Wimbledon 2019: Ivo Karlovic continues to defy the years in juggling the demands of tennis with fatherhood
Exclusive interview: The 40-year-old opens up on his life both on and off the court ahead of his second-round match at Wimbledon
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Your support makes all the difference.Combining a career as a professional tennis player with being a good father and husband can be a major challenge, but 40-year-old Ivo Karlovic has been working out solutions.
The answer here at Wimbledon, where the Croatian is the oldest competitor in the men’s singles for 44 years, is to bring his family with him. However, spending some time at home in Miami recently required some imaginative thinking by the world No 80 and his wife, Alsi. They have two children, seven-year-old Jada and 23-month-old Noah.
“After I drove my daughter to school in the morning I would go and hit,” Karlovic said. “Then I would come home and rest and be with the little one. Then when my daughter came home in the afternoon I would take her to activities or whatever.
“In the evening after the children had gone to bed, which was almost around 11pm, I would go to the gym. I’m happy because there is a local gym that is open at night. Then I would come home and I would have to eat. It would be 2am before I got to bed. Then I would be up at 7am to start it all over again the next day.”
Whether it is in the gym or on the running track Karlovic spends at least two hours a day working out. He stands 6ft 11in tall and has often had issues with his back, while his knees have also been a problem.
“I train less than I used to do because I can’t do everything because of the injuries I’ve had,” he said. “I can’t do exercises that can hurt my knees. But on the other hand I have to do extra work for injury prevention.
“Every day I do core exercises because of my back. Otherwise I would not be able to play. I always try to become a better athlete. Even at my age now, when most people are in decline, I’m trying to become even better.”
When Karlovic beat 31-year-old Andrea Arnaboldi in the first round here on Monday he became the oldest man to compete in singles at the All England Club since Ken Rosewall in 1975. He next faces 30-year-old Thomas Fabbiano on Wednesday.
Karlovic is making history at most tournaments he plays. In January he became the oldest man to win a singles match at the Australian Open for 41 years and at the French Open in May he became the first 40-year-old to win a Grand Slam singles match for more than a quarter of a century. Karlovic and his first-round opponent at Roland Garros, 37-year-old Feliciano Lopez, had the highest combined age for a Grand Slam men’s singles match in the Open era.
“Right now I’m just happy with any match that I win, whether it’s against older guys or against kids,” Karlovic said. “I just like to win.”
Does he still have ambitions, such as winning titles or reaching the second week of Grand Slam events? “I would like to do that, but I know that it’s really difficult. Everybody is so strong. But who knows? I train hard and I think I have an edge in terms of experience. It could happen.”
Karlovic considers his win here over Lleyton Hewitt in the first round in 2003 as the most significant moment of his career. Hewitt, world No 1 at the time, was only the second Wimbledon men’s singles champion and top seed to lose in the opening round.
“That opened up a lot of things for me,” Karlovic said. “I was from Croatia, which is a little country, and I didn’t have things that most other players had, like coaches. There was always doubt. I wondered whether or not I could make it because I didn’t have all these things.”
Karlovic thinks the current trend of players enjoying longer careers will continue. “There are a lot more older players if you compare it to the Eighties or Nineties, when nobody did any weightlifting or other gym work,” he said. “It was normal when you got to 28 or 29 that you went into a big decline. Now everybody is working hard in the gym or on the track so they can maintain that level for longer.”
For the moment he is not thinking about retirement. “Right now I’m still enjoying it,” he said. “My ranking is all right still to get into the Grand Slams. So while I don’t have any bad injuries and so long as I’m not feeling that I want to stop, then I will carry on.”
Whenever he does stop playing Karlovic wants to stay in tennis, perhaps as a coach. “Tennis is what I’ve done all my life,” he said. “I’m not going to do something else where I would have to start from the beginning.”
He added: “There are a lot of guys who end their careers and they think: ‘Now it’s going to be easy. I don’t have to do anything.’ But we’re not used to that. All our lives we are used to travelling and working hard. I’ve noticed with other guys that if they do that they can be a little bit lost after they have stopped playing.”
Do his fellow players wonder how long he might carry on playing? “Yes,” Karlovic smiled. “A lot of them ask me: ‘How much longer?’ Someone asks me that every day.”
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