Tennisisms

“He came also, when I was banned. He came to Monaco to practise there and everything was great. But now things are … are a bit different, because, you know, he’s No 4 in the world.”

“Aha,” I said, sensing a possible grey area in Sinner’s neatly organised world. “Does that mean you can’t practise with him any more?”

“OK, it’s harder to practise with him all the time,” Sinner acknowledged. “You share less things on court, I guess. You don’t want to show him much, you know, in the practice sessions. And he’s not gonna show me the real tennis either. It is a bit complicated.

“But it doesn’t mean that the friendship goes away completely. It’s maybe the opposite. We talk about playing doubles in the future, and we grab dinner at times.

“Jack has grown so much,” Sinner concludes. “Physically, he’s strong. Mentally, he’s very, very good. I truly believe he is going to win some big, big titles.”

Sinner’s enthusiasm stems from a long association with Draper on the junior tour, as well as a shared sense of humour. A mutual friend explains that “You don’t see the real Jannik unless you really know him, but he’s actually very funny in private and has a mickey-taking side that British people appreciate.”

Delving into the archives, Telegraph Sport found photographic evidence of this childhood connection. A group shot from the 2013 Nike Junior World Tour shows an 11-year-old Draper grinning broadly in the front row. Meanwhile Sinner stands in a patch of shadow, peering through a gap between two other boys, and rocking a bushy red mullet.

Their positioning in that photo feels deliberate. Sinner was a literal backmarker at the time, having only recently taken up tennis at the expense of skiing (a sport where he once finished second in the national giant-slalom for juniors). Progress was slow at first, and Draper recently described a teenage doubles encounter where “we were saying ‘Hit to him [Sinner, who was 15 at the time], because he’s not the best player on the court!’”

But as Sinner whizzed through the rankings like a snowboarder on a black run, the two men developed a close bond. “We send each other messages in good moments, bad moments,” Draper explained last year. “You’re on the road, you’re playing such a relentlessly intense sport, and we haven’t got many friends. So to have the support of someone who’s going through it themselves is really big.”

....

The family house in Monaco happened to boast a “backyard clay court” – in Cahill’s words – which was one of the few places where Sinner was allowed to train. Only in April did the terms of his suspension relax, whereupon Draper’s arrival for a training block coincided with an upgrade to the famous Monte Carlo Country Club.

“We asked Jack if he could come,” Sinner recalled of that week, “because I needed some feedback from the best players in the world. And it was good for me to see I was still quite rusty. Day by day, we tried to work on things, trying to go to Rome with certain feelings. After some time, we found it.”

The convenient timing of the ban, which did not affect Sinner’s participation in any grand-slam events, caused disquiet among certain members of his peer group, even if others – including Draper – defended him staunchly. The public response was also mixed, although fortunately Sinner says that “I am not the kind of person who is on social media for an hour every day… There are weeks when I am zero on it.”

When I asked him about the abusive online messages that disappointed gamblers send to players after each defeat, he looked unmoved. For one thing, the world No 1 doesn’t lose many matches. For another, he is not a great one for screens, unless he is playing Fifa on his PlayStation. He is more interested in his cars and his kitchen, where he indulges a very Italian passion for cooking – his signature dish is tiramisu.