The 2015 season brought faces both famous and accomplished back to the tennis coaching ranks: Lindsay Davenport with Madison Keys. Martina Navratilova with Agnieszka Radwanska. The veteran Tom Gullickson with Sam Querrey.
Perhaps the least heralded tandem, the most out-of-the-box pairing, was American John Isner with countryman Justin Gimelstob – a former player with neither the Hall of Fame playing resumé of Davenport or Navratilova, nor the coaching track record of Gullickson.
Of those players and others who recently have sought the help of former players, Isner arguably had the most raw material left to mine even as he turns 30 in two weeks. (Keys, barely 20, is obviously in a completely different category.)
At 6ft 10in, with many of the same strengths and weaknesses as, say, world No6 Milos Raonic (whose ranking has risen even single year for the last seven years), Isner has seemed at times to get in his own way too much to aspire to get back to his career-best ATP Tour ranking of No9, where he was exactly two years ago today.
So far, with a few notorious learning experiences such as Davis Cup in Scotland in March, the lessons of the rookie master seem to be sinking in. There are times when you can see the tactical advice dispensed to Isner on the practice court being put to work in matches, to great effect. Not always, and not always quite correctly – yet. It’s going to take time to reprogram Isner’s tennis brain from “surprisingly passive” to “appropriately aggressive”.
Isner’s decision to work with his longtime friend seemed to have been made on instinct, which is exactly how he characterizes himself as a player.
“I just believe it. That’s mainly it. There are Xs and Os, things here and there, but I believe it personally. So that’s it,” Isner told the Guardian after losing to lefty Gilles Muller of Luxembourg at the Australian Open, their first tournament together.
By Miami, as they continued to work out their coach-player dynamic, the message hadn’t changed that much. “I made the commitment to work with Justin because I want to really go after it. I feel like I have some very good tennis ahead of me, and he’s my guy. I believe in that, which is the most important thing,” Isner said.
That reflection came after Isner lost to world No1 Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals. But it also came after he defeated Grigor Dimitrov, Raonic and Kei Nishikori, ranked No11, No6 and No5, respectively, in his best run since reaching the semis at Indian Wells more than a year before. That was effort that brought Isner briefly back to the top 10, but didn’t involve wins over players anywhere near the caliber of the Miami three.
“He sees things on the court, like, he’s such a thinker out there. In a way I’m not that much of a thinker. I’m just kind of more instinctual out there,” Isner said in Miami. “He sees the math of the game; he knows players’ tendencies and weaknesses inside and out from calling so many matches and just being around the sport for so long.”
On Thursday, Isner gave Rafael Nadal everything he could handle in the third round on red clay in Monte-Carlo, before losing in three sets. The previous time he and Nadal met on clay, Isner extended him to the five-set limit in the first round of the 2011 French Open, Nadal’s eminent domain for the last decade, in a four-hour marathon the American had every opportunity to win. If people are surprised by how well he can play on the dirt, the Xs and Os of it are that it’s a surface that allows him time to reach balls. And, most intriguingly in this new chapter of his career, it allows him time to get to the net after his big serve.
Meanwhile Gimelstob, who has a finger in so many tennis pies that he’ll soon run out of fingers, was in a booth halfway across the world analyzing the match on Tennis Channel. If the conflict-of-interest component of that is very much up for debate, the notion that the coach has to be there for every match, every practice, every moment is a non-issue in this particular relationship.
Gimelstob’s thought process about taking on his first coaching job was, as you can imagine, a little more fleshed out.
“When someone that you care about and believe in feels that (you’re the right guy), that’s a huge part of it,” Gimelstob told the Guardian in Indian Wells. “He’s a very unique talent. At a time when the sport is very uniform, and there’s a zillion guys who hit the ball well, who move well, John can do things other players can’t do. Also, if he plays the wrong way, he can lose to anyone. If he plays the right way, I truly believe he can beat anyone. And that’s exciting.
“It’s really about me believing that he could do special things in tennis, and I believed I could help him do it,” he added.
The pair never discussed specific parameters such as how many weeks they would work together, or when. Isner already has a support group around him led by Rene Moller, the touring pros director at the Saddlebrook resort outside Tampa.
When he’s on site at a tournament, as was the case at Indian Wells, Gimelstob has television commitments in addition to his other interests. Adding practice sessions and match-watching is a bit of a juggling act for both. It’s all very much improvised – except for the message being delivered and the mutual commitment. They just make it work, like … well, like two adults.
One reason Gimelstob feels it’s a good fit is because it goes against the traditional coach-player dynamic in tennis which is that the player is, in essence the boss. He feels that throws the whole time-tested notion of “coach as authority figure” out of whack.
“I’ve always thought that tennis coaching was an under-evolved entity by virtue of being an individual sport where the dynamic is that the talent hires the coach as opposed to most sports, most businesses, where an independent outsider hires a person and that person, that coach is a person of leadership or authority,” he said. “It’s very difficult to be in a position of leader and authority and tell young athletes how to get better or be constructively critical if you need the job.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘celebrity coaches’, because I’m definitely not one. But of the great players that are coaching now, one of the things that’s lacked in the understanding of this is that yes, they’ve been there before. But the bigger part is that they don’t need the jobs. So the players who’ve sought their guidance really need them, and they’re in a position to effect change.”
What they’ve found as they’ve worked out their chemistry is that Isner doesn’t need Gimelstob constantly in his ear at tournaments anyway.
“We are talking a lot. He has a mind that works a lot different than mine, which can help me and it is going to help me. He sees these things that maybe I don’t see. But at the same time, too much information thrown at me can sort of make me go a little crazy,” Isner said in Miami. “He knows that, I know that, and so it’s finding that balance between, you know, him not telling me too much and just telling me the right amount.
“In practice weeks can he tell me more. During tournament weeks, probably not. We figured that out,” he added.
Observing a practice session at Indian Wells, Gimelstob’s game plan for Isner is fairly clear. He wants him to be more aggressive, to use the advantages his monster serve, big forehand his huge wingspan at the net give him to play points on his terms. But not at any cost. The trigger needs to be pulled at the right moments – the appropriate moments. The challenge facing the duo is for the recognition of those moments to become instinctive. In other words, Isner-like.
Gimelstob uses business-school maxims like “maximizing the risk-reward ratio” as he’s coaching, phrases you certainly don’t often hear on a practice court.
“At the end of the day, the thing with John is a unique challenge, and that’s what appealed to me. In a different situation, with a different player, it wouldn’t have appealed to me and I wouldn’t have done it,” Gimelstob said. “An American guy, one that I like. Until his early 20s he didn’t think he was going to play pro tennis, so think it’s a whole recalibration process in terms of his expectations.
“I think he’s a unique talent. Maybe he can do special things, and maybe he won’t. It’s something that always appealed to me, but something that I wasn’t conscious of.” he added. “And it’s tapped into a way different part of my thought process. I think it’s helped me become a better analyst. I think it’s helped me understand different parts of the game better.”
