Apostolos says, “His uniqueness helps him to handle all the thousands of pieces of information that are coming in while he’s playing matches.” “At some point, the teachers were worried, and they even asked me if maybe we should do some kind of special test,” Apostolos recalls, adding, “He’s a dreamer.” Today Tsitsipas’s quirky disposition is one of his biggest assets, in addition to the blazing forehand, a killer serve, and unusual versatility on all of the sport’s surfaces. From childhood, Stefanos was different: quiet, comfortable in solitude, as introverted as he is personable now. Stefanos is the eldest of four Tsitsipas children: His brother and doubles partner, Petros, recently joined the ATP tour, while their younger siblings, Pavlos and Elisavet, are on the junior circuit. He picked up tennis as a three-year-old at the local club, where both his father and his mother, Julia, a Soviet-born former professional player, worked as instructors. “I think growth starts from outside the tennis court, and then it goes into my tennis,” he says.īorn in Athens in 1998, Tsitsipas grew up in the seaside suburb of Vouliagmeni. Unusually for a professional athlete of his caliber, he cultivates extracurricular talents and sundry passions, remaining open to the world from the closed circuit of his sport. In addition to being the third-ranked tennis player in the world, the youngest person in the ATP Top Ten, and the subject of countless dubious nicknames (the Greek God, Greece Lightning), Tsitsipas has, apparently, been finding time to get into graphic design. “I was with him yesterday, and he was like, ‘I’ve created my own font!’ ” “He always wants to improve, no matter what he’s doing,” Nick Tzekos, Tsitsipas’s agent, said, looking on. Soon Tsitsipas’s coach-his father, Apostolos-had set up a quartet of cones, and Tsitsipas was hitting down-the-line forehand after down-the-line forehand, an exercise designed to improve his margins, cratering the red dirt so that it looked like the balls were landing on the moon.

While he waited, he took out a pouch and ate some kind of goo. His shoulder-length, sun-streaked curls were getting in his face, so he called for a headband.

Tsitsipas was wearing a new pair of black sneakers from Adidas, his sponsor black shorts and a white T-shirt that read terre battue (“clay court,” more or less, and a French Open slogan). Four days before he began his glorious, drama-filled run to the finals at Roland Garros, Stefanos Tsitsipas took the court at a suburban Paris country club and started circling his arms, reaching so far that he looked less like a 22-year-old tennis star and more like a Ferris wheel that had just been turned on and was gently picking up speed.

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