New Hall of Famers Martinez and Ivanisevic still leaving major marks

MELBOURNE—Earlier this week, at the Australian Open, the International Tennis Hall of Fame announced that its 2020 inductees will be Conchita Martinez and Goran Ivanisevic. In a twist that is likely unprecedented, Martinez and Ivanisevic are also deeply engaged in the current tournament. In fact, they're about as involved as you can get without actually playing in it.

Martinez is coaching Garbine Muguruza, who this Saturday evening will be playing the women’s final.

“Pretty exciting,” said Muguruza. “Very happy to get it. Proud of her.”

Ivanisevic is a new addition to Team Novak Djokovic, who on Sunday night will compete in the men’s final.

“I'm really glad to see him enter the Hall of Fame this year,” said Djokovic, who also continues to work with longstanding coach Marian Vadja. “He is a great friend. He has been a mentor for many years to me.”

Martinez and Ivanisevic each earned a single Grand Slam title. It happened to be the biggest prize of them all, Martinez winning Wimbledon in 1994, and Ivanisevic lifting the trophy in 2001.

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But the paths each took to reach that pinnacle were quite different. Martinez, owner of a patient, versatile baseline game and often subdued in demeanor, was a natural on clay, but initially uncomfortable on grass. Her run to the title, punctuated with a victory in the finals versus nine-time Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova, was in large part a shock.

Ivanisevic’s win was also a shock, but for a very different reason. His tremendous lefty serve fit the grass perfectly. Through the 1990s, Ivanisevic reached three finals—in ’92, ’94, ’98—but was beaten each time, his tennis journey a rollercoaster of emotion. Only in 2001, when Ivanisevic was ranked No. 125 in the world and given a wild card, was he at last able to break through (on the famous "People's Monday").

It has been interesting to witness and wonder what Martinez and Ivanisevic bring as coaches. In team sports, the coach is boss and architect, the top-down leader who leads and operates the entire squad. This is not the case in tennis. The coach is an employee, the player the ostensible team owner. And in tennis these days, players have indeed created teams–trainer, physiotherapist, hitting partner, coaches and more. Then again, former pros of significant accomplishments bring a different form of leverage that makes them something other than mere labor.

“There's a different level of trust between a former champion and a current champion,” Martina Navratilova wrote this week. “As a player, when you have a former Grand Slam champion as your coach, you take their word for it, you don't question what they tell you.”

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That connection in mind, it’s tempting to speculate that coaching is autobiography—the great player passing on his or her specific skills, be it Stefan Edberg suggesting Roger Federer come to net more, or Ivan Lendl insisting that Andy Murray deploy his forehand more aggressively.

But at first glance, the Martinez-Muguruza and Ivanisevic-Djokovic pairings dispel that notion. Muguruza is primarily a power baseliner, her concussive drives extremely different from Martinez’s array of spins and paces. Djokovic’s meticulous baseline game is also a vivid contrast to Ivanisevic’s lefty mix of serve and improvisation. So scratch that notion.

Dig deeper. Coaching in tennis is about comfort, connection, communication. Do the player and the coach speak the same language, not just figuratively but even literally? In a sport where English is the universal language, might the intimacy of coaching require that nothing be lost in translation, be it verbally or even more subtly?

Surely it helps Muguruza that she and Martinez are both Spanish. The two first worked together at Wimbledon in 2017, Martinez stepping in when Muguruza’s coach, Sam Sumyk, took a short leave to be present for the birth of he and his wife’s child. Muguruza that year won Wimbledon. As Navratilova wrote, “She was so relaxed, and everything was flowing freely on the court. Muguruza was walking like a champion, acting like a champion, and playing like a champion.”

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The years since that win have been hard for Muguruza, including first-round losses last year at Wimbledon and the US Open. By last November, she’d decided to bring Martinez back to her team, Conchita just having ended her coaching relationship with another power baseliner, Karolina Pliskova.

Language and affinity also matter greatly for Ivanisevic and Djokovic.

“We're coming from the country that was one before, said Ivanisevic “Mentality is the same. Balkan. I already know what he thinks before he thinks. Probably 90 percent of the time I will think the same.”

Djokovic concurs: “Speak the same language. Come from very similar cultures. He was one of my heroes growing up. We go back since I was 12 years old.”

And yet, tactical and technical improvements have surfaced in Muguruza and Djokovic this fortnight that likely bear the fingerprints of Martinez and Ivanisevic. Muguruza has been playing much better defense these last two weeks, a Martinez forte. Djokovic is serving faster, surely aided by input from Ivanisevic. Recall that Ivanisevic also aided the serve of Marin Cilic when he won the US Open in 2014.

During Ivanisevic’s playing days, a running joke was that there were at least two Gorans–the good one, the bad one, and perhaps even anotheer. Asked if these multiple Gorans surfaced as a coach, the man who’d been notoriously scattered as a player made his point with the clarity of an MBA.

“One Goran is enough," he said. "Sometimes one Goran, he always have some arguments with myself, but still as a coach you need to be very focused for your player, you have to always come with the right answers when he needs it.”