The U.S. Open is the loudest of Grand Slams, but I’ve never seen a crowd as silent and sad as the one that watched Dominic Thiem. He was winning—dominating, really—the opening two sets of his Monday night match against Juan Martín del Potro. There were no cheers, only groans, when Thiem held his serve or converted break points. Flu-sick and feverish, del Potro lugged his 6-foot-6 frame around the court, oafishly swinging at empty air as the sixth-seeded Austrian ripped winners well past him. The 24th-seeded Argentine called a medic to the court late in the second set, confirming what was already evident from his movement on court: He was ill, exhausted, and on the verge of losing straight sets. The crowd thrummed with disappointment.

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It’s true that del Potro, 2009 U.S. Open champion and all-around charmer, is a crowd favorite wherever and whomever he plays, but even Federer or Nadal devotees will occasionally cheer great effort and shotmaking from their beloved’s opponent. (Tennis, after all, is a game of respect as much as it is skill.) The crowd silence was a reminder of how adored del Potro is on tour, but also seemed to say something about how fans view Dominic Thiem. He was playing the kind of tennis people love—dictating thrilling long rallies, crushing winners from both wings, generally showcasing the methodical excellence that fans admire most in the sport. But if Thiem had fans in the Grandstand that evening, they couldn’t be found. Where were they? And do they exist?

Two days before that match, I wait for Dominic Thiem to traverse the route buried deep within Arthur Ashe stadium from locker room to Interview Room 1, where the top players field post-match questions from the many accredited journalists who flock from around the globe to report the final Grand Slam of the year. Lower-ranked players or early-round losers are shuffled through smaller rooms to speak to far fewer people, often only journalists from the player’s home country. But 24-year-old Thiem, with his blistering groundstrokes hit with equal force from his forehand or one-handed backhand, has been a firm fixture in the top ten for over a year, cementing his place at the fanciest dais in the biggest interview room. Bolstered by exemplary performances throughout the clay-court season, in which he was the only player to beat an otherwise perfect Nadal, Thiem has emerged in 2017 as one of the best, most consistent players on tour. He is the future of tennis—soon to occupy the highest-ranking spots once the Big Four age out of competition.

Finally through the door to Interview Room 1 is Thiem, running his hands through his still-wet wavy brown hair. He is compact and strong, walking with the confident bearing one might expect from an elite athlete. He’s quite handsome, with a square jaw and bright blue eyes that seem to never blink. He betrays no emotion, looking as if he’s just come from depositing a check at the bank instead of a straight-set win over his tricky third-round opponent, Adrian Mannarino. He takes his place behind the microphone, the camera crew signal that they are recording, and the moderator asks for questions.

But there aren’t any. Thiem, the victor, the eighth-best male tennis player in the world, presides over a room nearly empty, save the four German-language reporters waiting in the wings to speak to him more privately. The room is silent for a moment, and then the contingency plan kicks in, which is to have the camerawoman duck her head from behind the lens and ask all the questions herself, which she does, and not for the first time. I’d seen low attendance in plenty of press conferences before, but this was embarrassing, made more so by the fact that it had happened repeatedly for top-ranked Thiem at the U.S. Open.

The camerawoman offers up vague softballs, like how did Thiem feel about his performance, and he answers in a manner I’ve come to expect: He acknowledges that there are at least two ways of looking at anything, and that those ways are both fine—the most non-committal kind of non-answer. His tone of voice never wavers above a quiet drone, his stony gaze remains fixed ahead, his explanations are boring and brief. My performance was good, he’ll say, but there’s room to improve. My opponent was tough, but I played him well. I didn’t execute from the start, but luckily it all worked out just fine. End of press conference.

When I return to the media center, I describe the strange scene to a colleague who shrugs dismissively and says, “The press has given up! We don’t go to his pressers anymore because there’s no way to get anything out of him, but you get points for trying.”

And I have been trying. I’ve spent the first week of the U.S. Open interviewing Thiem, observing the blips that count as his press conferences, stalking his practices, and attending all his matches, attempting to get a glimpse of who he is as a person and having no luck. But the more distant he is, the more curious I become. I am already enthralled by him as a player, my enthusiasm cemented at the French Open, where I had the privilege to watch him up close from courtside press seating. Even the most casual TV viewer can see Thiem’s power, his precise serve, his returning prowess. But watching him in person, especially on clay, his preferred surface, is the only way to fully appreciate his dynamic balance and deceptive speed. I had several breathless moments seeing him glide ten feet on the fine, loose top layer of sand to execute flawless drop shots, followed by all-out sprints back to the baseline to return a lob that would have, for any other player, sailed over their head and out of reach. There on the Parisian red clay, his grit and endurance were matched by style and graceful motion, making him, to me, the most exciting player of the tournament.

When I ask Thiem about his speed and movement, he says, “The speed you have, you can’t practice it. You have to be fast from your birth on. There are other things you can practice, like flexibility or the little steps needed to stand good to the ball, but to be fast is a gift you get.” When I ask him if there are other aspects of the game that are similarly innate, he gives me a blank look. “Maybe reaction time or something? I’m not sure.” He pauses, and I mistake the pause to indicate that he’s searching further for an answer, but he isn’t. It is not a pause at all, but an abrupt end to his answer. He watches me calmly, waiting for my next question, but I stumble over my words. He possesses a focused stillness that unnerves me. If you were careless, you could mistake it for rudeness or reluctance, but you’d be mistaken. Thiem is fully engaged with me, maintaining unblinking eye contact, but he doesn’t indulge in the verbal tics or body language most use to express active listening—he doesn’t nod his head in acknowledgment or smile or frown as he’s thinking of his answer—not that I feel he owes me or anyone else such a comfort. He completes the obligation of the interview with perfect neutrality. I don’t have the sense that he in any way resents the time spent talking to me, but it’s just that his mind is slightly ahead of the moment, cataloguing the real work he needs to do once this task ends. It’s admirable. That night I ride the subway home in much the same mode.

A mythology has sprung up around Thiem’s work ethic that includes rumors that he swims in rivers in winter and drags tree trunks through forests, all of which he’s denied. Thiem has worked full-time with the same coach, Günter Bresnik, since he was 11. Bresnik, who also coached Boris Becker, has confirmed that Thiem’s typical training day lasts twelve hours, and has been quoted as saying that he trains Thiem for the “jungle of war.” Bresnik also pushes Thiem into a grueling tournament schedule that includes lower-level tournaments in remote locations. After his match Monday night, Roger Federer, who regularly addresses the press with humor, ease, and often a warm and charming familiarity, said that Thiem belonged in the “‘Rafa demographic’ where, between matches, they just go really hard. I’m not like that,” Federer added, “so I admire those guys who put their head down and work this hard.”

But Thiem seems to want to downplay his work ethic, and when I note this he says, “It’s fine if people see me like this, but there are really a lot of other players who are working the same amount. Otherwise they wouldn’t be that good. And there are some players who work less, obviously, but everybody is really different.” A non-committal non-answer. But then: “I’m a player or I’m a person who needs to practice a lot; otherwise I don’t play well.” He cringes a bit and breaks eye contact with me for the first time. “I do take days off,” he says quietly, almost defensively.

Thiem’s unstated nature was in high contrast throughout his match against del Potro, the amiable and expressive Argentine who sometimes hugs a linesperson when losing. (Crowds find this very endearing.) The stadium overflowed with Delpo fans who roared to life as he broke Thiem’s opening serve in the third set. Delpo, who had moments before looked ready to collapse on the court, pounced on the opening and took the third set 6-1. The crowd grew so loud that Federer, who played 1,000 feet away on Ashe, later commented on the noise: “We could even hear it on center court. That's the first time I experienced that.”

Perhaps crowds yearn for emotions more dynamic than Thiem’s steady determination. Thiem has destroyed his share of rackets on court, but such outbursts are rare and he, win or lose, typically remains glacially calm. On the other end of the spectrum is the divisive Nick Kyrgios, a racket smasher you can count on, whose on-court antics and vulnerability in press have earned him as much attention as his prodigious talent. Love him or hate him, Kyrgios’s openness gives fans and journalists alike a window into who he is—a quick-tempered, possibly overly analytical player who alienates some, but draws in more who identify and sympathize with his struggle to make peace with the life he’s chosen. After losing in the first round to a competitor ranked more than 200 places below him, Kyrgios told journalists that he was “not dedicated to the game at all” and that he’d prepared for past matches by playing basketball and eating ice cream, a piece of news circulated ten times as much as all of Thiem's U.S. Open coverage combined.

After another press conference, Thiem and I lean against a wall in the hallway outside of Interview Room 1, and I ask if it was frustrating to hear when players like Kyrgios appear to take for granted opportunities he strives so diligently for. Thiem responds with empathy, the force of which surprises me momentarily. “A human being is not made to work their ass off day in and day out,” he tells me. “To be honest, I a little bit understand them and what they’re saying, but of course we all have really privileged lives, so I mean for sure we have to think that at the end of the day there are more positives than negatives. But I understand them if they speak out what they think sometimes, but maybe they didn’t do it the right way.”

I ask if it’s fair to describe him as shy. “Yes,” he says, then says no more. Does that make the part of his job that requires him to talk to the press challenging? “In the beginning, for sure it was very tough for me to speak in front of all the people, but now I’m more used to it,” he says. “I don’t mind to speak about myself until a certain point, but I think there’s also stuff which is for myself that nobody has to know.”

Why do we want to know the athletes we revere? Why do we demand they show us who they are before we’ll give them our devotion and applause? Thiem’s number of fans will not change who he is as a player or how far he’ll go with his talent. It won’t change his work ethic—he isn’t motivated by external validation. It won’t change my certainty that he’ll win the French Open sooner rather than later.

But your love for or disinterest in Thiem does matter to tennis, which, especially in the United States, is still a niche sport perennially in need of ways to expand its appeal. Thiem leads a pack of up-and-comers who will inherit the top place on the tour, a tour which will need to sell tickets. Tennis is also a sport that lends itself heavily to attachments to individual players, who stand alone on the court to battle their opponents. When you pick who to cheer for, it is sometimes motivated by believing that player embodies a human quality you admire. We are given the opportunity to follow a player’s narrative throughout long seasons and often long careers, and we are moved by the best narratives: triumphs over rivals, injury, age. Thiem’s story is that he’s worked very hard and is better this year than he was last year, a trend likely to continue. It’s less narrative arc than steady uphill climb. Does that move you?

Maybe popularity matters in a match, too. Fans lost their minds as Delpo mounted a comeback, winning the fourth set in a tiebreak and forcing a deciding fifth. At the end, Thiem lost his last service game, gifting match point with a double-fault. Delpo was quick to give the crowd the credit for his comeback, claiming that he was “trying to retire the match in the second set. Then I saw the crowd waiting for more tennis, waiting for my good forehands, good serves. I took all that energy to change in a good way and think about fight and not retire.”

At Thiem’s final press conference of the 2017 U.S. Open, about ten journalists showed up to ask questions in English—still not many, but a veritable throng in comparison to previous pressers. I asked him about the effect of the crowd noise. “Well, I mean, of course the crowd was on his side,” he said, “but it was a great atmosphere. I mean, we're not playing every day in an atmosphere like this. I was enjoying it, actually. I mean, the crowd was not unfair at all. So it was fine.” He went on answering questions calmly, praising his opponent and the New York crowd, not showing any sign of the physical or emotional toll of falling to the biggest comeback of the tournament—likely the year. But then, at the end of the conference, a journalist asked if he was frustrated with the loss and Thiem responded with icy sarcasm: “I'm really happy about the loss. I cannot wait to play the next tournament now.” And maybe I shouldn’t have been so affected by this small admission, this tiny window into his state of mind, but I was, as it brought home for me the misery of the loss and how difficult it would be for even the most stoic player to move past it.

The last time I interview Thiem, I ask him to describe his worst moment on court. “Some are more painful, some are less painful,” he says, not blinking. I change tacks. Did he see one of his recent accomplishments as being particularly meaningful? “There was not one special victory or that was better than other ones.” When I press him on this, he adds, “I was never the person who came up with a boom somehow. I worked slowly and consistently, making my way up the rankings, so there wasn’t one special moment.”

It takes me a while to realize that these quotes, while not detailed or enthusiastically offered up, are the perfect picture of who Thiem is and why he’s destined to be one of the greatest players of his generation. He doesn’t see the game as a series of peaks and valleys but as a long, brutal ascent. He’s a player who understands that tennis success comes only to those who can thrive despite the day-in, day-out grind of the travel, the practices, the press, the pressure of the big moments, the pain of failure. While you read this, Thiem is back at work on a court somewhere, the sting of his recent loss already receded into the past.

And that dedication, that sheer will, may never be flashy. But over time everyone will realize that Dominic Thiem is, in his quiet way, exhilarating to witness.

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