THIVERVAL-GRIGNON, France -- The French visionary finds most human beings almost pitifully oblivious. He sees them ambling through the world while barely noticing the world.
So if you wish to denounce him for accepting a Sacramento tennis phenom with the shocking age of 4 into his tennis academy west of Paris in September 2006, it won't perturb his pulse.
"I know everything can happen in life," Patrick Mouratoglou said. "Most people have very closed minds. Has to be like this or like that. So things can come into their view, and they don't even see it."
Wavy-haired, 37, suave without trying, Mouratoglou doesn't hanker to convince. He just knows his phone rang in March 2006, and that on the line was Marcos Baghdatis, the 2006 Australian Open finalist, and an erstwhile Mouratoglou pupil. Baghdatis spoke as if having just seen an extraterrestrial.
"I was on the practice courts at Indian Wells," Baghdatis began to Mouratoglou, "and while I was practicing, I saw someone who when I saw what he was doing was the first time I ever see something like this."
Baghdatis had noticed a novelty invitee of the Pacific Life Open, Jan Silva, who'd turned up hitting tennis balls on the news in Sacramento way back at age 3. Mouratoglou, trusting of Baghdatis, reacted as would most any tennis-academy founder with zero concern that others think him eccentric: He bought the tyke and his family airplane tickets to France.
The parents, "Jani" the boy tennis player, his older brother and younger sister flew into Paris in June 2006. They rode westward from Paris, out to a bucolic French village that looks precisely as you'd think a bucolic French village might look, to a tennis academy in front of a cornfield with indoor-court bubbles that look like big white ticks.
Scott Silva, a welfare officer for Sacramento County, and Mari Maattanen-Silva, a tennis instructor at Gold River Racquet Club, had come upon the brainchild of Mouratoglou, who started his academy in the Paris suburbs in 1996.
In his childhood, Mouratoglou had reached 15 as a rare tennis animal who served and volleyed and harbored visions of a far-flung Patrick Rafter, until his magnate father made him shoo the daydreams and veer toward business school.
He slogged and slept through two years of that, worked at his father's renewable-energies colossus, left his racket untroubled for seven years, but then realized he could still summon peace just by looking at a tennis court.
