Making the difficult choice to pack up three children and leave beautiful Montenegro behind 17 years ago became the first of many family decisions to shape the path for rising tennis star Milos Raonic.
Today Raonic, 20, of Thornhill, Ont., is the sport’s fastest rising star, having climbed the world rankings from No. 303 one year ago to No. 26 today, as he prepares for the French Open next weekend. Raonic spent last winter training intensely at an academy in Barcelona, and announced his presence at the Australian Open in January by reaching the fourth round and inducing a tweet from John McEnroe: “He’s the real deal.” Moving on to the SAP Open, Raonic used a 240 km/h serve to become the first Canadian since Greg Rusedski in 1995 to win an ATP singles tournament, defeating top-seeded Fernando Verdasco in the final.
His tennis story starts at age 3. The Raonic family speaks passionately about the country they departed in 1994, then a part of Yugoslavia, a small nation of just 600,000 people on the Adriatic coast where they enjoyed the beaches, mountains and mild climate and were surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
His father, Dusan Raonic, was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Montenegro, and his mother, Vesna, was also an engineer. Along with their daughter and two sons, they lived well but Montenegro had become unstable in the early 1990s.
“It was not an easy decision because it’s a beautiful country and we had a good life there,” Mrs. Raonic said. “But the situation around Montenegro was changing. We thought for our children, and for a professional challenge for us, we needed to go to Canada.”
They had a few friends in the Toronto area, but no family. They settled as independent immigrants in Brampton, Ont., when they first arrived.
Fluent in English, both engineers quickly found jobs, Mr. Raonic in research at the University of Waterloo, driving 70 kilometres west to Cambridge;, Mrs. Raonic at a bank in Scarborough, trekking 50 kilometres east. Jelena, 12, and Momir, 10, took naturally to helping care for three-year-old Milos, who spoke only Serbian, but was learning quickly.
“Our kids often tell us today, ‘You guys did a great job,’ because it was a big challenge to go overseas with three small kids,” Mrs. Raonic said. “They had everything there. We had to start with simple things. But we are so lucky, it all worked out so well.”
Tennis takes over
At 8, Milos began at the Blackmore Tennis Club in Richmond Hill, hitting away using a ball machine with his dad in the wee hours of the morning and late in the evenings when the court fees were cheaper and the club was quiet.
“I grew up loving it; it was just as much a love as it was an obsession,” said Raonic, whose family eventually moved to Thornhill, Ont. “It’s the only thing I wanted to do.”
By the time he was 10, the talented young player was so serious about the sport, it took a total family effort to accommodate his daily tennis routine: 5:30 a.m. wake-up, get to the club by 6:15; train until school started, then get a ride to school; pickup at 1:30 (eat lunch in the car since Milos took class through lunch period); train until 5:30; another pick-up.
His older siblings made as many trips to the club as their parents did. By the time he was a junior travelling to tournaments, his sister pitched in on some of the trips “That was my chance to spend time with him, he’s my baby brother,” his older sister said. “We’re really close.”
The Raonics allowed their tennis-crazed teen to enhance his course load and finish high school in three years so he could leave home to train full-time at the National Tennis Centre in Montreal. Fast-tracking involved Milos taking senior-level calculus at age 15. Mrs. Raonic remembers a parent-teacher meeting when the math teacher’s jaw dropped on learning that the excelling student wasn’t 18 like most of his classmates.
