LONDON — It was two days before the ATP World Tour Finals even began, and you could sense this was different. Milos Raonic sat down in his chair, took a sip from his bottle of water, and a smile broke out across his face.
“Have you asked Daniel how his fantasy team is doing?” he asked.
Raonic is the first to tell you he doesn’t know much about the NFL, but he signed up for the same Yahoo! league as Daniel Nestor, whom the Bryan Brothers told me this summer is as proud of his fantasy sports trophies as he is his Grand Slam doubles titles.
“He’s 3-6, and I started 8-0,” grinned Raonic, taking great joy in the ongoing online struggles of his Davis Cup teammate. “You just know it’s driving him nuts.”
Raonic pulled out his phone, leaned back in his chair, and started scrolling through his team. “Jordy Nelson’s been having a big season for me,” he said.
So how is it a 23-year-old Toronto Raptors fan, who didn’t know the difference between Jordy and Willie Nelson all of four months ago, started his season undefeated?
“A good owner surrounds himself with good people and trusts them,” Raonic said. “And that’s what I did.”
That is also what Raonic did at the start of this 2014 tennis season, adding another coach (Ricardo Piatti) to join Ivan Ljubicic. He also brought on Claudio Zimaglia as physiotherapist and Dalibor Sirola to handle his fitness regimen. The goals were set out at the beginning of the year: to reach the ATP World Tour Finals in London for the first time, and play 70 matches.
“It’s been very good. It’s been the right step forward. It’s been what the team has wanted when we sat down,” reflected Raonic this week. “And we know that I’m on the right track.”
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It wasn’t like that early in the season, though, where he’d planned on a heavy schedule out of the year’s first slam. Following Melbourne, the itinerary included stops in Zagreb, Rotterdam and Marseille prior to Indian Wells.
But Raonic lost in the third round in Australia, while dealing with an ankle injury, then pulled out of January’s Davis Cup tie in Japan on the eve of competition because any rotation — inward or out — led to pain. It turned out he had a torn tendon and it sidelined him for six weeks.
Raonic was concerned in late January, before leaving Tokyo, and admitted so, in a quiet moment on court. “Yeah, it’s really…” his voice trailed off, and he exhaled deeply, and sighed. “It’s really difficult.” The unknown of the injury, the worry, the frustration that an off-season spent fine-tuning his game — improving the backhand; getting more of a rhythm on short volleys; making second-serve returns such a point of emphasis that the finest of details, from where to stand and how to be moving, were worked on — would have been wasted.
After more than a month of rehab, Raonic returned at Indian Wells, and immediately had points to defend coming off the break. “His fitness levels went down,” his coach, Ljubicic, told Sportsnet. “We had to build from zero.”
But Raonic took off with three straight quarter-final appearances in the California desert, Miami and Monte Carlo. Raonic reached the semi-finals in Rome, bowed out to Novak Djokovic in the quarters at the French Open and was ready, and healthy, for Wimbledon.
“The consistency he’s having, it’s a perfect base to win something important,” Ljubicic said at the All-England Club. “We’re at a good starting position to be going for something big.”
The fortnight was terrific. Raonic dropped only two sets, one in a tie-break, on his way to the semifinals. Then came a Friday afternoon at Wimbledon’s historic Centre Court — his first match ever there — against the incomparable Roger Federer. It was over before it began. A nervous Raonic, who had snuck peeks the day before to get a feel for his surroundings, dropped serve to open the proceedings and Federer never looked back, breaking the Canadian in each set, winning 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.
“He made me pay for the slightest of slip-ups,” Raonic said after the match.
In the summer, prior to the hardcourt season beginning, Raonic said he was “angry” and “frustrated” by how he played that day against Federer — despite this week acknowledging reaching his first slam semi was the highlight of his career, so far. At Wimbledon, he felt he was close to a breakthrough at a major, and set his sights on the US Open.
“I know the level that’s necessary is within myself. I’m going to take a big lesson from this,” he said in July. “I know it’s within me.”
He and his team began preparing for best-of-five’s in the New York heat by doing more off-court training during tournament weeks. He and fitness coach Sirola went to work. He took a total break for more than a week after Wimbledon “to clear my mind for the best,” and didn’t pick up a racket the following seven days either. He worked out with Sirola at Toronto FC’s soccer headquarters at Downsview Park, and when he returned to the court, it was with the attitude of being ready to win a Grand Slam.
“It’s constant discussion, after practice, on off-days, at lunch, at dinner, of what I can do and how I can get there,” he told me in a lengthy sit-down at our Sportsnet studios in July. “Just want to get a much bigger knowledge base to use in matches.”
Raonic won the 500-series event in Washington DC, beating fellow Canadian Vasek Pospisil in the final, and came back home for the Rogers Cup “honestly feeling great about how things have gone, and it couldn’t have been better.”
He had convinced himself he was right there.
A month later, in a match that lasted over four hours and ended as late as any other in US Open history, Raonic lost to Kei Nishikori 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (6), 7-5, 6-4 in the quarterfinals.
“I went into the US Open thinking very heavily I could win that tournament. So it was a little bit hard and angering to see the way it unfolded,” Raonic told us in Halifax in September, in his first television interview after the Open. He felt he got too defensive against Nishikori. “I gotta keep reinforcing my game, regardless of who I play,” he said.
The goal remained reaching the World Tour Finals, and Raonic had two months to get to London after helping Canada get back to World Group in mid-September’s Davis Cup tie on home soil. He reached the finals in Tokyo, losing to Nishikori again, but then fell ill with a virus at a time the points race for the year-end event was its most heated. He lost in consecutive first rounds in Shanghai and Moscow and looked listless in a three-set defeat to David Goffin in Basel late last month.
“I was definitely playing very poor,” Raonic acknowledged.
The season would come down to the final Masters-1000 series stop of the season, in suburban Paris. Either he or David Ferrer would claim the last spot in London, based on their results.
It was then, before that last tournament began, that Raonic sat down for a heart-to-heart meeting with Ljubicic and the team.
He wanted to know what he needed to do — not just to qualify for entry into the World Tour Finals, but turn his game around. It was clear a semifinal appearance, at the minimum, was required in a draw that had every top player entered, except for Rafael Nadal who was getting his appendix removed.
Ljubicic and Piatti were telling him to simplify things; not to just focus on hitting the ball. “Things will come in the matches,” they told Raonic, reminding him that everyone on tour is tired this time of year. “When adrenaline takes over in your matches, everything seems easier,” they said.
Raonic listened, but he was skeptical.
“At the same time you’re saying, ‘Yeah, but to qualify I have to play well this week. If I’m not playing well in practice, then it’s not really convincing I’m going to find it at the first point of the match.’ So it was that kind of back and forth,” he said.
Paris began and Raonic laboured through his opening round match against American Jack Sock, winning the third set in a tiebreak. Next was Roberto Bautista Agut, and with Ferrer on his heels, Raonic had to deliver again.
Raonic was splendid in that Oct. 30 match, playing at a level that had been lost since summer. He was clutch when he had to be: he fired 23 aces and broke the Spaniard three times in a straight sets win.
Raonic’s season would come down to one more meeting with the most prolific Grand Slam champion of them all, where his year-long goal hinged on a Wimbledon semifinal re-match against the man he’d never beaten before.
“The thing I focused on was, ‘find a way to win, keep yourself in this race’ and fortunately the tennis came along,” Raonic said. “I played a little bit better, and played really well against Roger.”
It was the watershed moment. Raonic won 85 percent of his first serve points and fought off the lone Federer break point of the match he faced. For the first time in his career, after six consecutive prior defeats, the kid had done it, knocking off the living legend, 7-6(5), 7-5.
The victory was enough to realize the goal he had set for himself at the start of the season: London was calling. He’d finally done it.
“It’s a big statement on having a good year,” Raonic said, a few minutes after mocking Nestor’s fantasy team. “It was very important, especially with everything on the line to play that well in such a big moment with my back up against the wall.”
Raonic finishes 2014 as the World No. 8. There was progress, with the semifinal appearance at Wimbledon, and there was growth, by reaching the World Tour Finals.
Reaching these milestones “makes things a little bit easier, makes the questioning of being able to find my way through my watch,” Raonic said. “Fear is what gets the best tennis out of me. So having that fear, and being able to find it, and find answers around it, and find answers through the difficult situations, is the most important thing.”
The goals will change in 2015, and Raonic acknowledged it Thursday after pulling out of the World Tour Finals with a quad injury.
“It’s not about staying in the Top 8. It’s about working my way up even higher,” he said.
This season was the next step in the steady growth of his career. For now, he can pay more attention to his fantasy football team.
“Every week I win, and the rest of them lose, is just great.”