HE PEDIGREE: Baghdatis is the first player from Cyprus to reach the Top 100, much less the Top 10. But if he’d had his way as a kid, he’d be a soccer player. His father, a tennis fanatic, pushed Baghdatis into the sport, shipping him off to train at an academy in Paris at age 13. Sometimes father knows best, because Baghdatis soon reached the top of the junior game. “Of course I would love to be the best soccer player in the world,” Baghdatis says. “But I have a great life. I won’t start crying about it. I love tennis, too.”

THE PERSONA: The smile says it all—Baghdatis is a crowd pleaser. The 21-year-old flashes his toothy grin many times a match, and spectators love it. “Any player would love the crowd to be with him, cheering you up. It makes it fun,” he says. Baghdatis is a big-match player because he feeds off the atmosphere at major events. He reached the 2006 Australian Open fi nal riding a wave of support from his 21 Aussie cousins, and at the U.S. Open, where he lost to Andre Agassi, Baghdatis used 23,000 New Yorkers to help him back into the match.

THE GAME: Baghdatis’ closest kin may be the man who beat him at the Open. Like Agassi, Baghdatis has compact ground strokes, blends offense and defense well, and is a shot-maker from both wings. But what got him into the Top 10 last year was his mental game. “He’s good at winning. He understands how to play the game,” says Patrick McEnroe, the U.S. Davis Cup captain and commentator for ESPN. “He can read his opponents quickly. He’s a shot-maker when he needs to be. He’s aggressive on his terms.”

THE PROGNOSIS: The weekly grind may never be his thing; consistency and concentration don’t typically go hand-in-hand with a happy-go-lucky personality. But, while that may keep him from becoming No. 1, his strength on all surfaces—and on the biggest stages—makes him a threat at every Grand Slam.