Marin Cilic is the 6-foot-6 Croatian whose 2014 US Open run remains one of the era's great anomalies — a non-Big Four player not just reaching a Slam final but blitzing through it without dropping a set in the title match. Born in Međugorje in 1988, he relocated to Italy as a teenager to train under the late Bob Brett, turned pro in the mid-2000s, and won his first ATP title in New Haven in 2008. He cracked the top 100 by 2007 and rose as high as world No. 3 in early 2018.
The game is first-strike tennis, plain and simple. The serve is the engine — flat, heavy, placed into the corners, regularly clocking the mid-130s mph — and it lets him win free points and dictate the second ball before a rally ever forms. Behind it sits a flat forehand he runs around to whenever he can and a backhand he flattens down the line. When the serve fires and the forehand finds range, he can blow through anyone; when timing slips, the margins thin and the unforced errors climb. There's no plan B disguise here — it's power, repeated.
The career arc has two peaks. The first is New York 2014, where he beat the gatekeepers back-to-back to lift the trophy. The second is the 2017–18 stretch: a Wimbledon final, a runner-up at the Australian Open, and a Croatia Davis Cup title, the run that carried him to No. 3. Across his career he's collected 20-plus tour titles and tested every name from Novak Djokovic to Daniil Medvedev.
Now 37 and ranked 47, Cilic is in the familiar role of veteran rebuild — fighting through the back end of draws against the next wave like Jiri Lehecka and chasing the grass swing through Queen's Club and Wimbledon, where his serve still travels.