But the radical compression of his attention and sense of himself have allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art – something few of us get to be. He has visited and tested parts of his psychic reserves most of us do not even know for sure we have (courage, playing with violent nausea, not choking, etc). Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way But he wants more. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the crowd. He wants this and will pay to have it – to pursue it, let it define him – and will pay up with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant a long time ago. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque. But if there’s like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story.

I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.Whether or not he ends up in the top 10 and a name people know, Michael Joyce will remain a paradox. Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answers a question, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work and practice.”If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. He has dated some girls but it is impossible to tell whether he is a virgin. It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is that he might be. His most revealing sexual comment was made in the context of explaining the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when there is lots of money at stake.

His interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the airport- paperback sort. He has a tight group of friends of long-standing back home in LA, but one senses that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. Chang’s mother is here – one of the most infamous of the dreaded tennis parents, a woman who is rumoured to have reached down her child’s shorts in public to check his underwear – and her attendance may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang’s mien and play. Michael Chang, 23 and number five in the world, looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I have seen outside a graduate creative-writing programme. I could not meaningfully exist on the same court as these obscure, hungry players Nor could you.

And it is not just a matter of talent or practice.Television also tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem blandly good-looking, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting – or even downright funny-looking. For yet another thing, their own shots have such ferocious depth and pace that there is no way I would be able to hit more than a couple of them back at any one time. For another thing, they will take any ball that doesn’t have ferocious depth and pace on it and – given even a fractional moment to line up a shot – hit a winner off it. In other words, I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance And I have been brought up sharply. I do not play and never have played even the same game as these qualifiers.The game I had spent so much of my youth perfecting would not work against these guys. Mine was a defensive game, a strategy Martin Amis once described as “craven retrieval”, with enough skill to keep hitting the ball until the other guy made a mistake. But for one thing, pros simply do not make unforced errors – or, at any rate, they make them so rarely that there’s no way they are going to make the four unforced errors in seven points necessary for me to win a game.