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by Pete Bodo
Mornin'. Been a hectic week for me, but it looks like a sunny weekend and I'm straining at the leash. But I wanted to update you on my visit with John Isner, whom I met up with on Wednesday for a big feature that will run in Tennis magazine (September/U.S. Open issue).
I knew this would be a smooth process (for it isn't always) when John showed up in front of the fitness center at Saddlebrook (where he trains, while living in nearby Tampa) about eight minutes late for our 10 am date. He walked right up to me, stuck out that big paw of his (his fingers, by the way, are as elegant and delicate as those you might expect to find on a concert pianist), called me by name and apologized for being late.*
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What we have here, I thought, is a kid who wears his baseball cap backwards and his manners forward.
We covered a lot of territory in our subsequent, lengthy conversation, and I didn't need to use the spurs, even once. Isner has a degree in a Speech Communication from the University of Georgia, so it only figures that he's an articulate Bulldog. He's also a focused interlocutor; ask him a straight question and you get a straight answer, without a lot of hemming and hawing or rambling.
Isner never had a moment's doubt about staying in college for four years. I got the sense that he enjoyed being a BMOC (Big Man on Campus), literally as well a figuratively, because at Georgia, tennis matters. In fact, he sheepishly admitted that he would have remained a Georgia Bulldog for another year (or two, or three, or seven) but for this inconvenient mandate that once you put in your four years and earn a degree it's time to move on (the nerve!). I think the preponderance of pretty young things at Georgia had something to do with John's reluctance to leave. Take heed, ladies, this one may not be wholly as innocent as that choir-boy face, good manners, and soft-spokeness suggests.
But I mention Georgia for a specific reason - having stayed so long in what has to rank as one of the most highly pressured and competitive environments seems to have played a significant shaping role in Isner. Many observers, including Isner's Davis Cup captain, Pat McEnroe, have remarked on what a terrific competitive temperament Isner possesses. They love his easy sense of command and the way he reacts to a challenge. If there's one noun I'd apply to the way he appears to handle stress and pressure, I'd use "unfazed."
Isner told me that he thinks that sangfroid was bred by the enormous volume of tennis matches he played in college. "I wouldn't say I'm surprised at my ability to step up and perform, because I believe college made me that way. Some of it may be innate, but I think most of it was learned. College matches can be very tough, they make you tough. You get into situations where the whole match is riding on the outcome of your match, the whole team is depending on you. . . That's when you have to be strong. One thing I gained in college that some of my peers didn't when they went on the pro tour is that kind of experience. I was playing 60, 70 matches a year in that four-year span. I was lucky enough to be winning a lot, and winning breeds confidence. Even today, in tight situations, I can always call upon that experience."
Sure, nobody is going to confuse college matches with ATP tour head-buttings. But this notion of the intrinsic value of playing - and winning - many matches is worth keeping in mind. I've certainly harped on it often enough in this space, most recently by touting Rafael Nadal these past few weeks. The four or five matches Nadal played and won were worth more to him for the upcoming weeks than would have a singles title, if he had found a way to take one without having to play those matches.
I think this also helps explain how in 2007 Isner managed to win the very first pro tournament he played (a Futures, which he got into only because he was awarded a wild card). Not long thereafter, he won a Challenger event (making him the winner in two of the first three pro tournaments he played) and then y'all know what happened next: that amazing run that carried him to the finals at Washington (the Legg Mason Classic), and overnight stardom in his own nation.
Isner ultimately paid a price for so astonishing a breakout, but this is the important thing: While all those 17 and 18 year-olds were out hammering their heads against the Futures and Challengers walls, learning to lose matches, Isner was gorging on Ws. Were they more winnable matches? Of course. So what? We all know the roles that experience and confidence play in tennis. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that this approach is some sort of magic bullet - it takes the right kind of kid, in the appropriate environment to make it work. But Isner convinced me that he earned his recent success because of, rather than in spite of, his unorthodox background.
One other element in this discussion has to be Isner's personal background. He comes from a very stable, comfortable home. His father is a builder, and his mother, according to John, "cooked me three meals a day for all of my life." Isner grew up with two brothers and various dogs, and despite always being fairly high in the US junior tennis rankings, he played for his high school team for four years. He was a popular, happy, "normal" kid and makes no bones about it. A big fish not named Mardy in a small pond. And it was good preparation for swimming with the sharks out in the open ocean.
Since Isner developed outside the tennis bubble, his game is different, almost old-school. Because he's 6-9, lean as a whippet and flexible as strand of rope, he has a fierce serve. He backs it up with a big forehand, and a game plan designed to make the best use of those two assets. And while the conventional wisdom has been that his backhand is his Achilles heel, he may surprise some people with it in the coming months. As he said when we talked Xs and Os, "If you're playing and winning matches, your weaker shots are going to be getting better all the time because that's where everybody goes."
The major obstacle for Isner is likely to be mobility; he's got a lot of body to lug around the court, and the further the ball is from the command center of your neurological system the more things can go wrong. And in a broader sense, a big man tires more easily than a small one. There's an ideal efficiency equation in the marriage of the human body with any sport, and in tennis big men pay a price for some of the obvious advantages their reach and leverage provide. The trick is for them to put together a game - and game plan - that is most conducive to neutralizing their liabilities. It's unrealistic to expect Isner to be able to, say, transition from defense to offense as expertly as some of the top ATP players (that facility being a premium asset these days). As Isner put it, "I need to play the points on my terms as much as possible."
Isner will have his work cut out for him over the coming weeks, but he won't just be going through the motions on clay. He ought to be able to hold serve, even on the slower red clay courts, and the court speed will give him a better look at returns. In a way, his problem is similar to Andy Roddick's: the clay plays just slow enough to put either man's survival in jeopardy if he's not playing very consistent, error-free tennis (something which isn't a signature trait for either player, even if Roddick has take great strides toward rectifying that). By contrast, these two can get away more on hard courts. Isner said, "If you look at the record, I've lost some very close matches on clay - and on hard it's almost the reverse."
But Isner also knows he's playing with house money up and through Wimbledon. Last year, he was diagnosed with mononucleosis two days before he was to depart for Paris and he was off the grid through Wimbledon. Think he'll have a chance there in London come June?