TORONTO—Milos Raonic hammered an easy overhead long, and then the Canadian looked up, he smiled, and he rolled his eyes.
A few points later, he crushed a winner and then looked to the crowd and yelled “Let’s go!”
This relaxed and fired up Raonic—who easily won his second-round match at the Rogers Cup on Wednesday night—is different from the stoic player we’ve seen in the past.
The 25-year-old from Thornhill, Ont., says it’s thanks to some advice from coach Carlos Moya, a former world No. 1.
“My perspective was, I need to get the best out of myself,” Raonic said of the rare opportunity to play in front of the home crowd. “[Carlos] sorta put me in the thought process of, you don’t get to do this that often, make sure you enjoy it.
“I think once I use that nervous energy in the right outlet it made it much better for me.”
It did. Raonic opened his tournament with a 6-3, 6-3, never-in-doubt win over world No. 70 Yen-Hsun Lu of Chinese Taipei on centre court at the Aviva Centre, and he looked like he had fun in the process.
It took just one hour and six minutes for the fourth seed, who was dressed head to toe in red and white, to advance to the third round.
“I didn’t expect to play as well as I did. I was sorta hopeful,” Raonic said after the match, sitting next to a bouquet of flowers as he addressed media. “I took rhythm away from him, and it’s a good way to start the tournament.
“I look to continue hopefully playing better the next match, which is know is gonna be necessary.”
When he was serving for match point, the fans were on their feet for Raonic, who won a whopping 80 per cent of his first serve points and fired eight aces.
After he won, Raonic stood at centre court and pumped his fists.
While that was more emotion than we’ve come to expect from the World No. 7, perhaps the most emotion here on Wednesday came on the grandstand earlier in the day, when Vasek Pospisil of Vernon, B.C., played against 10th seed Gael Monfils.
The pair traded games in the first set, and by the time the tiebreaker hit the fans were lined up around the court because you couldn’t find a seat.
One fan started chanting “Defence! Defence!” like it was a hockey game, and another tried to start a “Let’s go Canada!” chant, but this is tennis and umpires aren’t a fan of that, so it didn’t really go over. It did make Pospisil smile, though.
Pospisil led 5-3 in the tiebreaker, and fans were living and dying on every point. He yelled “yes!” when Monfils hit a return into the net.
But the excitement didn’t last long—and things turned in a hurry. Monfils staged a comeback to take the tiebreaker and the first set, and then he rolled over the Canadian 6-0 in the second set.
Later in the evening, following Raonic’s match, Canadian teenager Denis Shapovalov put up a valiant fight against Grigor Dimitrov, but his run here came to an end. The 17-year-old with the blonde hair and backwards hat went up an early break in the first set, but he couldn’t hold on, losing in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3.
Wearing a t-shirt that said “Hit the ball as loud as you can” the recent Wimbledon boys’ champion grinned when he heard that Dimitrov said he thought Shapovalov was going to win the match. “I don’t think he’s lucky at all,” Shapovalov said. “I had a chance…too bad I didn’t serve better tonight.”
He pointed out that he has to work on his serve, too. “I thought I had a good serve, ’til I played [Nick] Kyrgios who was just bombing aces past me,” he said, with a laugh.
Raonic, like Dimitrov, was singing Shapovalov’s praises, and applauding how much tennis has grown in Canada at the elite level. While Raonic is the lone Canadian man standing now in singles, he pointed out five Canadian men advanced past the first round, the most in a long time at the Rogers Cup.
“When players used to come here at this tournament, it’s not necessarily the best thing to say, but if you drew a Canadian you were feeling pretty good about yourself,” Raonic said. “I think that whole stigma, that whole observation of the situation has definitely changed.”
Next up, Raonic will play American Derek Donaldson, a 19-year-old qualifier, on Thursday night.
You can expect to see that fired up version of Raonic in the third round, too.
“Sometimes you let yourself get in that situation too much where you bottle up a lot of energy,” he said. “So start expressing more, be more positive with it, show more intensity.
“And in tough moments, fight fire with fire a bit more.”