John Isner holds the ATP record for the highest number of aces hit with 14,470 in his career.
The towering frame of John Isner was enough to incite fear into some of the sport’s greatest talents, with his retirement in 2023 coming as a relief to many players on the tour who no longer had to face his serve.
While Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic are widely considered the best returners in the game, at least a bit of credit should go to the big servers like Isner whose massive shot aided the return game of these all-time greats.
With history-making a common feature of Isner’s long career, his 11-hour win against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon remains the longest tennis match in history.
Isner reached a career-high ranking of eight, with the big server spending much of his career around the top of the men’s game, reaching a Wimbledon semi-final in 2018.
Which player did John Isner label a ‘nightmare’ to play against?
Having intercepted the greatest era of tennis, you might expect Isner to have labelled the King of Clay, Rafael Nadal, or Swiss maestro Roger Federer as his toughest opponent.
The American however revealed on the podcast Served with Andy Roddick, that Australia’s Lleyton Hewitt was an opponent he found tremendously hard to play against.
He said: “I couldn’t stand playing him! I played him a few times, and he returned so well. His serve stayed so low.
“When I played him this wasn’t ‘number one in the world Lleyton Hewitt’, he wasn’t at his top level, but he was a nightmare to play,” he shockingly revealed.
“He had this unbelievable, legendary top spin lob. People think I’m hard to lob, but I didn’t move backwards well. I moved side to side okay, but moving backwards is very difficult. So people were like ‘don’t lob John’ and I was like ‘I’m glad they thought that.’
“But Hewitt could lob me at will and his serve would stay so, so low especially if I played him on grass. I played him at Queen’s one time and he was nightmare. I couldn’t stand playing him. I really disliked that match-up.”
Hewitt’s second longest rivalry after his 27 meetings with Federer was against Roddick, with the two playing on 14 occasions.
The Australian dominated the rivalry in the early years winning six of their first seven meetings, but later years saw Roddick turn the tides with the rivalry finishing at seven wins each.
Just how good was Lleyton Hewitt’s tennis career?
Hewitt remains the last Australian player to have won a major singles title, with victories at Wimbledon and the US Open in the early 2000s.
Against Isner, Hewitt won four out of their six match-ups, and in keeping with the American’s claim is widely considered to have one of the best lobs of all time.
The fact Hewitt was not known for his power is in many ways a testament to his trophy-laden career, with the Australian using precise, patient placement to tire out his opponents.
Wins against all of the ‘big three’ as well as his major success leave Hewitt as one of Australia’s finest tennis players.
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