In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Goran Ivanišević [CRO]Born: 13 September 1971
Career: 1989-2004
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1994)
Peak Elo rating: 2,185 (3rd place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 1 (2001 Wimbledon)
Total singles titles: 22
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In the late 1990s, men’s tennis was in crisis. The women’s game had the stars, the drama, and the ratings. The ATP had a bunch of tall guys hitting big serves, some clay courters who didn’t like to play on other surfaces, and the perennial question of whether Andre Agassi would make an effort this year.
Rick Reilly voiced the dilemma for Sports Illustrated after Wimbledon in 2001:
The women play amazing, long, topsy-turvy, edge-of-your-seat points. The men hit 140-mph aces nobody can see, and then ask for a towel. Everything is serve and towel, serve and towel. It’s like being at a cocktail party with Boris Yeltsin. In a third-round Wimbledon match Ivanišević had 41 aces against Andy Roddick, who had 20. It is unclear how the rest of the points were won because the official statistician fell asleep. If men’s tennis is to be saved, somebody had better start decompressing these guys’ balls. Then something has to be done about the equipment.
Ironically, Reilly’s column was printed just as the tide turned for the men’s game. That Wimbledon marked the arrival of a 20-year-old Roger Federer, who upset seven-time champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round. Roddick would live up to his potential and energize American men’s tennis. Two months later, another young star, Lleyton Hewitt, would win his first major at the US Open.
Most of all, the 2001 Championships at Wimbledon gave the sport’s biggest stage to one of its most engaging personalities. Fans could gripe about Goran Ivanišević’s one-dimensional game, but no one has ever said the man was boring. Suffering through shoulder injuries and holding a ranking outside the top 100, he needed a wild card just to enter the tournament. The Croatian turned in the best fortnight of his career, winning the title with a series of dramatic matches against some of the best of his peers.
Reilly wasn’t the only one to find Goran’s game aesthetically displeasing. But in general, the press found him to be a godsend, a colorful character with a comment on everything, and a ranking high enough to make his wacky utterances newsworthy. By the time he finally got his sole major title, he was an even better story: the ultimate underdog. He gave men’s tennis a shot in the arm when the sport needed it most.
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Ivanišević was given to on-court theatrics that caused a generation of tennis fans to misjudge him. He broke rackets, cursed at line judges, and openly tanked points (occasionally entire matches) throughout his career. He was the first to recognize his own mercuriality, referring to his different in-match personas as “Good Goran, “Bad Goran,” and “Crazy Goran.” There was also “Emergency Goran,” who mediated disputes among the others.
Emergency Goran wasn’t always available. At Brighton in 2000, he smashed three of his rackets, and without another one to finish the match, he was defaulted.
The people who knew him best realized that there was nothing artificial about the antics. In 1992, his manager Ion Țiriac said, “Everybody has a certain craziness if he wants to be a superstar.” His coach, Bob Brett, added, “There’s a thin line between creativity and self-destruction.”
Ivanišević in conflict, in 1999
In the 2001 Wimbledon final against Pat Rafter, he needed four match points to finish the job. Serving at 8-7 in the fifth set, he hit two aces to reach 40-30. He clasped his hands in prayer to ask for assistance from a higher power… then he double faulted. Another unreturned serve, then another double fault. When he earned a third match point, he got down on his knees to plead even more emphatically for help. He landed his first serve, but this time it was Rafter that didn’t cooperate, ending the point with a lob winner.
Back at deuce, Ivanišević hit yet another unreturned serve, his 73rd of the match. Now with a fourth match point, he had no more gestures. Rational Goran kicked in, and after he missed his first serve, he went with a conservative second offering, trusting that his opponent was under as much pressure as he was. Rafter missed the return, and the match was over.
It wasn’t the first time Ivanišević acknowledged that he needed more than what mere earthly coaches could offer. It was one of many matches in which he failed to convert a crucial point or two. But while it’s tempting to draw conclusions from a handful of memorable anecdotes, the stats tell a different story. Goran played his best when the pressure was at its highest.
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Ivanišević was one of the best servers in modern tennis history. He hit 206 aces in his first run to the Wimbledon final, in 1992, and he smacked another 213 at the tournament in 2001. Like most big servers, his return game was mediocre in comparison. For players with that sort of game style, the path to superstardom is extremely narrow, and it depends heavily on clutch play.
In 2015, I introduced a concept that I dubbed the “minimum viable return game.” Most men win between about 32% and 42% of their return points. Only the very best returners will do better, as Andre Agassi did when he won nearly 44% of his return points in 1993. A handful of players will do worse, surviving purely on serve dominance. John Isner has won only 29.6% of his career points on return.
Players can thrive at either end of that range, but for those who win less than about 36% of their return points, there’s an upper limit on how much they can achieve. In the 30-plus years for which we have match-by-match return stats, only two men have finished a season in the top five of the ATP rankings while winning fewer than 36% of return points. One of them was Pete Sampras, who ended 1996 as the world’s top-ranked player despite managing only 35.3% on return. The other was Goran Ivanišević.
The man could serve (at Wimbledon in 1998)
The gap between 36% and, say, 39% sounds tiny. But like so many small differences in tennis, its effects are enormous. 36% means breaking serve once every five return games instead of once every four. That translates to more close sets, more tiebreaks, and more deciding sets. A big-serve, weak-return game makes it unlikely that either player dominates, so matches are more likely to turn on a few high-pressure points.
Sampras’s 1996 campaign is an example of what is possible with middling return results, but Pete himself didn’t usually depend on such narrow margins. From 1991 to 1998, he won at least 38% of his return points in seven of the eight seasons. (He probably did so in 1990 as well, but stats are incomplete before 1991.) Ivanišević, on the other hand, spent his entire career on the tightrope. His career average was only 35.1%, and he never posted a full season above 36.7%. Goran possessed the very definition of the minimum viable return game.
For Ivanišević to manage three top-five year-end ranking finishes and four Wimbledon finals with such a one-dimensional game demanded that he play well in the clutch. He did exactly that.
In 2011, researcher Amir Bachar compared every player’s number of break points won with their expected break points won, based on their winning percentage on all points. In his career from 1991, Goran played just over 6,400 break points (combining both serve and return), and he won 3,362 of them. If he had won break points at his average rate for all points, his total would’ve been only 3,229. The difference of 133 points–entirely due to exceeding expectations when returning–is greater than any of the other 430 players that Bachar considered.
Break points are worth much more than average return points, and Ivanišević became a better returner when it mattered. Another way to measure his effectiveness is to compare his return points won with his breaks of serve. Return points won don’t themselves matter, unless enough of them are bunched together to create a break of the opponent’s serve. Goran’s 35.1% career average would typically translate to breaking serve 17.2% of the time. In reality, he broke 19.2%–still far from elite, but meaningfully better. A break rate of 19.2% is roughly equivalent to winning return points at a rate of 36.2%, a number that sits (barely) on the positive side of my threshold of minimum viability.
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Up to this point, I’ve used the word “clutch” to describe Ivanišević’s ability to generate better results than his return game appears to deserve. You may be skeptical that Ivanišević was reliably better under pressure, and you may even dispute that players can be consistently clutch.
The numbers don’t lie, but the explanation is hardly set in stone. A player can post Goran-like results by tanking unimportant points, as it appears that Nick Kyrgios does. And “clutch” doesn’t require constant, unwavering mental strength. Ivanišević once said, “The trouble with me is, every match I play against five opponents—umpire, crowd, ball boys, court, and myself. It’s no wonder sometimes my mind goes to the beach.”* All we’re talking about is an improvement from “bad” to “mediocre” on break points. He might have simply been less likely to go to the mental beach on obviously important points.
* Notice that he doesn’t count his actual opponent.
Goran’s big-point performance was never more important than at Wimbledon in 2001. In those seven matches, he won 31.1% of return points, by far the lowest single-tournament rate for a major winner since 1991, and even lower than the single-tournament for a major finalist. Of the 120 or so slam winners of the last three decades, only four other men won their title with a return-points-won percentage below 36.8%. Pete Sampras did it three times, and Roger Federer did it once.
As usual, Ivanišević was better when it mattered. After a routine first-round victory, the Croatian earned 34 break points in 25 sets–a miniscule number of opportunities in line with his poor return performance throughout the fortnight. Yet of those 34, he converted 14, good for a rate of 41%. Remember, anything that starts with a 4 is elite return territory. Somehow, presented with only a couple of big moments per hour on court, Emergency Goran usually convinced Good Goran to show up.
The margins were particularly tiny in the semi-final and final. Tim Henman took Ivanišević to five sets in the semi-final, winning a 6-0 third set before rain arrived, stopping the Brit’s momentum in a match that would ultimately stretch over three days. The Croatian generated a mere six break points in five sets, and he converted just two. He won only 48.5% of the 326 points they played, but when the match reached a fifth set, only one point really mattered. At break point on Henman’s serve in the eighth game, Ivanišević came up with a good-enough return to coax a volley error from his opponent. He double-faulted twice in an attempt to serve out the set, but as usual, the serve was more triumph than tragedy. At deuce, he came up with a second-serve ace out wide, and sealed the result on the next point with another unreturnable delivery.
Goran with the Wimbledon trophy
Against Pat Rafter in the final, Ivanišević once again scraped together a mere six break points in five sets. This time, he converted three, and remarkably, the two big servers didn’t reach a tiebreak in the first four sets. Rafter also broke serve three times, but he made the mistake of bunching two of them in a single set. Goran won 153 points to his opponent’s 150, a heartbreaker for the Australian but a life-changer for Ivanišević, who would never again be referred to as the best active player without a major.
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Fans have never known quite what to think of the big-hitting Croatian. Two months after his Wimbledon title, Liz Robbins of the New York Times called him “the wacky racket-kissing comedian with a cannon serve,” a description that few would challenge.
But just as Ivanišević’s on-court reputation can’t explain his results, his off-court complexities get the short shrift. He was a national hero in Croatia long before the Wimbledon title–before, in fact, his country was widely recognized as an independent nation. He insisted that the ATP identify him as Croatian when the organization still labeled him a Yugoslavian, and he turned in one of the most strenuous performances of his career to bring home two bronze medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Goran has more recently gained credit for the tennis mind that spent so long hidden behind the clown suit. In a 1992 profile for Sports Illustrated, Frank Lidz jokingly differentiated between the energetic Mr. Goran and the quiet Dr. Ivanišević. The doctor is increasingly in demand. For nearly a decade, he has coached a series of top players: Marin Čilić, Tomáš Berdych, Milos Raonic, and now Novak Djoković. He helped Čilić to the 2014 US Open title, and he’s been part of another five slam-winning teams as a member of the Djoković camp.
Now, as in the 1990s, it’s easy to think of the big-serve, weak-return game as the most mindless version of tennis. In some hands it is, and from a fan’s perspective, it’s rarely the most compelling style to watch. Rick Reilly’s 2001 screed shows its age, but he was right about one thing–there’s nothing worse than waiting for the server to go to his towel after one swing of the racket.
But players with limited skillsets need to think that much harder to reach the top. While the ball wasn’t in play for very long in the typical Ivanišević match, that left him with a larger fraction of the match time to consider his next move. Without the natural return skills of an Agassi or Djoković, Goran needed to weigh his options and take calculated risks. For a player to show up with those limitations plus an injured serving shoulder and win the Wimbledon title–that’s a feat that deserves every bit of the celebration it has received, and more.