10 things you probably didn't know about Goran Ivanisevic

Goran Ivanisevic with the 2001 Wimbledon trophy

Goran is a huge fan of the English football team West Bromwich Albion and regularly follows their matches online.

He had a couple of bizarre injuries, like the one in Miami in 1996, when he cut himself by stepping on a shell: ‘I must be the only player in the world who ever injured himself for a tournament by stepping on a shell on the beach’, he said.
Interestingly, he got his name after his mother Gorana, while his older sister Srdjana was named after her father Srdjan.
During the early years of Goran’s career, his sister Srdjana was suffering from cancer and the Ivanisevic family relied on his earnings in order to pay for treatment. This supposedly gave him extra motivation to play really great tennis.
Goran won two Olympic bronze medals in both singles and doubles (paired with Goran Prpic) at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics.
He enjoyed playing doubles as well – he won 9 ATP double titles in total.
In 2007, Goran practiced with Roger Federer, who was about to face Rafael Nadal in the Wimbledon final. Federer said the practice session proved to be very helpful because both Nadal and Ivanisevic are left-handed.
In Croatian media Goran was nicknamed Zec (Rabbit) because of his speed on a tennis court.
He appeared on a Croatian reality tv show Mjenjacnica (Exchange Office) in which he exchanged jobs with a street cleaner. Popular tennis player had to get up at 4am to sweep the roads in Zagreb. Afterwards, he admitted it was the hardest work he ever had to do.