Inside Jack Draper's bromance with fellow Brit Jack Pinnington Jones: Arguments over pick-up times, car DJing, pre-match texts and treatment room debriefs
As the more senior of the Surrey teenagers and the only one with a licence, Jack Draper would do the driving to the National Tennis Centre in his second-hand Volkswagen Polo. But while Jack Pinnington Jones was grateful for the lift, he was less pleased with the early morning collection.
'Where he picked me up in Cobham, the traffic is a nightmare with the school run,' recalls 22-year-old Pinnington Jones, who is 15 months younger than Draper. 'So he would say, 'Right I'm going to be there at 6.30am, you're either there or you're not'. I'd be half asleep every time.
'It would only take us 20 minutes to get there because no one else was awake, so we'd be there at 7am. There was no breakfast until 8am, so it would just be us sitting there at the NTC.'
Draper, however, remains unapologetic about those early starts. 'It was like, 'Would you rather go 45 minutes earlier or would you rather sit in traffic for two hours?',' says the British No1. 'We always argued about it because he'd be hitting at 11am and I'd be hitting at 9.30am. But he loved coming with me. We'd have a laugh.'
For Pinnington Jones, the joy of those journeys came from being in charge of the auxiliary cable connecting his phone to Draper's car audio system.
'Unless he was excited to show me a new song he'd found, I'd get the aux,' says the world No281. 'At the beginning of the week, it would be UK rap. At the end of the week, it would be something more chill.
'It's the same car he has now, this little Polo. He treats it awfully. He's like, 'I don't need a nice car in London, I'm going to ding it anyway'. He has some boxing gloves in the mirror. He loves it.'
Now, six years on from carsharing to Roehampton, Draper and Pinnington Jones are sharing the limelight at nearby Wimbledon.
The friends have been separated in recent years, with Pinnington Jones moving to the States to attend Texas Christian University. But their bromance has been allowed to blossom again after Pinnington Jones quit college a month ago to return home and turn professional, then was handed a wildcard for Wimbledon.
On Tuesday, he made the most of his opportunity at SW19, upsetting world No53 Tomas Martin Etcheverry in straight sets on his Grand Slam debut. And waiting to greet him in the treatment room after his breakthrough victory was Draper, who had also just come through his first-round tie.
'I saw him after the match and he came up and congratulated me,' says Pinnington Jones, who faces Italian 22nd seed Flavio Cobolli in the second round on Thursday. 'He also sent me a text just before I went on saying, 'You're ready for this, go and embrace it'.
'It just means a lot that he's there supporting me. He's one of my best friends. Maybe one day I can get up to, maybe not where he is, but where we are playing the same tournaments.'
For his part, Draper is of no doubt that his close pal will soon be joining him at the top table of tennis.
'He's immensely talented,' adds the fourth seed, who meets 2017 runner-up Marin Cilic on Thursday. 'I think he is going to be a top 100 player pretty soon. I think the British public have someone else to be really excited about.'
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