In about 10 more minutes, João Fonseca is going to be the biggest problem in tennis.

That stamp press of a forehand indents a tennis ball so hard you wonder if it will split open. Another unaccountable weapon is his compressed composure at the age of just 18, an outward unbotheredness though he’s playing in the first Grand Slam season of his life. But what should most worry the top-ranked players in the French Open is his exuberant hunger for everything raw and new that he encounters, especially opponents. He can’t wait to get at these guys.

There is a peculiar charm and revelation in watching a young player on the way to becoming possibly a champion. This is especially true at Roland Garros, where the red clay seems to particularly isolate and expose, making what it calls up in a player so intensely visible. The great French film critic and aficionado of the game Serge Daney once wrote that tennis is so telegenic because it is literally played in a frame, and that “produces the clearest, most legible emblematic image of modern sport: a violent telescoping … of money, the body, and power.” The camera captures “a body slacken, reflexes wane, tics invade, an intention impose itself.” We’re watching Fonseca’s body and intentions grow within the frame. What the camera shows is this:

A boy-man with hair on his chin downy as a cygnet, and a hint of baby fat around the cheeks, mop-hair curling under his cap. When he is asked who his agent is, he says to call his dad. Yet the power of his game is absolutely slaughtering — when the camera closes in on him standing alone, what you can’t miss is how much chestier he grows on big points. He reached the third round of the French on Thursday by defeating a man almost twice his age in 34-year-old Pierre-Hugues Herbert. And what’s more, he had to cope with a baying, standing-room-only French crowded ringing Court 14, and yet he coolly did away with their rooting interest in straight sets, taking every big point as if with a broadax, 7-6 (7-4), 7-6 (7-4), 6-4.

“In important moments I just try to be brave,” Fonseca said. “I think that’s the difference between the good guys in the top 50 from the top 10: They need to be brave, they need to know how to play in important moments.”

There is an incredible sense of velocity around Fonseca. Part of it comes from his racket speed, which is a combination of timing and torque, a flying elbow around a thick crankshaft of a torso and terrific footwork. According to an ATP Tour analysis, Fonseca’s average forehand shot speed is 81 miles per hour — as compared to the general Tour average of 76 mph. What’s more, he has an enormously heavy spin rate of 3,019 rotations per minute, compared to the Tour average of 2,844. And he’s still an adolescent exploring his body. His power can make older, powerful players look pedestrian — he backed Herbert all the way up to the BNP Paribas sign at the end of the court, and had him flailing at balls catapulting to shoulder level.

Of course, Fonseca’s brute power alone won’t make him a top five or even top 10 player; he’ll need to acquire more breadth and definition to his game. But he’s already got a key component: great movement. Every major champion has a unique physical signature. With Roger Federer it was a supple ease, an emanation of grace. With Carlos Alcaraz, a limber, skipping playfulness, all mobility and scalloping soft hands. It’s hard to say yet what Fonseca’s signature will be — he is still playdough — but there is already a suggestive look to him. He seems to wholly envelope the ball with his body when he strikes it; he devours it, chases it around the court with the dogged appetite of a rottweiler. He’s a little remindful of what Daney once wrote of Jimmy Connors: “If he could follow the ball to the opposite side he would do so.”

Premature as it might be to suggest that Fonseca has greatness in him, there is no ignoring the acceleration of his win rate as just a rookie in his second major tournament. It was only in January that the Brazilian teenager mused, “It’s my dream to play the tour, like, the real tour where top 50 players play.” At the Australian Open, when he caused a sensation by upsetting Andrey Rublev in the first round, he said demurely, “I mean, I don’t know why me. I think people think about me too much.”

But by mid-February he had won his first ATP title at the Argentina Open, and by the end of March he said, “Playing with the top players, you kind of know where’s your level. I really see that I’m the right way, I’m the right path, playing some good matches against top, top players. There is where I want to be.”

By then everyone had taken notice of him. No less than Novak Djokovic said, “He’s been the talk of the tour in the last several months. I mean, deservedly so. I mean, so young. Just incredible firepower from both ends of the baseline. Of course, what is impressive is the way he strikes the ball, but even more so how he handles the nerves on the court for someone that doesn’t have the experience at all playing at the highest level.”

Perhaps most suggestive of Fonseca’s skying potential is this: By reaching the third round at Roland Garros at just 18 — setting up an entrancing encounter Saturday with world No. 5 Jack Draper — he joined a list of youngest-ever-tos that includes Federer, Rafael Nadal and Alcaraz. Speaking of which, wasn’t it just the other day that Alcaraz and top-ranked Jannik Sinner, 22 and 23 years old respectively, were considered the new generation? So what, then, does that make Fonseca?

“I don’t know, what should I call it, the new, new, new generation?” Djokovic said.