There wasn’t much that separated Borna Coric and Alexander Zverev during their long, grueling, and never less than intriguing first-round match at the Western & Southern Open on Tuesday. The two 18-year-olds wore virtually the same red-and-white Nike kits, which they sweated through with equal thoroughness. They played similarly powerful and remarkably polished baseline games, which they used to push each other all over the court for more than two hours. And in the end, the score couldn’t have been closer. Zverev led 3-0 in a third-set tiebreaker, but Coric won seven of the next nine points to nose his fellow teen out at the finish line, 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (5).
The stands in Mason, Ohio, somehow, weren’t packed for this match. There were other attractions on the grounds—namely, Nick Kyrgios, who did the sport a favor by bowing out in a hurry to Richard Gasquet. But if the 20-year-old Kyrgios gave tennis fans an unpleasantly in-your-face vision of tennis’ future last week in Montreal, yesterday Coric and Zverev, the two youngest players in the Top 100 at the moment, offered another, more cerebral version of that future in Cincinnati. Despite the similarities between the two players, their match gave us what qualifies, by the narrow standards of today’s men’s game, as a contrast in styles.
Because of their youth, Coric-Zverev also gave the hardcore tennis fans in the audience a chance to play one of our favorite parlor games: Imagining which player and which style will find more success down the road. “This could be a Grand Slam final someday,” we like to say in these situations. It doesn’t always come to pass: I seem to remember hearing someone (not me, of course, definitely not me) say those words when Donald Young and Sam Querrey faced off in the U.S. national junior final in Kalamazoo a decade or so ago. But it’s always a tantalizing thought.
Coric and Zverev make for an especially interesting matchup because each of their games are of a definite, well-known type. To oversimplify, Coric is the grinder, Zverev the shotmaker. Yet their styles also overlap. Each can look, at times, like the other. Each, it seems, is still in the process of discovering how he plays.
Coric, a native of Zagreb, Croatia, has been called Baby Djokovic, and as much as fans seem to hate these types of nicknames, this one fits. Like Djokovic, Coric plays with well-measured precision, and a similarly rubbery style of movement. Like Djokovic, he thinks long-term; rather than blowing opponents off the court, he wears them out with his legs and his relentlessness. And like Djokovic, his ground strokes look endlessly repeatable. At 18, with his hair cut severely and not an extraneous ounce on his body, Coric already has the vibe of a battle-tested veteran. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him let his emotions get the best of him, which is saying something for a teenager.