Goran Ivanisevic built a career on the left-handed serve out of Split: 1,477 aces in 1996, still the single-season record. Wimbledon kept refusing him, three finals lost, Andre Agassi in five sets in 1992, then Pete Sampras in 1994 and 1998. He carried more than a racquet: as Yugoslavia broke apart he declared himself a Croat, took death threats for it, and bore the new nation's flag at the 1992 Olympics.
Then 2001. Ranked 125, a wild card, he outlasted Tim Henman in a rain-broken, three-day semifinal and beat Patrick Rafter 9-7 in the fifth on People's Monday, before 10,000 fans who queued all weekend. No other wild card has won a men's major. Three Gorans shared the court, he joked, one going left, one going right, one watching; that fortnight the right one served. He retired at Wimbledon in 2004 with 24 career titles, 1 of them a major, entered the Hall of Fame in 2020, then coached Novak Djokovic through a run of majors from 2019 to 2024.
Four. That is how many men are left at Wimbledon, and no two of them arrived the same way. A favourite carrying the weight of the tag, a 39-year-old chasing one more, a wildcard chasing a fairytale, and a first-time major champion arriving as one. One draw, four separate stories.
Wimbledon notebook