Thomas Enqvist

Thomas Enqvist

Thomas Enqvist hit the ball flatter and harder than almost anyone in his generation, a 6-foot-3 Swede whose forehand and two-handed backhand carried little margin for error and needed none. It carried him to the final of the 1999 Australian Open, where he took the first set off Yevgeny Kafelnikov before the Russian read him and closed it out in four. That November he reached No. 4, the peak of a run that had already beaten Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi at their best.

The body never matched the game plan. Enqvist operated on both knees in 1994, then feet, ankles and shoulder through the rest of the decade, playing through pain that eventually caught him: shoulder surgery in 2000 and again in 2003, a stretch with no tennis at all after August 2002. He kept winning titles between operations, 19 of them in a career that never delivered the major his ball striking promised, before retiring in 2006. He later turned to coaching, most recently guiding Matteo Berrettini.