'YOU are my sex god," I said to Patrick Rafter, conversationally. "Er," he said. But I didn't mean personally. I merely meant that these were the sentiments frequently expressed upon the T-shirt frontage of women at his tennis matches. Rafter has a huge following among the female of the species, you will gather, most of them in metaphorical dirty mackintoshes, writes Sue Mott.

"Ah," he said, coming back from the brink of blind panic. "But it all comes along with succeeding. I don't think it matters what you look like, success is just a very attractive thing."

Arrant nonsense. Even before Rafter, the top-ranked Australian, both tennis-wise and in the silken thigh/languid locks/eyes-like-pools department, won the US Open last year against all expectation - especially his - he was lusted after in no uncertain terms. "Sex," courtside girls had emblazoned across their chests, while their friends alongside would add reverently: "God." And I don't think they meant Jeremy Bates in the doubles.

Just now, it is true, Rafter's sexual immortality is cunningly concealed beneath baggy track pants, a loose-fitting top and the sort of scrunched-up, wisps-out ponytail that Arantxa Sanchez Vicario phased out around her 16th birthday. But there is no denying he is a victim of girl-powered body fascism and he - despite the model girlfriend back home - is extremely pleased about it.

"How is it for me?" he asked incredulously. "Good. I'm a big fan of women. I enjoy it." So no harrassment cases looming there then.

This week British women were exposed to his muscular glories at the Guardian Direct Cup, held - slightly dangerously in the circumstances - in Battersea Park. One hopes the organisers have told Rafter to stick to well-lit paths and not to take lifts from strangers. "Oh, his legs," said Lorraine, a legal secretary from Ilford, when asked what she admired about his game. "From the toes up," she elaborated.

"He's just a great big healthy hunk," said Jenny Boxhall, of Wimbledon, aptly, now retired from her career as a safari courier in Kenya and therefore used to some of nature's more stunningly rugged specimens.

"OK. All right," said Rafter, trying to dampen the prevailing ardour. But I'm afraid it was rather like squeezing a sponge on a raging bush fire, and he would know all about that.

He was brought up in the Australian desert, in Mount Isa, a tough little mining town in Queensland, with his eight brothers and sisters. A trip to the seaside took three days. He was beaten up at regular intervals, sometimes by siblings, sometimes at school. "But I deserved it. Being one of the youngest, I was a bit cheeky."

He shared a bedroom with his four brothers. "But our parents always made us feel like we had everything. Our mother would always make our clothes and sewed little Lacoste signs on them. We never went hungry. There was always a big bowl of pasta for us. That was the great thing about our parents. At a time when things were very difficult financially, we never felt it."

Perhaps this is why he is so defensive on the subject of his new-found wealth. He has amassed a ?.8 million fortune in prize money alone, never mind all the extra bits for modelling Ray-Bans and such like, but still carefully cultivates a grunge look which, to the uninitiated, means devotedly wearing clothes two sizes too large which a tramp might prefer to throw on his brazier. "I may travel with three bags of clothes and shoes but I'm not an Armani freak. I'm not a yuppie at all. I'm pretty grunge actually. I'm very happy being that way."

He is not wedded to money. He is not even affianced to it. What did he earn last year? "A bit," he said, guardedly. Millions, I suggested. "Well, what did other people earn?" he countered, meaning Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, Bernie Ecclestone and the Sultan of Brunei. Yes, but it is still more than 99.99 per cent of the world's population. Finally he succumbed (as Barbara Cartland might say).

'Oh yeah, well, definitely. I know I'm very fortunate to be put in this scenario, in tennis. But I think we work harder mentally and physically than a lot of people. I think it's relative.

"It certainly hasn't affected me. Other people may perceive me differently but I don't perceive them differently at all. As one of nine children, we had very little in the way of luxuries. My money doesn't get spent on decadent things at all."

Damn.

It may seem a curious word to apply to a man currently auditioning for Adonis but the most striking feature about Rafter is his innocence. He used to collect butterflies, for heaven's sake, which is hardly the childhood experience you expect from the swamp things that often play Australian sport. Admittedly, his technique was more Lecter than lepidopter. "I used to go out with my tennis racket and kill butterflies and put them on my window sill." The little darling.

Then, in January 1997, he astonished the tennis world by asking the umpire to reverse a point awarded in his favour while trailing Andrei Cherkasov in the Australian Hardcourt Championships. He wasn't just trailing, he was teetering on the very edge of defeat. The point became the astounded Russian's sixth match point which he converted to win the match.

This is more or less his philosophy of tennis. He is an uninhibited throwback to the old Aussie days when players served and volleyed instinctively. Newcombe, Hoad, Roche, Laver, Emerson, Rosewall. They would rather hang around the bars than the baseline and Rafter, notwithstanding his move to Bermuda, is their natural successor.

Against Greg Rusedski in last year's US Open final, he was a demon at the net. The British No 1 was powerless against the force and relentlessness of his opponent and lost in straight sets. Whereupon Rafter, who prefers beer, discovered Dom Perignon. "I don't really drink champagne," he said. "But it went down very sweetly."

He believes in karma. He still wonders whether 1997 was such a good year (he also reached the semis of the French Open) because he gave Cherkasov that point back. On the whole, he thinks not. "I think you would have to do a lot more good actions than that. But I believe in reincarnation. Maybe I did something good in my last life."

Achilles, Henry V, Don Juan, Red Rum . . . the old mind is racing now. "Oh no, no, no," he protested, not wishing to discuss what he might have been before his DNA settled on a serve-volleying sex deity. "I'm so lucky to be what I am right now, maybe I'll come back as an insect." This is a sobering thought. "You are my cockroach" emblazoned across T-shirts doesn't have the same ring at all - although as a description of mankind it's pretty accurate.

He is third in the world rankings and talented enough to challenge Pete Sampras on Mount Olympus. But he won't, in all probability. Because at 25, he has suffered that most debilitating of human blights, he has achieved his dearest ambition. When he won the US Open, one of the quartet of Holy Grails in the sport, he thought: "I've done it."

"Yeah, I did, unfortunately. I think that's why motivation is tough for me at the moment because I feel like I've done everything I've every dreamed of. It's definitely tough."

Made tougher by the fact that he refuses to travel with a coach. "I don't have to worry about anyone else being in my back pocket." Well, not a coach anyway. I couldn't speak for old Lorraine. "If I feel like going out. I just up and do it. That makes me happy and when I'm happy I play my best tennis."

He is being slightly disingenuous here because during the US Open he was drawing on the advice of Tony Roche and John Newcombe, which hardly qualifies Rafter as an abandoned waif. Indeed, it was Newc's instruction that he should prepare for a "war of attrition" when two sets down to Cedric Pioline in the Davis Cup in early 1997 that completely restored his confidence and fortunes. He won the match and then asked the Australian coach what the hell attrition meant. "I just thought it sounded good and I knew the point he was trying to get across."

His unrehearsed good humour is a tonic (probably with vodka in it). "Do you drown your sorrows when you lose?" I asked. "Yeah, but they're not sorrows. I drown 'em. But I drown nothing. It's important to go out and have a good time. If people have a problem with that, it's just too bad."

He is clearly a man content to be merely the sum of his parts and who could blame him with parts like that . . . but I'd better not continue with this analogy. I think I might be in danger of coming back as a cockroach.

UK Paper