Japan's Tokito Oda was just 17 years and 33 days old when he won the Roland Garros wheelchair men's singles title last month. Not only is he now ranked as the world’s best player but even the briefest of chats with him rubber stamps him as a future giant of the game. Instantly likeable but a man to be feared too. Get this.

'You’re not used to grass Tokito, how difficult is it to play on for you?'

Not at all it seems. 

“I like to play on grass”.

'The big show courts, are they intimidating or even plain scary?'

“No. I wanted to play on a big stadium in Paris and got Phillipe-Chatrier. It wasn’t full but there were enough people there. It was a good atmosphere.”

'You must get nervous before matches surely, at your age?

“Actually I don’t feel nervous, I just enjoy playing tennis. I want to be at this stage,” he says in the rain delay wait before his scheduled Wimbledon semi-final against the experienced, multi-slam winning Gordon Reid.

To pile the pressure further on the Scotsman, it transpires that Oda, as a youngster, studied Reid (as a fellow leftie) for cues on how to improve his play.

“Gordon’s at home so many people are going to watch his match," he added. "I think it’s going to be fun playing with the country’s guy. I was looking forward to playing like him when I became a tennis player, and I will hit to his backhand all the time (as Reid does to others). I am feeling amazing.”

As impressive as Oda is in person - he is already fluent in English and uses his time alone in hotel rooms on tour to practice his second language - it is his mental approach that stands out. And it comes from the very top.

“My parents were always supporting me when I started playing tennis," he explains. "They said, ‘you can be No. 1, you can do anything you want'. They told me that always every day. I am confident now but when I started I didn’t think I'd be like this. My change in thinking came from my parents.”

Thirty-one-year-old Reid does not lack self-belief either, but it has evolved from experience and a thoroughly welcome, easy going nature. It also comes with the greatest of anecdotes to back this up.

It happened just after Reid, a Paralympic gold medal winner in Rio 2016, was given his gong by the Queen at Holyrood Palace in Scotland.

“I have got video evidence of that” he says. “I only found out about four years after it happened. A friend sent me a YouTube link where Nicola Sturgeon (Scotland’s First Minister) meets the Queen. The Queen said to Sturgeon that it had been a good day with lots of the Paralympic athletes there.

“Nicola says, ‘Gordon Reid was one of them'. 

“ ‘Ah says the Queen, charming young man’.”

That Reid can tell the story in a self-deprecating and warm manner is testament to an uplifting character that saw him clinch the Australian Open and Wimbledon singles crowns in 2016, plus a mind-blowing 21 Grand Slam doubles titles in his career all up.

Success at the team game, where has has long partnered with England’s Alfie Hewett, has not come about by accident.

“We play about 15 tournaments a year together," he says. "A couple of years before Rio, I was trying to figure out who to play with there. Alfie was still at school, he wasn’t sure what he was doing. I thought ‘let’s take a gamble here, he has got a lot of potential and he’ll be hungry and a chance for the long term’.

“One of the reasons Alfie and I have been so successful is that we regard the doubles as important. Sometimes for other players, if they play singles, then doubles is not really important to them. We’ve always said doubles sits alongside singles.”

Playing on the biggest stages matters he says, not just personally, but for the health of wheelchair sport.

“It’s really important for us," he adds. "When we get scheduled on those courts it shows the tournament is thinking about us, it’s not ‘that’s the wheelchair event over there and we’ll leave them there’.”

His Thursday semi-final doubles match, on Court No. 1, was played before several thousand increasingly engaged and buoyant spectators. 

“A lot of times we’ve played on a show court at the other slams and it’s been at the start or the end of the day when there’s no-one around," he says. "This match was in the middle of the day so you’re a full part of the schedule rather than just an add-on

“That’s the stage we want to get to, where people want to watch wheelchair matches regardless of who it is or because they are invested in a player’s character or style of play. The goal is to create an atmospheres or fill a stadium when it’s any player.”

Where, or when even, Reid and Oda are to play their singles semi-final was still to be decided when we spoke as rain wiped out Friday’s play outside Wimbledon’s two covered show courts.

Despite Oda’s emergence, Reid is confident he has the skill-set to compete with the Japanese titan.

“Tokito is the head of the young players at the moment, he’s shown consistency over 12 months, it’s really impressive what he has done in a short space of time," he says. "He’s mentally very strong, aggressive, has a fast arm and he takes the ball early.”

While Reid can’t recall their head to head record (Oda is ahead recently he says) do not discount a Scottish victory.

“Grass is a surface I feel very comfortable on and the grass events are home events as well,” he says.

Either way, wheelchair tennis is in safe hands. Get along or tune in if you can!