Since he first picked up tennis as a toddler, at every age level, Learner Tien has pretty much always been one of the best tennis players in America. That didn’t mean, however, he spent all those years hell-bent on becoming a professional tennis player. Learner’s first coach was his dad, Khuong, who later remembered that his son’s attitude toward a pro career was always one of detached curiosity rather than obsessive commitment. As he put it in a 2023 Tennis Channel segment:

“His famous line was, ‘Well, I’ll just see how far I could go.’ Do you want to be a pro? ‘Yeah, I’m gonna see how far I can go.’ Learner, do you even like tennis? ‘Yeah, I’m gonna see how that’s gonna go.’”

Learner took his time going pro; he even played a bit of college tennis at USC. Once he did make the leap, however, he flew right up the pro rankings. Watching him now, at age 19, already with two wins over top-five players, I am left wondering if that cool, curious attitude is the healthiest possible way to approach a life in sports. Tien never looks frazzled out there on the court, and he wins a lot, with a game beyond his years.

In 2024, a season spent mostly in Challenger and Futures events, Tien racked up 63 wins, including a 28-match win streak from May to July. By the end of the year he had qualified for the Next Gen Finals, where he lost to fellow wunderkind Joao Fonseca in the championship. Fonseca, with all his firepower, fits the more common mold of a prodigy whose unteachable physical talent is discernible after watching three forehands. But Tien played a technically astute game of angles and foot speed. It was something like seeing veteran guile downloaded into a kid’s body. At the end of that tournament, as usual, I was looking forward to keeping tabs on these players who would, in time, break out at the highest level.

But fast-forward just a few weeks and both of those kids were already upsetting top 10 players at the Australian Open. Tien beat world No. 5 Daniil Medvedev in a five-setter that lasted four hours, 49 minutes. It was something of a mirror match. Medvedev was confronted by a much younger player who could match his irritating shot selection and tolerance for brutally long rallies—and, true to mirrors, Tien was a lefty. Whenever Medvedev hit one of his weird off-speed shots, Tien would hit one right back. These two are needlers and meddlers, winning more with precision and patience than with overwhelming power. It’s impressive for a player to have mastered a tricky style like that by age 19, just a few matches into his first season at the ATP level; it took Medvedev until age 23 to fully discover his own game.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the word “smart” as often on a tennis broadcast as I did while watching Tien thrive as a qualifier in Acapulco this week—perhaps dozens of times in the span of a two-set match. This initially gave me some pause; was this torrent of “smart” a product of his game (fair), his name (funny), or a stereotype (less funny)? But from what I already knew of his game, and what he revealed over the course of his fourth-round match against Sascha Zverev on Wednesday, it was clear that Tien really did make the right call over and over, and his success on a tennis court was just as attributable to his savvy decision-making as his fast feet. (Maybe it’s just that other players should also be called smart more often.) Tien poked and prodded at Zverev’s problem forehand, played some killer defense, and beat a moody Zverev, who walked off the court and directly into a car.

Afterward Tien was asked if he was enjoying the courts in Acapulco. It sounded as if he was holding back his honest assessment out of politeness; in all likelihood, the molasses-slow court speed is not ideal for a guy who can struggle to muster enough pace to finish the point. That very thing caught up with him in Thursday’s quarterfinal match against Tomas Machac, who overpowered him in straight sets. But what a week it was for Tien, who won four matches and might have been the bright spot of a tournament otherwise defined by mass gastrointestinal distress. And what a year it’s been for him, too. It’s only February of his first full season on the ATP Tour and he’s already beaten two of the best players in the world. The kid who was ranked outside the top 400 this time last year will wind up in the top 70 next week. He’s still so new to tour life that he hasn’t even solidified his schedule for the clay season, as he told Bounces this week, but he at least knows his next stop. After all his success on slow hard courts this week, he’ll soon have plenty more to chew on at Indian Wells. He and Fonseca were both granted wild cards for the main draw there; Tien’s ranking is so high now, he qualified for the main draw on his own merit, freeing up the wild card for someone else. He’s already just another pro.