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WIMBLEDONJune 30, 2016John IsnerLondon, England J. ISNER/M. Baghdatis THE MODERATOR: Questions, please. Q. You kept your composure nicely over three days. Was this vaguely a familiar experience? JOHN ISNER: Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, actually not ‑‑it's familiar because it's exactly what happened at the French Open. I was supposed to play on Sunday and I finished on Tuesday. I had a little bit of bad fortune with the rain and scheduling at some tournaments this year, but it's the same for everyone. It's not a great feeling, you know, when you're going out there and playing, finishing your first round when some guys are already in the third round. You know, a lot of players are on the grounds playing their second round. But I guess that's just how it goes sometimes. It's all good. Q. Did the 70‑68 from 2010 help you at least in moments of... JOHN ISNER: No, actually, I don't think so, because that was just a completely ‑‑that had nothing to do with rain. Q. Understood. JOHN ISNER: No, actually I don't think I drew anything from that. But just the long days in the locker room the last two days were just brutal. You can only play so much putt‑putt in the locker room with your friends and whatnot. Q. Are you thinking of retiring, had enough? JOHN ISNER: No. No. No, not at all. I wasn't tired. I was just anxious to get the match over with. Q. How much do you know about your next opponent, Aussie qualifier? JOHN ISNER: I don't know too much about him. He's a ‑‑actually, I have gotten to know him a little bit this year. Saw him in Auckland and in Houston. We have played some of the same tournaments. He seems to be a super nice guy and I know he's got a big game, a big serve and I believe a big forehand that translates pretty well to grass. He won some matches in qualifying obviously and won this long match now. It's gonna be a very tough match for me. I'm looking forward to it, though. Q. You seem to be the one representing the United States. I don't know how you see that. JOHN ISNER: Maybe. I mean, I have been ‑‑ Q. I mean, in men. JOHN ISNER: Well, I mean, I just looked at the score on the scoreboard and Jack Sock is winning and Steve Johnson is winning and Sam Querrey already won. Q. Donald Young won. JOHN ISNER: Donald won. So, look, that's five Americans still left in the main draw of this tournament, so I don't think I'm the ‑‑maybe I'm the highest ranked right now, but we have a lot of players doing well. Q. Your record at Wimbledon is 8 and 7 now. You're over 500. It seems like your game should be more conducive to grass. It's the only place you haven't gotten to the fourth round. JOHN ISNER: Yeah. Q. Where is the disconnect, I guess? JOHN ISNER: I mean, I have played some long matches here. Obviously, the one. But last year I played Marin Cilic tooth and nail to the very end. It was a tough third round match. Certainly my game, it does translate pretty well in the sense that I serve well and the grass does very good things for my serve. But on the flip side of that, the ball stays low and skips through. Maybe being so big that makes it very tough. I have always said I prefer a hard court, a slower hard court, because I like my serve on any surface. The more time I have generally the better. If I play the right way and do that at a consistent level, then grass can definitely be very, very good for me. Q. Can you tell us more about your arm. JOHN ISNER: Oh, it's fine. No issue. Q. No issue? JOHN ISNER: Yeah. No issue. Q. Why is it so heavily bandaged? JOHN ISNER: It's ice. It's just a wrap with ice. It's fine. Q. Did the court feel dangerous to you on Tuesday? JOHN ISNER: Yesterday it did, yeah. Q. The very back, particularly? JOHN ISNER: Yeah. Just, you know, it felt a bit dangerous. When you slip early on in the match, it kind of gets in your head a little bit and you're very tentative out there moving. It's already tough for me moving on this surface given how the balls are bouncing and whatnot. But yesterday was ‑‑it was very slippery. I think Marcos fell a bunch of times, as well. It was tough to make aggressive moves on the grass yesterday. I think most players that were playing, you know, during the couple‑hour period that we were able to play, pretty much agreed on the fact that it felt like we were on ice skates and everyone was pretty tentative out there. Q. Going back to Matt briefly, he's coming off comfortably the longest match of his career. It's not 70‑68 obviously, but it's big for him. Can you tell me a little bit about how you recover and how you bounce back from such a long match? JOHN ISNER: I'm not going to say anything about that. (Laughter.) I'm kidding. That's a joke. He knows what to do. I mean, he's a professional. You know, I think in his match they probably weren't many long points. It went a three‑day match like mine, sort of. It's not like he played all five sets today or whatnot. He should be pretty fresh. I don't expect him to be laboring any tomorrow. He'll come out guns blazing just like I will. It will be a fun match. Q. You spoke a moment ago about when the grass is wet. How about, as a general proposition, for your game and for your approach, what are the best things about playing on grass and what are the worst? JOHN ISNER: Well, the best is my serve. I mean, if I hit my spots on my serve, a lot of times it's night‑night. If I go T and I hit T, the ball's going to shoot through the court. And then other than that, returning and moving on the grass is ‑‑it's pretty tough for me. The grass, you know, makes my opponent serve a little bit tougher as well. For me being so big, the ball skidding through in rallies, I've got to be very, very diligent about staying low and keeping my big frame down low. I like to play up high and hit balls at shoulder height. But I've got to stay low and try to keep my knees as low to the ground as possible. It's much easier said than done, but that's what makes it tough for me sometimes. Q. When you see Novak on any surface, what, for you as a fellow player, do you look at as the most impressive aspect of his approach or his style of play? JOHN ISNER: I mean, his approach, you know, what everyone sees on the practice court and in the locker room and, you know, you hear everything about him in the hyperbaric chambers, he leaves no stone unturned. He does that in Australia. He puts absolutely everything he possibly can into his game. Of course on the practice court, everything he does off the court, he's so, so professional about what he eats and how he stretches and how he sleeps. I mean, everything he does is, absolutely everything he does is to make himself a better player. He's probably the most, one of the most ‑‑there's no one more professional than him, I should say, on tour. He does everything the right way. It certainly shows. On top of that, he's extremely talented and extremely gifted. You roll all that together and it makes a pretty good tennis player. Q. You keep saying you are big, you are big. You are not big. You are taller. Is that a disadvantage? JOHN ISNER: Well, it's both. I mean, it can help, definitely help on my serve, but on this surface where the ball bounces low, being tall, it makes it much tougher for me than someone who is a foot shorter than me. It's a little bit of both. Q. A question about American tennis. It's an issue that comes up all the time in media conferences and stuff like that. Does it really matter anymore given what's happened with this game globally and stuff? JOHN ISNER: No, I think it still matters. I think tennis is such a big sport in America. So many people play it. American tennis fans are pretty thirsty for a player to, you know, get inside the top 10 and stay in the top 10 and do extremely well in Grand Slams. But I think us, as a country, we have sort of turned the corner. I think there is a lot of players doing, you know, doing very good things. Three players seeded here. Sam's in the third round. Jack's winning comfortably, it looks like. Steve is top 30 in the world again. We're certainly on the up, in my opinion, and we have a lot of good, young talent, as well, led by Taylor Fritz currently right now. I always tell American tennis fans I think to keep practicing patience because it will come. Q. If you see fans if you're walking around at tournaments or even at the mall and somebody recognizes you, do they ask you, Hey, what's going on? How come we don't have any great American players? Or is it just in the community that that discussion takes place? JOHN ISNER: I think just the community. If somebody recognizes me at the mall, they assume probably I'm just a basketball player. (Laughter.) No, but when someone does know I'm a tennis player, they just sort of tell me, Good luck. They don't poke and prod about American tennis on the big scheme of things. Q. That's our job. JOHN ISNER: Yeah. Q. You have a history of playing matches here that take place over several days. This one is a little different. JOHN ISNER: Very different. Q. How do you stay focused and be in the right place physically for when you are going to start playing? JOHN ISNER: Yeah, I think, as I told Greg earlier, I had good practice with this at the French Open. I was scheduled to play on the first Sunday, and I did not finish my match until Tuesday with all the rain we had going on. So this is pretty much the exact same thing. Supposed to play Tuesday and finished on Thursday. It's tough and you've got to stay ready. It's just tricky with ‑‑you've got to know when to eat, you don't know when you're going to get on, you're in the locker room, you're just waiting in the locker room. It's hours on end. The next thing you know you're on in 30 minutes. You have to wake back up, drink some coffee, whatever it may be, and get on the court. I have been around long enough where I have been in that situation before. The most important thing is keeping my body fresh and limber feeling so I'm not so stiff when I go out there. Yesterday was a nasty day, it was cold and windy. The tennis as a whole I think around the grounds wasn't great. But considering the fact that I was up a set, I was able to sleep on the fact that I was up a set, although I was down 3‑1, it was a bit comforting to me knowing that coming out today wasn't a full match that had to be finished, and luckily for me it didn't go any more than three sets. Q. Are you players constantly checking the radar like we are? JOHN ISNER: Yeah, everyone has a different app on their phone. We're all comparing ‑‑I have one that tells me exactly when it's going to rain, it's going to rain in eight minutes and stop in ten minutes. Yeah, you look at the radar and at a certain point yesterday it looked bleak. We went out ‑‑ weinitially started, played two games and came back in for three more hours, but we were able to finish the first set. The radar didn't look good, but we were able to get some tennis in. Q. Are you into fashion at all? JOHN ISNER: No, not so much. I'm not the most trendy guy out there, but here at Wimbledon you don't really have a choice in what you're going to wear. It's gotta be white. So that's pretty much it. I like to wear a collar. Just a white shirt that my sponsor gives me and white shorts and go out there and have fun. Q. What do you think of the Wimbledon towels? JOHN ISNER: I think that I was able to make out with six of them in this last match. Shhh. 1‑All, left the court. There's two. Finished 7‑6, 1‑3, two more. Then today. There's two more. I'm dishing them out like candy right now. Be nice to me, guys. I can give you a towel. Q. Do you have your own collection, and if so how big is it? JOHN ISNER: That's why ‑‑Michael Russell has like this famous collection of towels he collected over the years, and I kind of wish I had done that now that I look back on it. I certainly have a lot of Wimbledon towels. I like to keep the Grand Slam towels, but even the other tournaments I play, the tournaments in Asia or wherever they may be, Europe, not the Grand Slams, I wish I could ‑‑I'm going to start trying to collect towels. It's a pretty cool thing. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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