Cilic takes Agassi's tried and tested route to get back into winning form

LONDON : Catching a millionaire Grand Slam champion in action on the second-tier Challenger Circuit is a rare sight, especially since cheering fans and creature comforts are in short supply when compared to the glitz and glamour of the main ATP Tour events.

Yet this is the world that Marin Cilic, who has amassed a fortune of almost $32 million in prize money alone, has been circulating in for most of this year after his ranking nosedived to outside the Top 1000 following knee surgery in 2023.

With his ranking, which stood at 1092 last August, no longer high enough to gain entry into the ATP events, the Croatian opted to get back to basics at the Challenger level in order to obtain some much-needed match practice.

It was a strategy that worked wonders for Andre Agassi way back in 1998 when he found himself in a tennis rut - and within a year the American had won two Grand Slam titles.

But whereas Agassi was aged 28 at the time, with years of tennis still left in him, Cilic decided to go down the rough road to tennis redemption in his mid 30s.

Having put in the hard graft to get his body back into shape after damage to the meniscus and cartilage made his knee balloon in size, the Croatian was not ready to give up on his career.

On Thursday, all the pain and strain he endured to get back to top-level tennis paid off when he marked his Wimbledon comeback with a 6-4 6-3 1-6 6-4 win over British fourth seed Jack Draper in the second round.

"Considering everything that happened in last two, three years. If even I look at situation where I was, how my knee was in February '23, lots of rehab, lots of unknowns. Even coming back, the knee wasn't good. What to do then? New surgery?" the 2014 U.S. Open champion explained after returning