I am walking with Denis Shapovalov on the grounds of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden when a woman approaches him and, after apologizing for being a bother, wishes him luck. The young Canadian graciously thanks her, brushing his long blond hair away from his eyes. His bright blue eyes are wide with genuine glee as he tells her how cool it is to play this tournament for the first time. It’s a brief but telling interaction. He spoke with her, a stranger as far as I could tell, as naturally and with as much warmth as I’d observed him speak to anyone else that day.

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If you have the chance to follow an athlete behind the scenes at a tennis tournament, you’ll notice a lot of necessary, often subtle, behavioral shifts. Within a few steps, a player moves from a private lounge to a public court. Journalists lurk. Photographers, amateur and professional, are everywhere. Indian Wells has lots of open practice courts, allowing fans an opportunity to get quite close to their favorite players. This is normal life on the tour. Many get used to it quickly, handling the shifting expectations of these close spaces with ease; sometimes you can detect a protective wariness, especially when a stranger approaches. Just a quick glint in a player’s eye that sizes up the stranger—is it a fan? A sponsor? A tournament volunteer? But Shapovalov is, for now, unusually unguarded.

For most of 2017, Shapovalov was a relatively unknown junior pro fighting for titles in remote locations in the lower-tiered Futures and Challenger circuit. That August, Shapovalov had competed well enough to earn a wild card into the Rogers Cup in Montreal. He was then 18, ranked 143rd in the world. “That tournament,” he tells me, “honestly, it changed everything.”

He fought his way through the first and second rounds, earning the attention and vocal support of the Canadian crowd along the way. But in the third round, he faced a formidable foe: an in-form Rafael Nadal, who at the time was chasing a return to the top of the world rankings. Throughout the tournament, Shapovalov had been staying at the family home of close friend and fellow Canadian tennis player Félix Auger-Aliassime. Both young Canadians had grown up idolizing players like Nadal, and Auger-Aliassime had a poster of the legend hanging in his basement. Shapovalov, filled with nerves on the morning of his match, took it off the wall.

Occasionally, you can get the sense that, when a lower-ranked player takes the court against an all-time great like Nadal or Federer, they do so with the modest hope of just not getting blown off the court. They don’t expect to win, they just want to escape with their pride intact. It’s evident in their conservative shot selection, their resignation as they let a winner fly past them, their deference at the net when the better player bests them.

One could not have blamed Shapovalov—18 at the time and ranked 141 places behind—if he’d played it safe against Nadal. Instead, he competed with reckless optimism. Bolstered by the enthusiasm of the crowd, Shapovalov hit inadvisably bold shots, aiming for winners at every opportunity. “When you’re playing up, you have to go for every shot,” he said, reminiscing with me about that night. “You can’t just put the ball in and hope Rafa misses. It’s not going to happen. He’ll just run you around the court and make the shots he needs to make. When I play the top guys, I make sure that if I have an opening, I go for it.”

I’ve since seen him play this way many times. When he’s a bit off, he loses badly, spraying wild shots way out of bounds. When his bravery and precision align, he can beat anyone on the tour.