By Ronald Atkin

As seminal sporting moments go, it registered high on the Richter Scale. The low backhand which Juan Carlos Ferrero sent scudding past Lleyton Hewitt to win the Davis Cup for Spain instantly transformed the 20-year-old from a fine tennis player into Hero of Iberia.

Once he had survived the unnerving experience of his beefy captain, Javier Duarte, diving on top of him as he lay flat on his back, Ferrero was hauled to his feet, dusted free of the court clay in which he was smothered and transported for a triumphal circuit of the Palau Sant Jordi on the shoulders of his team-mate, Alex Corretja.

Amid the soaring celebrations, and virtually unnoticed, Ferrero raised two fingers to his lips and blew a gentle kiss skywards, a greeting to his mother, Rosario, who died of cancer four years ago. Then it was on towards the VIP dais, where another Juan Carlos, king of the country, reached down at a precipitate angle for a handshake with the lad whose parents had named him after their monarch.

By last Thursday the two Juan Carloses had shaken hands again, at a reception for the team in Madrid. By then, of course, Ferrero had become Spain’s most lauded sportsman of the moment, earning comparison with such as the Tour de France giant Miguel Indurain and Seve Ballesteros.

The Spanish team’s post-match champagne-spraying session, interrupted by the need to attend doping control, proceeded via an official dinner to a Barcelona disco called Gaslight, where the players ended up onstage and Ferrero, the lad with the face of a choirboy, performed what a local paper called “un simpatico y discreto striptease”. By the time Ferrero presented himself just before noon next day for a marathon session of interviews, the following had happened: Sergio Tacchini signed him to a four-year shirt contract; the tourist office of his home province, Valencia, tabled a bid to become his leading sponsor; Spain’s top communications company, Telefonico, offered what it called a “supercontracto”; and the citizens back home in Onteniente circulated a petition to raise a monument in his honour, unheard of in this anonymous hill town of 32,000 souls.

Before plunging into another celebrity day on Tuesday, Ferrero took himself off for an evening meal at McDonald’s, followed by a visit to the cinema, one of his passions. He has seen Titanic four times and also loved Notting Hill. “I am a romantic,” he explains. He is also car-crazy, driving a Mitsubishi but nursing ambitions to move to Ferrari status. Another passion is football, particularly Real Madrid. In the middle of last Sunday’s frenzy he found time to ask how Real had got on (they beat Celta 3-0). The enterprising, but possibly ill-informed, Barc-elona president, Juan Gaspart, rushed to their hotel on Sunday evening to present all four Davis Cup players with named Barça shirts. Ferrero accepted with a straight face.

But then Juan Carlos has never been one for showing much emotion. Although he has two older sisters, Ana and Laura, Ferrero is the only son of a former pelota professional, Eduardo, and the first racket he lifted, aged four, was a pelota one. By seven, along with interests in football and basketball, he was into tennis, practising endlessly against the wall of the textile workshop in the basement of the family home. Vicente Penades, coach of his first club, Helios in Onteniente, said: “He was as skinny as a shower pipe in those days. The racket weighed more than he did, which is why he developed the two-handed grip.”

Soon, Ferrero outgrew the facilities of his home town. So, while Juan Carlos did his homework in the car, his mother drove him most evenings and every weekend the 20 miles to the Esquelite tennis centre in Villena. Eventually he became a resident and, under the guidance of Antonio Martinez Cascales, still his coach, he won the world under-13 title. Preferring to be based near home, Ferrero rejected offers from the Nick Bollettieri academy in Florida and the Spanish Tennis Federation’s youth development school in San Cugat.

After his first professional year in 1998 Ferrero had climbed 302 ranking places to end at 43. Last year the light-hitting but deadly player now nicknamed “Mosquito” won his first tour title, beating Corretja in the Majorca final. This year, in climbing to 12th, he has been runner-up in Dubai and Barcelona and a semi-finalist at his first French Open. Wimbledon has yet to see Ferrero since, along with Corretja and Albert Costa, he boycotted this year’s Championships in protest at not being seeded according to his world ranking.

This was a clear indication of his determination not be be belittled, though he is not, as one Barcelona sports daily dubbed him, Juan Carlos Fiero (ferocious). More Juan Carlos Fearless, a man who has set his sights early on winning the 2001 French Open.

Ferrero acknowledges that his rise has been rapid, to say the least. “I have put myself in the limelight very quickly but I am happier with a bit less of all that.” As his father pointed out, “What Juan Carlos likes most is to be big on the tennis court and as normal as possible away from it.”

Having announced long-term intentions by buying 10,000 square metres of land in Onteniente to build the tennis centre the town lacks, Ferrero showed his dislike of the limelight by saying that, before he starts the 2001 season on New Year’s Day with the tournament in Chennai, India, he intends to take a holiday. “As far away from Spain as possible,” smiled the Hero of Iberia.