It’s a hot and muggy early August evening and eighteen year old Denis Shapovalov is standing on the baseline, readying himself to return a serve under a clear, starry sky and the bright lights of Montreal’s Uniprix stadium.

This match has a certain feel and gravity to it, that can only really be appreciated by understanding it’s context not only in the scope of each player’s career but Canadian tennis as a whole. For the past two hours this unpolished and unproven teenager has been playing the role of giant killer and has been steadily moving closer and closer to accomplishing a remarkable feat that is now just one point away.

As he stands a step behind the baseline he rocks from side to side and blows on the fingertips of his left hand, drying them, presumably, because at some point they were wettened while tucking his long blonde hair behind his ear and then underneath the brim of the white baseball cap he’s wearing backwards. As his counterpart winds up to serve the rocking stops and his eyes track the movement of his opponent, hoping that his mind will pick up on some subtle cue that will allow his body to anticipate the angle of the ball that will take only milliseconds to reach him after leaving the racket.

On the other side of the net is the toughest opponent he’s faced in his brief professional career. Rafael Nadal. A legend bigger than the game itself who, in a somewhat surprising renaissance, has earned the number one seed in this tournament and has reclaimed his rightful place at the top of the world rankings. Peackocked out in a bright yellow shirt and blue wristbands, Rafa as he’s affectionately known, throws the ball into the air, the perfect distance above his head, as he’s done a million times before and then uses the full momentum of his body to serve it cross court to Shapovalov.

The serve forces Denis to return the ball with his backhand, which is not a weakness for him but also not his strongest asset. He returns it successfully down the middle of the court but Nadal is well positioned and barely moves his feet before sending the ball back over the net, again to Shapovalov’s backhand side. They trade strokes this way two more times and then it happened. Rafa cross court shot is short. Everyone watching realizes what is about to happen. Shapovalov steps in from the baseline to meet the shallow shot, authoritatively smashes it down the line and then collapses onto the court out of joy, finally allowing himself to give in to the magnitude of the moment.

Toronto Star

August was a really great month for Denis. He beat Nadal, became the youngest player ever to reach a Masters tournament quarter final, earned two hundred thousand dollars, and after fighting his way through the qualifiers, got to play on one of the sports biggest stages in sport, the U.S. Open. All of things even on their own are impressive but for me it’s not the best part of his story. is incredibly impressive but to me, none of those things are the most intriguing part of his story.

Even though I’ve never met him, I feel a connection with Denis. One of the reason is that his personal brand of tennis is exciting to watch. He takes tons of chances and plays with a looseness and aggressiveness that has quickly made him a tennis renegade of sorts, and a fan favourite. For me however, there is another underlying reason that I feel connected to him.

Now before I tell you why I have a kinship with this long haired teenager from Toronto, I promise you in advance that this isn’t going to be one of those anecdotal stories you hear at a party where someone compares themselves to an athlete and laments about an injury sustained in their teens that was the only reason they didn’t go pro. I promise.

Associated Press

When I was younger, for me the baseball diamond was my sanctuary and the pitchers mound was the most comfortable place in the world. It’s where I felt most in control. It was something that I truly excelled at, and was a source of peer admiration that really wasn’t comparable to anything else in my life at that point.

My specialty was the ability to switch speeds on batters which was unique because it was a skill that not many of people I played against could exercise with any type of regularity. I had a really good change up for someone of my age, a weapon I developed in secret over one winter by reading about different arm angles and ways to grip the baseball, so that when spring finally rolled around I was able to exploit batters because they couldn’t tell if I was going to throw it as hard as I could or if I was going to drop the hook on them.

The story that psychically connects me to Denis is one that unfolded on a summer day July while I was pitching in a tournament game. I was standing on the mound, adjusting my cap I imagine, and readying myself to throw a pitch that would hopefully get me out of a self inflicted jam. The bases were loaded with one out and the ball was hit sharply back to me and I was able to snag it before it got past me. I instinctively threw the ball home trying to beat the runner who was racing down the third line trying score. This would have all been perfectly fine, except for one problem. The bases weren’t loaded. There were only runners on first and third.

No one was racing down the third baseline which is why the catcher wasn’t standing with one foot on the plate awaiting my throw and -most importantly-that’s why the umpire was looking in a different direction as my throw sailed past home plate, past the catcher and hit the umpire squarely in her unsuspecting left breast.

So before I tell the next part there is something that you should keep in mind. I was only around nine or ten at the time. Not that being sensitive is a bad thing, (as an adult I’ve come to see it as both virtue and curse) but the context of this story is important.

In the moments that followed the umpire received some light medical attention, drank some water and was pretty much back to normal self. I was not so fortunate. In retrospect I am probably the one who took brunt of the blow but in the form of psychological pain, as I stood there on the mound, mortified that I had just thrown a fastball into some poor woman who was now on bended knee indicating to bystanders exactly where I had plunked her.

After a few minutes the game resumed but I was a disaster. My memory of everything asides from the basic details is obviously hazy at best, but it’s probably safe to assume that I found back tears for the remainder of the inning before being removed, presumable because of my emotional instability.

So after all these years not much memory of that day remains in my mind except the chalk outline of the emotions I felt. The one that rolled over me when I realized that there wasn’t anyone standing at home, the shock of realizing what had happened and then the shameful aftermath, lying down in the backseat of my parents car in between games to try and recover psychologically. I was just a kid but it hurt like hell. I actually find it really funny now but it sure wasn’t then.

Okay. Now that’s out of the way and I’m done dredging up tracing old scars.

For those of you not familiar with Denis Shapovalov’s backstory, he had a very unfortunate incident earlier while representing Canada at the Davis Cup, a tournament played between countries where participating nations send their best players to compete over four weekends that spans an entire calendar year. This year Denis, at an extraordinarily young age, was selected to participate and in February he found himself in Ottawa, the capital city of his country, in a match against Britain’s own rising star Kyle Edmund.

Denis struggled early, dropping the first two sets of the best of five and was nearing defeat, trailing 2–1 in the third. It was at this point that he made a judgement error that sent the match highlights viral for all the the reason that you would never want your participation in a sport to go viral.

After losing his serve, fueled by what can only be described as internally aimed frustration, he took the ball he didn’t need out of his pocket and impulsively decided to hit it into the crowd, only realizing halfway through the motion that it was probably a bad idea. This caused him to not commit fully to hitting it which changed the angle and flight of the ball. So instead of it taking a harmless trajectory into the stand it became a line drive that went directly into the face of the unsuspecting umpire who was perched on his seat a few feet above the centre of the court.

Sky Sports

I’m not going to insert the video here because that would really be defeating the purpose of this article. It did viral and can be summoned in milliseconds by typing his name into a google search but what happened isn’t nearly as important as what happened next . It’s important to note as well, that I’m downplaying what happened— the umpire was actually hurt and required surgery — but Denis reacted in a way that, without being to broad and judgmental, is sometimes foreign to athletes of his age.

First, in the moments afterwards he apologized profusely to the umpire. You could clearly see by his pained expression that this was really a bizarre, against all odds, pure accident. After making his apology he then had to wait several excruciating minutes before gracefully accepting the officials decision to end the match because despite the fact that it obviously unintentional in nature it also had to be interpreted as unsportsmanlike.

In the days that followed he took to Twitter to ask for forgiveness from the world in general, the smaller world of tennis and then finally to the people within his immediate orbit that he felt he had disappointed.

It was noble in it’s intentions, but sometimes that’s where it ends with apologies of this nature. A lot of times this kind of thing can come off as staged and can feel like nothing more than orchestrated push from a public relation team who’s main objective is just push something unsavory out of the public consciousness. But this really did feel different.

Parr / Getty Images

Denis didn’t hide in the weeks that followed the apology. He made his statement and then legitimately took ownership of it, which is an action that is hard to view as anything but admirable and as the days rolled forward he present a certain attitude, on that seem to just be an outright refusal to let one moment define him. He even attended the NHL awards during the time where the worst moment of his life was circulating as shareable content.

So there you have it. You may think the connection I have with Denis is trivial, and yeah, admittedly it probably is. To everyone but me. There’s something great about watching someone succeed in and it becomes even more special when they’ve met adversity along the way. Rooting for Denis is easy and in the coming months, as his notoriety soars to the same level as his talent, that sentiment will almost certainly become contagious and one can only hope that someday, in the near future a Google search of his name will intuitively want to add the word champion.