To mark the 20th anniversary of winning Wimbledon, Goran Ivanišević will be inducted to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, USA, tonight, 18 months after learning the happy news that marked the end of his magnificent career. Goran was supposed to enter the Hall of Fame last summer, but the coronavirus disrupted those plans and postponed them to today, reports Slobodna Dalmacija.
The solemn ceremony begins at 6 pm local time, or at midnight in Croatia. Goran has about five minutes to speak, and as he announced, he will dedicate his speech primarily to his family – Dad Srdjan, mom Gorana and sister Srdjana who passed away two years ago. It will not be easy to summarize all these emotions in such a short time, but we have no doubt that in addition to the written notes on paper, there will be room for some spontaneous comments, in Goran fashion.
“I played the final for the first time on Monday, I played the semifinals for the first time in three days, there were so many events. And then the match points, I had four of them, and I played my fourth final. That had to be it. When I won, all my dreams came true. All my life I wanted to win Wimbledon,” said Goran in a video on the official website of the Hall of Fame.
In addition to Ivanišević, other proud Hall of Fame inductees will be Conchita Martinez, the posthumously famous coach Dennis Van der Meer, and the “Original 9”, more precisely the tennis players who changed women’s tennis in the early 1970s and were the predecessors of the WTA Tour.
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