Milos Raonic, centre, celebrates with his teammates after defeating Italy's Andreas Seppi at a Davis Cup tennis quarter-final singles match in Vancouver in 2013. Raonic proudly represented Canada through an 18-year pro career, which he officially ended on Sunday.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
If you had to reduce Milos Raonic’s tennis career to a single point, it would be in the fifth set of the 2016 Wimbledon gentleman’s singles semi-final.
This was a match Roger Federer assumed he had already won, but Raonic wouldn’t do the decent thing and give up, or his usual thing and tear a hamstring.
In the deciding point of the fourth game, Federer set the Canadian like a bowling pin. He hit him with a bomb of a serve, rushed the net, covered the entirety of it and dared Raonic to out-finesse him. It took five tries of increasing desperation, but Raonic managed it.
Federer got a look then – the look that says that even though you are the best to ever do it, sometimes you must accept that it isn’t your day.
Afterward, Raonic was asked what impact advancing to a Wimbledon final would have on Canadian tennis.
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“It will be a bigger impact if I win,” he said.
He was right. After the high high of beating Federer, there was the low low of being shoved aside in straight sets by Andy Murray.
Raonic’s career was the story of a great player who for years was right on the edge of writing history, but couldn’t figure out the ending. Part of that was being trapped in the back half of the Big Three era in men’s tennis. A bigger part of it was a pernicious series of injuries.
On Monday, a year-and-a-half since he’d last played a competitive match, Raonic gave in to medical destiny and retired.
“This is a moment you know will come one day, but somehow you never feel ready for it,” Raonic, 35, wrote on Instagram. “This is as ready as I will ever be.”
When Raonic arrived the scene, you wouldn’t have said that Canadian men’s tennis was in a depressed state, because it had never been in any other sort of state.
The closest it had come to making it was Greg Rusedski. As soon as he got within sighting distance of the top, Rusedski realized that the whole time he’d been accepting Canadian assistance to learn his trade, he’d been denying his own Britishness. Watching the U.K. stage of Rusedski’s career never quite come together was the highlight of Canadian men’s tennis during the nineties.
Born in what is now Montenegro, raised in Brampton, Ont., weaned by the Canadian tennis establishment, Raonic was another rising star that you figured would find some transparent excuse to leave once he hit the big time. He actually had an excuse. But Raonic didn’t leave.
He played on our national teams, wore the colours and talked about Canada all the time. This was new.
We take it for granted now that non-hockey-playing Canadians want to play in and for Canada, but that was not the case even recently. Raonic was a tipping point. Maybe the tipping point.
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He began to put together a run of form in his early 20s, setting two patterns. Whenever Raonic could stay healthy, he was remarkably consistent, working his way deep into tournaments. Then, just as he was on the cusp of a breakthrough, he’d get hurt.
Often, this seemed to happen in the most high-profile matches. Shortly after that run at Wimbledon in 2016, Raonic rose to No. 3 in the world. He would never play another complete season.
By that point, the game had started to change around him. His type – big bodied, huge serve, batter you to death with quick points – was going out of fashion. The new player, eventually epitomized by Carlos Alcaraz, played like a big man, but moved like a small one. Meanwhile, the old guard – Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal – refused to cede the field.
Robbed of a little more of his mobility with each passing year, Raonic could no longer keep pace with the best. But in that Canadian way, he refused to go. He didn’t make a show of it, or burst back onto the scene. He would simply go away for a while, and then come back.
Raonic serves to Austria's Dennis Novak at Wimbledon in July, 2023. It marked the final year that the Canadian talent would compete there.Alastair Grant/The Associated Press
He returned to Wimbledon after a four-year absence in 2023. It would be his last time there.
When he’d started, Raonic was the big Canadian story wherever he went. Now he was a distant fifth, after Bianca Andreescu’s return, as well as Leylah Fernandez’s, Denis Shapovalov’s and Félix Auger-Aliassime’s chances.
That didn’t seem to bother him. Past 30, married and having almost quit once before, he was more contemplative. In his prime, you could sometimes feel Raonic vibrating with irritation when you spoke to him. Now he was more a chatter, more of a storyteller.
“What I used to measure things last time I was here was quite different than how I would measure things now,” he told the ATP Tour’s site.
His plan was to play Wimbledon, then Toronto, then the U.S. Open and then see where he was at. He did that. He even got as far as the Paris Olympics the next year. But then he was hurt again and that was it.
Raonic is not the greatest Canadian tennis player ever. Though her career has been similarly impeded by injury, that’s Andreescu. Just one grand slam victory trumps any number of other wins.
But Raonic is the most impactful Canadian tennis player. He made it normal to be very good at something that is seen as globally cool, while also being comfortably Canadian. The pride with which players now wear the red and white in sports as disparate as soccer, basketball and rugby is down in some small way to Raonic’s quiet, patriotic confidence when few other Canadian athletes felt that way.
In his parting statement, Raonic thanked Canada as though it were a person – “I enjoyed every moment of the opportunity to represent you all around the world.”
Milos Raonic – a great national talent, a greater national example.