95 Minutes With ...Vivek Ramaswamy

The highly self-motivated candidate may not win the Republican nomination, but Donald Trump sure seems to like him.

- By Benjamin Hart

The culture warrior and long-shot presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, was once a nationally ranked junior tennis player. He now carves out time from his campaign to play with promising high schoolers and other worthy challengers. ("Any top junior or college tennis players down for a hitting session in Key Biscayne tomorrow?" he recently tweeted.) This is how I found myself across the net from Ramaswamy on a sweltering June day in New Hampshire, where I asked about his strategy in the Granite State. "We're gonna win it," he told me despite polling in the one to 7 percent range there. (His campaign later amended that prediction to assert that he'll finish in the top two.)

Ramaswamy plays like a club pro with fluid ground strokes and an impressively speedy serve. He wanted to end the session with some volleys, then call it a day. But after I got the better of what I thought we'd agreed would be our last exchange, he wordlessly aimed an additional volley my way and we started up once more. As soon as he forced me into a lunging backhand error, our time was officially upRamaswamy had won the final point, so it was now permissible to stop. He greeted me warmly at the net with a bro hug and "That was fun."

But the candidate still wasn't done. "Wanna do some sprints?" he suggested, informing me, to my horror, that this is how he usually concludes his workouts. For the first time since high school, I found myself running full speed toward the net, tapping it half-heartedly with my racket, running full speed back toward the baseline, then doing it all again until I was wheezing like a chain-smoker. "Let's do one more," Ramaswamy said in an apparent attempt to murder me before I could interview him.