About Marin Cilic — Bio & Playing Style

Cilic: the Croatian giant who crashed the Big Four's party in 2014

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.

Marin Cilic at a glance