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The big guns get all the attention, of course.

But the bulk of the ATP Tour is made up of stubborn, dedicated grinders like Marcos Giron. And as you’ll see in the interview below, they’re often the ones who have the most perspective.

Now 31, Giron is a solid top-50 player – currently ranked No. 48, with his career high of No. 37 reached last August. And he surpassed the $5 million mark in career earnings this year.

On Friday, he pulled off a top-10 upset with a 7-6 (4), 3-6, 6-2 win over No. 4 seed Casper Ruud. It was the first top-five victory of his career.

He’ll play No. 26 seed Alexei Popyrin on Sunday.

But it’s been a long, long road to get there.

College star to hip surgery

Giron was a top-20 junior back in the day – not necessarilly among the best in the world, but among the very best of his generation in the U.S and the No. 1 college recruit in the national. He was a college standout, winning the NCAA singles title in 2014 as a junior, starring at UCLA on an excellent squad.

But it wasn’t long before his pro aspirations were set back – big time – by a pair of hip surgeries performed just two months apart in Dec. 2015 and Feb. 2016. At the time, he was outside the top 400 and was even a volunteer assistant coach at his alma mater while he rehabbed. For a player whose biggest strengths were his reslience and physicality, it was the only way he’d have a shot.

After missing eight months, he slowly crawled up the charts.

By 2019, at age 25, Giron was ranked No. 217 and had never even won a match in qualifying at Indian Wells, which is as close as the Thousand Oaks, Calif. native would get to a “home” event.

He could well remember sitting in the upper reaches of the stadium court there, watching Nadal and Federer and the big stars of the day.

That year, he got a wild card into the qualifying, and maximized.

That was impressive. But even more impressive was all the insight he offered in a prss conference after the tough loss to Raonic.

It took awhile. As he mentioned in the interview, he expected to be mostly playing Challengers that year. And he did. He got to No. 123 at the end of that season.

Held back by COVID

On the cusp of the top 100 when he reached the quarterfinals of the Indian Wells Challenger in 2020 – played on the same site at the main event, it went ahead even as there were rumblings that the BNP Paribas Open would be cancelled because of the pandemic, which it was – his progress was halted.

By the dawn of the 2020 US Open – after five months when the Tour didn’t even happen because of the pandemic, be finally broke into the top 100 a month after his 27th birthday.

Giron reached his first ATP Tour final in 2022, in San Diego.

It took another 3 1/2 years to break into the top 50, which he did just over a year ago.

There are a lot of stories of determination and perseverance out there. Giron’s is just one of them. But it’s an example to everyone.

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