I would be surprised if anybody reading this has ever heard of Jakob Hlasek.Michael Joyce, 22, is listed in the ATP Tour Player Guide as 5ft 11in and 165lb On the Stadium Court, he looks compact and stocky. Last year, he made $300,000 on the tour (that’s just prize money, not counting exhibitions and endorsement contracts), his career winnings are over $4 million, and it turns out his home base was for a time Monte Carlo, where lots of European players with tax issues end up living. Watching him practise is probably the first time it really strikes me how good these professionals are, because even just messing around, Hlasek is the most impressive tennis player I have ever seen. There are a million little ways you can tell that somebody’s a great player: details in his posture, in the way he bounces the ball with his racket head to pick it up, in the way he twirls the racket casually while waiting for the ball Hlasek wears a plain grey T-shirt and very white shoes.

It is mid-morning and already at least 90 degrees, and he isn’t sweating.Hlasek turned pro in 1983, six years later had one year in the top 10, and for the past few years has been ranked in the 60s and 70s, getting straight into the main draw of all the tournaments and usually losing in the first couple of rounds. Jakob Hlasek is 6ft 2in and built like a half-back, his blond hair in a short square Eastern European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here He looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard. His backhand is a one-hander, rather like Ivan Lendl’s, and watching him practise it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something I keep having to remember to blink. They are practising ground strokes down the line – Rosset’s forehand and Hlasek’s backhand – each ball plumb-line straight and within centimetres of the corner, the players moving with the compact nonchalance I have since come to recognise in pros when they are working out: the suggestion is of a very powerful engine in low gear. An example is Jakob Hlasek, a Czech who is working out with Marc Rosset on one of the practice courts the morning I arrive at Stade Jarry. Even McEnroe, Sampras and Agassi had to play qualies at the start of their careers, and Sampras spent a couple of years losing in the early rounds of main draws before he suddenly erupted in the early Nineties and started beating everybody.Still, even most main-draw players are obscure and unknown.

I notice them and go over to watch only because Hlasek and Rosset are so beautiful to see – at this point, I have no idea who they are. In the qualies it is $560 for losing the second round and $0.00 for losing in the first – and there is very little chance of sponsorship at this level.) The main draw’s 64 or 128 players are still mostly the supporting cast for the stars we see in televised finals But they are also the pool from which superstars are drawn. (In Montreal, a first-round loser in the main event will earn $5,400, a second-round loser $10,300. The move from qualifier to main-draw player is a huge boost, both financially and psychically, but it is still a couple of plateaux away from true fame and fortune.

The action in Montreal began two days before the official start- date of the Canadian Open, one of the ATP’s “Super 9″ tournaments, when these players gathered for the qualies. This is essentially a competition to determine who will occupy the seven slots in the tournament’s main draw designated for “qualifiers”, those not automatically eligible to enter based on their ATP computer ranking.Michael Joyce’s career is now on a cusp: he still has to qualify for some tournaments, but more and more often he gets straight into the main draw. They stand around in the air-conditioning in wet hair and sandals waiting for results of matches to go up on the board and for their own next match to be posted Some of them listen to headphones; none seem to read. They all have the unhappy and self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and in hotel lobbies, waiting around – the look of people who must create an envelope of privacy around themselves with just their expressions. A lot of the players are extremely young – new guys trying to break into the tour – or conspicuously older – ie, over 30 with tans that look permanent and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues.The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the big-event finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the players’ tent.

With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds – big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-size arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophic arm. Many of these players in the qualifying rounds, or “qualies”, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawn chairs and sun themselves next to their players’ practice courts.The players themselves tend to congregate in the complex’s lobby, where the drawsheet for the qualifying tournament is pinned up on a cork bulletin board. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits Malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts. The acoustics in the near-empty stadium are amazing – you can hear every breath, every sneaker squeak, the authoritative ping of the ball against very tight strings.Although there are very few paying customers here today, there are close to 100 world-class players: big spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac-10 sweat clothes, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians.