Gilles Muller is a realist. On his recent trip to the US Open, he didn’t even bother to book a hotel room for the second week of the tournament. He didn’t think he would need to.
Ranked 130, it had been two years since Muller won back-to-back tour matches, and he had to fight through the qualifying rounds just for the chance to play in the Grand Slam.
A month ago, his name was known only to the most hardcore of tennis tragics, as a former US Open junior champion and a shock winner over Andy Roddick in the first round at Arthur Ashe Stadium three years earlier.
Now, as Flushing Meadows closes its doors for another year, Muller has a story to tell.
Every now and then in Grand Slam tennis, a player rises from obscurity to capture the imagination of the public. This year it was Muller, who came back from two sets to love down to win for the first time in his career.
And the next match he did it again, the second time in his career.
Beating former world number-two Tommy Haas and 18th seed Nicholas Almagro in this manner showed Muller had talent, though many suspected his run was short-lived.
But then he beat fifth seed Nikolay Davydenko, becoming the first Luxembourg-born player to reach a Grand Slam quarter-final, where he pushed Roger Federer and started to turn some heads.
Muller might be a realist, but he’s a realist with a dream.
All it took was some confidence in his own ability and a thought for some past fairytales and suddenly he was winning matches against top-class players and ready to make his own history.
“I’m thinking also about those guys like Marcos Baghdatis in Australia,” Muller said in near-perfect English, after beating Almagro.
“Nobody knew the guy before and he went to the finals. Same thing this year with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. He came back from a lot of injuries. He went to the finals right away. Why shouldn’t that happen to me?”
Why indeed?
These stories are part of the excitement of the big tournaments. Without them, in the age of the Federer-Nadal rivalry, tennis would be boring and predictable.
With them, they bring the public together, giving them an underdog to cheer for, a new favourite when the household names are eliminated, and illustrating the depths in men’s tennis.
Who can forget Marcos Baghdatis’ enormous Greek-Cypriot fan base in Melbourne, or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s fist pump with shades of Muhammad Ali?
And what about Mariano Puerta, the unheralded Argentine who beat Ivan Lubjcic, Guillermo Canas and Nikolay Davydenko on the way to a surprise French Open Final in 2005?
Muller is the latest in a long line of surprise successes, going back to a teenage Boris Becker’s unseeded Wimbledon victory, and further, some of whom keep rising until they reach their potential, while others fall by the wayside back into obscurity.
Either way, they capture the heart of the public and remind us why sport is so wonderful.
With the depth of men’s tennis talent as impressive as it is, here’s hoping the fairytales keep coming.
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