It’s pretty wild that at that age I knew what I wanted to do in life.”Īuger-Aliassime’s rise in tennis is no Cinderella story. “What never changed was my desire to make it and do this as my career. “From that point on I was on a mission,” he says. Then again, Auger-Aliassime has never been average.įrom the time his father first told him it was possible to make a profession out of playing the game he loved, Auger-Aliassime developed a one-track mind. “Different.” The average kid doesn’t have his career mapped out at seven years old. “He was able to concentrate in a way you don’t see from kids that age. “He was serious,” says Bruneau, who has since worked with some of the top stars in the country.
While most kids were goofing around, Auger-Aliassime was preparing for a career. The child would bring his racquet back, line up his shot and, like clockwork, power the ball across the net, releasing a guttural grunt with each stroke-the kind of sound that a human can only produce when they’re pushing their body to its limit. One day, among the mass of bright yellow balls ricocheting around the courts, Bruneau noticed a spindly kid who burned a hole with his eyes through each ball that came his way. It was 2007, and Sylvain Bruneau, who was working with Équipes du Québec, saw hundreds of seven- to 10-year-olds take the court at the Montreal academy every other Saturday to play with friends. This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s.įélix Auger-Aliassime was seven years old the first time he caught a tennis coach’s eye.
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