Shortly before he faced Stan Wawrinka at the Australian Open this week, Milos Raonic went on a canned tour of a Melbourne art museum.
The Canadian tennis star frolicked uncomfortably amid interactive exhibits and posed stiffly for pictures in front of Ai Weiwei's massive installation, Forever Bicycles. He gave interviews talking about "finding some new passions," and wanted very badly to look like someone who does more than run around in shorts for a living.
He needn't have bothered. If Mr. Raonic keeps playing the way he has over the first month of the season, no one will care if he's a renaissance man. That's the try-hard territory of pros who've almost made it.
Mr. Raonic is now tantalizingly close to being the other sort of pro – a winner. Winners don't hang out a shingle for sponsors. They don't need to cultivate an air of urbanity. They get photographed holding trophies, and then they cash cheques.
On Wednesday, Mr. Raonic beat erratic Frenchman Gael Monfils 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 to reach the semi-finals of the year's first major. A Canadian male singles player has advanced to the final four of a Grand Slam event three times in the past century; Mr. Raonic has now done it twice.
He'll play the most unpredictable of the Big Three – Andy Murray – on Friday evening in Melbourne. The match is scheduled to go off at 3:30 a.m. EST on Friday.
Mr. Raonic has beaten Murray four of the eight times he's faced him, though never in a slam.
It's fair to say that while Mr. Murray is playing well, he is probably not at peak focus just at the moment. His wife is about to give birth, his father-in-law was stretchered from the arena early in the week after collapsing, and Mr. Murray has spent an inordinate amount of time in Australia shrieking angrily at the people in his own box. In one instance, Mr. Murray dressed down an unidentified member of his entourage mid-match for the sin of being on the phone.
The Scotsman has always been edgy. Right now, he seems close to cracking. All that to say, this is as good a chance as Mr. Raonic will ever get to break the profane Trinity atop men's tennis in a major tournament.
When it comes to Canada's big names – Mr. Raonic and Eugenie Bouchard – the disappointments of the past year are priced into our excitement.
When Mr. Raonic beat Roger Federer, another of the Big Three, in the final at Brisbane two weeks ago, the news created a small ripple. When he beat Mr. Wawrinka, the 2014 Australian Open champ, in the Round of 16 in Melbourne this week, the ripple expanded slightly. Taking down Mr. Murray would turn this momentum into a wave.
But having got ahead of ourselves so many times in the past two years, there's an understandable fear of doing so again. We've moved the goal posts of Canada's tennis "breakthrough." In 2014, it was "be reasonably good at tennis." From now until Mr. Raonic fades from the top-20 in three or five or seven years, it will be "win a major." Nothing else is good enough.
We keep looking for signs. Maybe this is one. Maybe Mr. Raonic is different. He's 25, which is a little late for a men's player to discover he is truly elite. But maybe Mr. Raonic is finally more than just the best serve on tour.
If so, how exactly did that happen?
You won't get much help on that score from the man himself. Mr. Raonic has spent most of his time in Melbourne being prodded on the theme of "figuring it out." He's breezy about what exactly has changed in his approach beyond ye olde redoubtables – being healthy, better conditioning, more aggressive, go to the net, focus, groundstrokes, coaching, relaxed, playing my game, yadda yadda yadda. If winning tennis matches was as easy as going to the net, more people would win them.
(Also, just once you'd like some out-of-nowhere comer to say, "What's changed? Well, I've stopped smoking and they've started giving me these blue pills and I feel fantastic!')
If he can't explain precisely how the ground shifted, Mr. Raonic does know when. It was apparently during his second-round match in Brisbane, an easy win over French youngster Lucas Pouille.
"It was sort of a big click," Mr. Raonic said. "Even though against Bernard [Tomic] I struggled in the third match, I felt like I was in control … I was playing on my terms."
There are so many things that I would like to discover in mid-life that I can suddenly do really well on my own terms – furniture assembly, driving in serenity, drinking in moderation. I'm not expecting any major breakthroughs.
But very occasionally, athletes do manage it. More often than not, it's a mental process, usually an easing off rather than a ramping up. Mr. Raonic has never lacked for work ethic or focus. He is precise to the point of fussiness.
One remembers a match at the 2014 U.S. Open in which he had a quiet war with a ballboy and the umpire over the chairside placement of his towels. The umpire wanted the towel weighed down by a water bottle in windy conditions; Mr. Raonic very much did not. French mimery ensued. In the end, Mr. Raonic got his way.
"I don't think you should be telling people to touch my stuff," Mr. Raonic said darkly afterward. This is a man who likes everything just so.
So maybe he's finally got it all there – the right program, the right mental prep, the right strategy.
There's also a strong element of self-realization here. Mr. Raonic is not a creative player. He can't shift on the fly. His strength is in executing a plan. Some players have tools. Mr. Raonic is one, his own precision instrument. All he requires is winding.
Recently, he brought in former world No. 1 Carlos Moya as a sort of tactical pathfinder. Moya is "an organizer in the way I go about my game," Mr. Raonic said. It sounds hopelessly non-specific when you read it, but the only person who matters believes it's helping.
As long as he does, maybe this is one of those truly rare moments – where the right combination of experience and innovation turns someone into something more than we thought he was.
Cathal Kelly