By rights, Chris Eubanks shouldn’t really be here. If, a couple of weeks ago, you had been reading the form book you would have thought that his name alongside that of Daniil Medvedev in the draw sheet was a typo.

But Wimbledon is known for its attention to detail and Eubanks is indeed facing Medvedev in the quarter-finals here.

On his Wimbledon debut, the man with no Grand Slam form to speak of (two wins at the Slams in five years of trying), has taken The Championships by storm. He has already beaten Cameron Norrie, the No.12 seed, and Stefanos Tsitsipas, the No.5 seed, and now, riding a wave of confidence and crowd support (everyone loves an underdog), he is blinking in the glare of the media spotlight. It is a lot for a chap to take in.

Yet Eubanks is not your usual giant-killing newcomer. The sport is full of young guns who pull off a surprise win at a big event and promptly crash and burn in the next round. Not Eubanks. He is building on every match and doing his level best to think of the task in front of him as just another match.

But it could all have been very different.

Growing up as the son of a Baptist minister in Atlanta, Georgia, tennis was not the first career choice for the young Eubanks. He had always played but he was overlooked by the United States Tennis Association – they did not deem him good enough for their training programmes.

Instead, he took himself off to Georgia Tech to study for a degree in business and to play college tennis. When he was named the ACC Player of the Year in 2016 and 2017, he ditched his studies, left college and set off to make his way as a professional player.

And then nothing happened. Not for a long, long time.

“I was extremely, extremely fortunate to grow up in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time that I did,” Eubanks explained. “There were so many players from the city, not too far from my house, that went through the trials and tribulations before me and really helped me out.

“Whether it's Jarmere Jenkins, who's Serena's long-time hitting partner, and got up to 180 himself. His older brother Jermaine Jenkins is now a national coach at USTA. Donald Young has been like a big brother to me since I was like 15. All of those guys grew up or were about 10 minutes away from where I lived. I was so, so lucky to have those guys at my disposal from a young age.”

When the Tour creaked back into life after the pandemic, Eubanks’s ranking was mired in the middle 200s and he was beginning to lose hope. He told his agent that if he could not break into the top 100 in the next 12 months, he needed to get a proper job.

He even turned his hand to some TV commentary with the Tennis Channel – something he now thinks helped him enormously. Analysing the games of the great and the good showed him what he needed to do to improve.

But still the results would not come with any level of frequency or consistency. And then he went to Miami.

It was in March this year that the 6ft 7in (2.01m) Eubanks walked into the qualifying tournament of that Masters 1000 event and won his first two matches. His roll had begun and it took him all the way to the quarter-finals and a meeting with – as luck would have it – Medvedev.

He lost that day but his run had pushed him up to No.85 in the pecking order. His goal had been achieved and his persistence had been rewarded.

But fast forward to the start of the grass court season and Eubanks was down in the dumps again. After a second-round loss at the Surbiton Challenger and first round losses in Stuttgart and Halle, he messaged Kim Clijsters and moaned that grass was “the stupidest surface to play on”.

Kim immediately fired back some advice: “Try to do some little footwork drills. Even play some mini-tennis games… stay low, use your slice.” So he did. And it worked – he won the title in Mallorca the week before The Championships.

“She's a big, big contributing factor to, I think, some of the success,” Eubanks said. “Just keeping my mind fresh and keeping me up in spirits when I wasn’t.”

Now he is preparing to face Medvedev again. The big serve, huge forehand and sizzling backhand return could cause the former world No.1 problems, and when they meet this time, Eubanks will have the crowd on his side (they have taken him and his story to their hearts) and he will have absolutely nothing to lose.

Wimbledon fairytales don’t get much better than that.

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