, British Columbia to the south, and the northern coast rests on the Beaufort Sea. But mostly, there is a lot of nothing. Bears walk down city streets during the twenty-hour-long summer days; locals joke about mosquitoes being the region’s official bird.

Diore is a member of the Yukon’s Filipino community, a community that has grown from 150 people when he arrived nine years ago to more than 2,000 now. Most of the growth can be attributed to the Yukon Government’s nominee program, which was designed to alleviate the region’s labour shortage by bringing foreign workers into the territory. Diore started the Yukon Pinoy Basketball League in 2007 with four teams; there are now more than 150 players in the league. They wear professional-looking uniforms with the logos of various local businesses stamped across the chest. The uniforms are made back home, in the Philippines; it’s the best deal, Gayangos says.

Even with its growth, Diore is constantly recruiting. The league is usually one of the first introductions newcomers get to the community. You see new people in the grocery store and you introduce yourself and the next week they are here, he says. Some people come to play and more come just to watch and meet people and learn about the community. Diore says it used to be easy to speak with everyone, but now his introductions are occasionally marred by language barriers, indicative of the nearly 200 dialectal variations that exist in the Philippines. Sometimes, he also mistakes local First Nations people for Filipinos. It’s getting hard to tell, he says sheepishly. There are just so many people now.

It’s Gayangos’s first year running the league — he calls it a brotherhood — but he has been involved since its inception. He puts particular emphasis in getting younger players onto the planning committee, ensuring continued growth. There are so many young players now and they are developing on the high-school teams, and this gives them more exposure and training, he says. It teaches them responsibility. We all support each other. The growth of the Filipino population has been mirrored in the school system, and basketball, a hugely popular sport in the Philippines, has worked its way into the local lexicon, alongside hockey.

The territory’s high-school circuit is dominated by Filipino players. Last year, travelling teams from Alaska crossed the border during the Arctic Winter Games, a biennial mini-Olympics of sorts with nine contingents from across the circumpolar North. Alaska, usually a much stronger force in sports, was trounced in nearly every game. Last year’s local basketball MVP, a fourteen-year-old Filipino, now suits up alongside Diore on team Pilinians.

In the hallway of the Catholic high school that hosts the league, there’s a bulletin board covered with red tissue paper and tacked with laminated clippings of students who have made the local newspapers for sporting accomplishments or musical achievements or other notable feats. More than a few feature Filipino students. The school itself made headlines in the last month when a student challenged the school’s policy on sexual orientation that referred to homosexuality as intrinsically disordered and an act of grave depravity. Things are changing in the Yukon, and the region’s Filipinos, and basketball, are a part of it.

~

The commissioner’s sister is named Ailene, and she operates the Asian Central Grocery Store and Restaurant. Ailene came to the Yukon in 1989, during the first wave of migration. She estimates that there were, at most, twenty other Filipinos in the territory at that time. She left her hometown on the Visayas Islands and arrived in November, one of the hardest and coldest months of the year. She spent her first night, an unseasonably warm minus-five late fall evening, sleeping fully clothed in a down parka, mittens, and a woolen hat. Later that winter, the mercury dropped to sixty below zero.

I came from a tropical place and grew up on the ocean, but here everything is frozen and cold, she says. But it’s home now. The opportunity is here. When I was young I dreamt of touching snow, but I never thought I’d be living in it.

The store is multicoloured and wildly aromatic, with aisles of sauces and pastes and oils and packaged and dried food from across Asia. A tropical wooden overhang shades the cashier, and a wall-mounted flat-screen television beams Filipino television into the dining area. A selection of rice cookers and pots and pans line the far side of the room, and the clang of dishes and sizzle of a generously greased grill sound from the kitchen. The space also hosts karaoke nights, children’s birthday parties, and other events; freshly arrived Pinoys will leave their phone numbers with Ailene, in case she knows of any eligible singles who might be interested in going out.

Earlier in the season, one of the league’s players got engaged the day of a game; that night they celebrated at the store, playing music and drinking imported Filipino beer. We try to do anything we can, says Ailene. If it’s going to be positive; if it’s going to bring the community together.

If people are having problems, they come here and we try and help, adds Mike, Ailene’s business partner. We put them in touch with other people, or we listen and give advice.

Mike is a recent arrival to the community, having made his way North from Alberta six months ago. He’s middle-aged, with a soft smile and dark sunken eyes. The Yukon is the fifth place he’s lived since arriving in Canada in 1994. I hope this is my last stop, he says, looking out the window and onto an empty street. When you’re alone it’s easier to move around. The smile on his face is suspended over a deep sadness.

In 2005, nine years after he started an import and export company, Mike’s wife got sick and he fell into a depression. His friends picked him up and asked him to join a small business; it kept him busy and his mind occupied, but it didn’t heal his wife. She passed in 2011, and Mike entered a complete depression. I had lost interest in everything, he says. But then my daughter phoned and said, ‘Come to the Yukon, come work up here.’ I came without hesitation.

Mike found new family through the Filipino community, and because of his role at the store, he’s now a face that everybody knows. The store is also one of the main sponsors of the league. His daughter, Jocelyn, is currently on staff as a city councillor.

In terms of lifestyle for us, the Filipino community, we’re improving, says Ailene. We’ve gone from menial jobs to owning businesses. We have a dentist in town, now. We’re the fastest growing ethnic group in Whitehorse. In a city that was never a place anyone quite wanted to live, Yukon’s Filipinos have found something like home: a place to live, work, and play basketball.

~

A week later, the championship game pits team KFC against the skilled but aging Pilinians. Collapsible stands unfold next to the court and pour down the sideline at Porter Creek Secondary School. It’s a considerably larger space than the usual gym, but in tonight’s atmosphere, it feels full, even cramped. There’s not an empty seat to be found on the bleachers; a local reporter sits under one of the baskets, a zoom lens fully extended. The action moves fast, with each team playing a similar style that’s near pathologically focused on passing and getting an open shot. The shot clock never once comes close to expiring. On many of the possessions, the ball doesn’t touch the floor.

Late in the second quarter, the premier of the territory and the city’s mayor shuffle into the stands nearest the exit. Their appearance is greeted by an announcement of their arrival over the PA system and a round of cheers and applause. They sit stiffly in the third row of the bleachers, constantly smiling but never removing their coats. They are also joined by Whitehorse’s Member of Parliament and Jocelyn. At the half, they take turns speaking to the crowd; the mayor points to Jocelyn, calling her the hardest working city councillor he’s seen in thirty-one years. In the stands, Mike watches, wide-eyed and emotional. What he might be feeling, so far from his home in so many ways, is hard to guess. Pride, at the very least, is palpable.

The teams enter the final quarter within seven points of each other. There is a season’s worth of buildup in the final ten minutes, and a year’s worth of camaraderie and community converging on the sidelines. It gets loud, and the game gets close. The teams exchange leads on each possession and the crowd jumps up and down with every basket, the floor shaking with the rhythm of their cheers. The Filipino woman on the microphone rises to her feet and pushes her chair aside, the speed of her voice increasing and arriving at a higher frequency. It gets louder still.

Players on the sideline cup their hands around their mouths, yelling instructions to teammates over the noise of the cheers. With twenty-one seconds remaining, a KFC flying chicken drops in the game-tying basket, a left-handed layup, and gets fouled. Along the sideline, his teammates, all thirteen of them, link arms as he toes the free-throw line. He takes three dribbles, exhales, and knocks down the go-ahead basket. The gym erupts and the Pilinians, eager to get momentum back on their side, rush down the court and turn the ball over. The gym gets louder and the Pilinians begin fouling away the final seconds. The flying chickens hold on to win 75–70.

At centre court, Romy and his fellow committee members pull golden trophies and silver medals from a cardboard box. They wear black T-shirts with committee written in white block text on the back. The stands empty as everyone in attendance rushes the court. It’s chaos after that, a happy churn of cheers and camera clicks and congratulations. The premier and the mayor pose for photos with the teams, and family members crowd in as well. Ailene moves through the crowd. It’s nearly 10:30 p.m. and only three people are working at the store. She makes the call on her cell phone and tells them to get ready, tonight’s going to be a celebration.

RICHARD POPLAK

THE ACE AGE

---

The Walrus, September 12, 2012

Memphis in late winter: sky the colour of the blues. Outside, a February gale tears past Graceland, past Chess Records, past Stax Records, arriving at the Racquet Club of Memphis in a whirl of dust and leaves and fast-food wrappers. Inside, Stadium Court hums with fluorescents and fake air. Between points, ’60s pop. Now, an explosive brisance thunders from the rafters.

Fifteen–love, says the umpire.

The final game of the 2012 Regions Morgan Keegan Championships, US$277,915 up for grabs. The crowd turns to observe twenty-one-year-old Canadian tennis player Milos Raonic. He drags his size fourteen trainers cross-court, scuffing the toes like a kid double-shifting at Wendy’s. On television, he appears gangly. In the flesh, he looks like supple rainforest wood lashed into human simulacrum, his shoulders two plates of armour borrowed from the carapace of some -saurus or other.

He regards the ball girl. She throws over three U.S. Open Wilsons. He rolls them in his right hand, discards one, pockets a second. He turns away from her and assumes an unaggressive crouch, bounces the ball eight times, touches it to the V of his racquet. Uncoiling until he reaches his full six foot five, he tosses the ball skyward, where it lingers, blazing under the lights.

Then he leaps up and forward and bends until he resembles, in profile, an upended Nike Swoosh. What follows is a Looney Tunes outtake. It’s as if he’s pounded a ceramic sink at the Austrian Jürgen Melzer, last year ranked the eighth-best tennis player in the world; as if the contents of a Home Depot have exploded over the net, nails and buzz saws and beams and washer-dryer units.

One hundred and thirty-eight miles an hour.

Ace.

Thirty–love, says the umpire.

The Racquet Club of Memphis is a farrago of tennis-related facilities east of the Mississippi River, host of the Regions Morgan Keegan Championships since 1976. The event is managed and operated by Sharks Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the NHL’s San Jose franchise and the SAP Open Tennis Tournament. Three days before his first match in Memphis, Raonic won in San Jose, defeating Denis Istomin 7–6(3), 6–2. Auspiciously, that event functioned as his cotillion; he earned his first title there in 2011, rocketing up the rankings and into the Association of Tennis Professionals’ dreams: a photogenic, well-spoken North American, a player to vanquish the klatch of bandana-wearing Europeans crowded atop the field. (As far as Americans are concerned, fading Andy Roddick looks as if he hits the buffet table more often than the tennis court, and John Isner is a grump.) Raonic is the first Canadian athlete more commonly referred to by his given name. Mee-lowsh. Uttered with reverence, constantly, in the halls of the Racquet Club of Memphis and beyond.

Man, Americans love him, Austin Nunn, the adenoidal ATP public relations and marketing manager for the Americas, tells me. He’s going to be a North American superstar. He isn’t in-your-face Canadian — something I previously considered a contradiction in terms — and the kid is just so mature. Around here, we say he’s twenty-one going on fifty. More and more, Americans are embracing him. Watch what happens at the U.S. Open. He’s going to literally explode.

Explosive is the adjective most often attached to his person. His great, metastasizing serve is his primary weapon. His record heading into Memphis is 14–1; he has now won eight matches in a row. In San Jose, one of his serves clocked in at 155 miles an hour, just one mile less than Ivo Karlović’s record 156-mile-an-hour blast. (Every server is not created equal, nor is every radar gun. Serve-speed records are contested business: Samuel Groth, a massive Australian ranked 258th, unleashed a 163-mile-an-hour bomb in South Korea, but it doesn’t stand because of variance in radar guns.) Milos is, commentators agree, the player most likely to break the 160-mile-per-hour barrier. As of this writing, over the course of 2012, he has served 578 aces in thirty-seven matches, an average of fifteen free points per contest, the equivalent of roughly four full games per match won without a ball coming his way. He has held 94 percent of his service games, the highest on the tour, higher even than Roger Federer’s 91 percent. In 2011, Milos won 53 percent of his second serves.

Such a serve becomes mythic. Pure, elemental wrath, the sort of thing Cormac McCarthy wrote of in his 1985 novel Blood Meridian: Hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it.

But The Serve is no guarantee of greatness. If that were so, David Wheaton would be a household name, while Federer, who is less powerful but more precise, would be preparing for a career as a cruise-ship pro. Andre Agassi’s serve was unremarkable; Boris Becker’s arm was a concealed weapon. They played each other into the court on more than one occasion.

In Milos’s case, injuries have been a major concern. His junior career was interrupted twice, by a Jones fracture that required five months to heal and by a broken wrist. His wrong-footed slide on the grass at Wimbledon 2011 — horses get shot for less — resulted in a labral (cartilage) tear. This was surgically repaired and painstakingly rehabilitated, only to be followed by a medial collateral ligament injury (misdiagnosed, as it turns out) during the first rubber of the 2012 Davis Cup, where he was forced to pull out hours before facing Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France.

Tens, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars rest on this question: is The Serve enough? The crowds love him, the ATP adores him, the sponsors — they melt. Barely four years into a pro career, Milos is already the most successful Canadian men’s singles tennis player of all time. But in assembling this unsmiling, taciturn HAL — a creation that doesn’t make mistakes and doesn’t care about intangibles — something may have been left on the workshop floor.

Another blast of ordnance. Memphis gasps. Windows rattle in Nashville.

One hundred and forty-one miles an hour.

Milos hangs his head, dog-tired, as if he has just killed a man.

~

By the time Milos was eight, his parents knew. The moment that stands out for Dusan and Vesna Raonic occurred shortly after their move from Brampton, Ontario, to nearby Thornhill. And it had nothing to do with tennis.

It was, however, what Tim Hortons commercials are made of: skinny new kid of foreign parentage shows up at a local pickup roller-hockey game. He doesn’t own a pair of Rollerblades, or know how to use them. That afternoon, his father sets off for a sporting goods store. The kid spends the night and the following day as frenzied autodidact. He shows up at the next game and plays roller hockey like Wayne Gretzky on trucker pills. Cheers, backslaps, cue close-up of glistening doughnuts.

The part you don’t see? Blood is raining down his knees, Vesna tells me. But Milos doesn’t care. He will not stop.

While there are all sorts of clinical terms for this behaviour, Vesna and Dusan are too old-world for kiddie yoga and meditation retreats. On a wintry evening in February, I meet them at a Starbucks in Thornhill, the northern labyrinth of strip malls and housing developments that downtown Torontonians refer to as the sprawl. Dusan is sad-eyed and quiet; Vesna is bright-eyed and gregarious.

Tennis parents have a reputation for unsavoury child-rearing practices: the Williams paterfamilias using his daughters as specimens in a nature versus nurture experiment; Mike Agassi drilling for the American dream by way of Andre’s racquet. In this dubious pantheon, Dusan and Vesna register as a minority. They may have exacting standards, but they are not insane.

For us, tennis was an accident, Vesna says. A flyer comes to the mailbox, and we needed something for both Milos and his brother to do. So we take them.

It was March break, 1998, four years after the Raonic clan decamped from Podgorica, Montenegro — the former Titograd, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — to Brampton. Like most people who actually lived in Yugoslavia during Josip Tito’s regime, their memories don’t converge with the country’s reputation as a commie backwater.

We had a very good life, children had everything, we had everything, Vesna says. Everybody was surprised when we left. We said, ‘Okay, why not? We try.’ It was almost an adventure. Challenge. And to give the kids opportunities. Milos was three at the time.

The thing I want you to understand of Milos, she continues, is he is a very determined child. That she still refers to him as a child is testament to his place in the Raonic family mythology: he is the baby, a monument to their will to make it in the new world, raised to represent their courage and tenacity in terra incognita.

Brought up as much by his older siblings, Jelena and Momir, as by his parents, Milos is a collective expression of who they are. My daughter, Jelena, says, ‘Mama, Milos completes us as a family,’ Vesna points out. And she’s right. He does.

His first time on a tennis court, the result of that fateful flyer, Milos was seven and had never held a racquet. He stomped home and informed his parents that he was willing to return, so long as he could play exclusively with the coaches. There was a healthy touch of John McEnroe’s petulance in the boy: he had no time for the other kids.

Dusan and Vesna were nonplussed. We said, ‘No, Milos. You must go back and play nicely.’ By the end of the week, the coach called to ask that they send Milos back. They demurred. Life was busy; their move to Thornhill was pending. Tennis disappeared as abruptly as it had arrived.

But he has an incredible memory, Milos, Dusan says. Nearly a year later, unprompted, he said, Tennis, Daddy. But proper. Professional. At the time, no one understood why.

Back in Montenegro, if you were looking for answers to what are now googleable questions, you went to the local barber. So Dusan visited an Italian stylist at Yonge and Steeles, who told him that he should make the trip to the nearby Blackmore Tennis Club, run by a coach named Casey Curtis.

The first meeting went poorly. Curtis is in the business of developing talent, and that process costs a lot of money. In 2011, a Tennis Canada program called Building Tennis Communities counted 22,500 kids in Mississauga and North York, Ontario, and in Surrey, B.C., alone. Almost every suburban kid hits a ball with a racquet at some point. Few go through the rigorous development process that will make them mildly competitive: daily court time, camps in the summer, private coaching. If a youngster shows promise, a coach will often waive the fees and invest the time: fashioning professional material from the mess of prepubescence beats a classified advertising campaign. If a player is merely keen, parents can expect to drop more than $10,000 a year. Very often, early talent fries out, and all that’s left is a childhood spent on hard courts, learning how to be alone.

How many tournaments has he won? Curtis wanted to know. Dusan stood alongside his son under the marshmallow glow of a winterized court and said, None. How many has he played? None. How many games has he won? Zero. Has he even played a game? Um, no.

Curtis hedged what he felt was a sure bet: Dusan and Milos could use an empty court at a discount, off-peak, six in the morning and ten at night. If Milos proved diligent, Curtis would reassess him.

For three months, without interruption, Dusan operated a machine that fired tennis balls at his boy, who punished himself like a stylite and drove himself like a prophet; he did not miss a single session, darkness or inclemency be damned. Talent, sure. But something else: a second spine, a bulletproof exoskeleton, lasers for eyes. He wasn’t pushed, he wasn’t cajoled. He showed up and hit green streaks into the night.

On the appointed date, Curtis watched Milos play and said, I’ll take him.

Milos and Curtis would work together twice a day, almost every day, for the next nine years.

~

Round two, Memphis. Dusan Raonic sits in the press box, front row. Thirteen years have passed since those father-son sessions at Blackmore. Next to him: Galo Blanco, Milos’s Spanish coach. They are solemn, intoning the occasional Go, Milos like a liturgy.

Milos faces the Ukrainian Sergiy Stakhovsky, a consistent top seventy-five player. Dusan never watches his son serve. He turns his head to the right, leaning his chin on his shoulder, as if the energy of the blast depletes him. As if the power is a shared power — a battery on which the entire Raonic family must run.

One hundred and thirty-two miles an hour.

Ace.

Milos leads 6–4, 4–4.

Stakhovsky has the red-rimmed eyes and gloomy mien of an extra in a Roman Polanski film. According to his bio, he enjoys reading Russian classics, and he plays accordingly.

On court, between points, Milos is slow moving, dolorous. He does not make a sound. He doesn’t grunt; he doesn’t exclaim. He never eyes the umpire and does not query calls. On occasion, he will look over at his coach. Every point, won or lost, is greeted with the same hang of the head, erased from memory the moment it goes up on the board. He plays in a continuous present, a shrouded train that moves at precisely the same speed from point A to point Z. This evenness of disposition, applied uniformly throughout a match, can seem at times a greater force than The Serve.

Once, an errant shot bounces into a ball girl’s shirt. She blushes wildly, and the crowd laughs. Milos stares at her with an utter lack of comprehension, as if he has just woken from a trance. She looks back at him, having gleaned a fundamental about tennis that she could never learn with racquet in hand. On court, as Stakhovsky might know better than most, you are a character from the Russian canon: utterly abandoned, alone.

Milos crouches, swaying side to side. As Stakhovsky raises his racquet, Milos straightens, eyes widening as if something vaguely interesting is happening on the other side of the net.

The serve comes to his forehand. He leaps up, hangs there. While airborne, he performs a sort of ladling motion. The ball screams toward Stakhovsky’s backhand, but he isn’t in the same time zone. Milos’s secondary weapon: the bestial forehand.

Game, Milos. Five points later: match.

Dusan rises. He has the same shoulder blades as his son, the great genetic gift. But on Dusan, it is a scholar’s hunchback — an engineering professor’s occupational hazard. He blinks at the camera flashes and disappears down the players’ tunnel. His son shakes Stakhovsky’s hand, and then stays to autograph big yellow novelty balls.

~

Later, I sit with Milos in the squash court the ATP has designated for player interviews. The walls are pocked with the ghosts of games past, the hardwood protected by humid carpet. Milos sits before me in a track suit, legs spread, knees like anvils. The most notable thing about him, besides the fact that he is very large, is that he has not yet fully worked his voice in; it derails, as a French journalist puts it.

Tennis and math. They’re linked, he says. Everyone uses statistics on my team. We look at what percentage of second serve points on my serve I’m winning and what points on his second serve I’m losing. What is my percentage of first serve returns? Those are critical numbers. These numbers need to keep rising if I hope to keep winning.

Other numbers are important, too. Milos has collected US$1,483,700 in prize money so far, and more in appearance fees and sponsorship deals. But should his career stall, he will not come out of the sport even: coaching costs of up to $2,500 a week, practice courts, international travel. Stakhovsky complained that he spent over $210,000 in game expenses last year and close to $110,000 on flights alone, leaving him, after some rudimentary accounting, with less than nothing. The French Open (often referred to as Roland Garros) brings in US$174 million in revenue and pays out US$24 million in prize money — nowhere near the fifty-fifty split one sees in, say, the NBA. The threat of a players’ strike looms. Thus, the ATP treats players with religious deference, in preparation for internecine war. (Months, ATP’s Austin Nunn said to me of how far ahead I needed to book a feature interview with Milos. Months. Long pause. Months.)

The stakes for Milos are as high as they are for his on-the-financial-rivet peers: the nine critical years of development at the hands of Curtis; the 10,000 hours of serves and groundstrokes and volleys and two-handed backhands; his parents taking him to practice twice a day; the special dispensations from school administrators for him to leave early; his siblings, the moment they are old enough to drive, pitching in; never eating lunch outside of the car; Dusan taking a retirement package in 2008 to focus on his son’s development. No downtime. No holes in the schedule. No room for the errant. Money hosed at him as if he were a Saudi princeling on a gambling weekend in Macau.

Because of this, for Milos tennis is not a game in any meaningful sense of the term. As kids, we were always told to excel, he tells me. It was expected. And that’s why I chose tennis. It’s something I could control. Like mathematics. I’m not dependent on teammates. I’m dependent on me. I don’t like waiting around for what other people are going to do. I like to excel my own way, on my own terms.

In all of this, there is an inherent tragedy in his game. The tennis serve exemplifies the failure of the human being as a machine; it is where the metaphor of the machine breaks down. Much has been written on the kinesiology of a tennis serve — papers that combine Newtonian law, the Magnus effect, complex anatomy — but what it really amounts to is magic. A potpourri of size, strength, flexibility, hand-eye coordination, rage, stillness, length of thumb, width of index finger, practice, luck. In a series of motions a player will repeat up to 80,000 times in a career, there exist such variables as the fault or the double fault. Nothing presents our fallibility with more eloquence than elite athletes bungling the only shot they can properly control. Ninety-four percent of one’s service points is not 100 percent.

With this in mind, I ask Milos how he keeps so calm.

What Galo, my coach, has preached is more peace and less panic, he says. That I should keep a flatline of energy. So I try not to get pumped up; I try not to think too far ahead; I focus on the moment. I play much better tennis this way. I don’t self-destruct.

Milos rises and shakes my hand. Interview as algorithm: he has not put one word out of place; he has kept the interview precisely within the ATP’s parameters. Twenty-one going on fifty. Austin Nunn is positively glowing.

~

Tennis regency is a baton. In recent memory: Sampras, Agassi, Federer, Nadal, Djoković. And sport loves a daddy narrative. In late 2011, Milos played Pete Sampras at a match dubbed the Face-Off: Hero vs. Prodigy, at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. Hopefully, Milos remembers that I was his idol. That I could be his father, kidded Sampras. The match went 7–6(7–4), 6–1 in Milos’s favour. He says Sampras is his idol, but I don’t know, Blanco tells me. They play very different games.

To understand why this matters, we must engage in the age-old tennis pursuit of critical theory, which I’ll call disassembling a player’s lineage. And the first concept we need to understand is that lineage often has little to do with a player’s mentor or his long-running coach and everything to do with his first love, his fire starter, the poster on his childhood wall.

Sampras, whose rise coincided with the end of the Cold War, reigned throughout the ’90s as the ultimate physical expression of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. It wasn’t that he was unbeatable — although fourteen Grand Slams make for a compelling statement of outright dominance. Rather, his style of play suggested the looming possibility of the invincible. His serve-and-volley combo resembled mixed martial arts in its violence: he would slam opposing players a metre and a half behind the baseline; while they wheezed for breath, he would kneecap them with a low, slinky lob. The nature of this orchestration, its haiku simplicity — Sampras almost killed tennis as a spectator sport.

But while power ungarnished by histrionics is Milos’s lodestar, to fully comprehend his métier we have to go back further. Sampras revered Rod Laver, the Australian who dominated during the ’60s and played a serve-volley game with far more subtlety than the players he begat. He was dazzlingly athletic, with a Popeye-sized left forearm that unleashed Samprasian carnage, yet with greater vocabulary. His cross-court movement equalled that of an Agassi or a Nadal. That said, Milos is not Laver reanimated. In a perfect world, he would reference Richard Alonzo Pancho Gonzales, the self-destructive giant of the game, Laver’s coeval for a short, beautiful moment in the late ’50s, a power server and baseline regent who a certain species of tennis fanatic — sun bitten and martini cured and very old — would insist, on pain of death, was the greatest of all time.

In tennis, lineage counts more than in any other sport, because it is a solitary endeavour hitched to generations of precedent. When Milos builds his game around Sampras — when he would do well to embrace Gonzales and his use of