Taller players are becoming increasingly common on tour. For evidence, look no further than the Top 5, which features 6-foot-6 Daniil Medvedev, 6-foot-6 Alexander Zverev and 6-foot-5 Stefanos Tsitsipas.
Still, even among the current crop of giants, 6-foot-11 American Reilly Opelka stands out, both for his height, and increasingly, his game.
“I think I’m a unique player,” Opelka said, referring to the advantage his size creates. This is particularly true on serve, where he can regularly pour in 140 mph offerings, often at impossible angles. As an example of his rare air, the 24-year-old cited his straight-sets victory earlier this year over Lorenzo Musetti, his opponent in Thursday’s US Open second-round match, “I don’t think he had ever played or seen anything like that before. He was super uncomfortable.”
Opelka has been making opponents uncomfortable for years, and increasingly, he is doing so to the top players on tour. This year alone, the Open’s 22nd seed reached the semifinals at the Masters 1000 in Rome before falling in two competitive sets to his childhood idol Rafael Nadal, and this summer, he upended world No. 3 Tsitsipas and Top 20 players Grigor Dimitrov and Roberto Bautista Agut en route to the final at the US Open Series event in Toronto. And in 2020, he posted wins over Medvedev and Top 15 players Matteo Berrettini and Diego Schwartzman.
With his current success, Opelka is following in the (large) footsteps of his big-man predecessors: 6-foot-7 Marc Rosset, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist; 6-foot-8 Dick Norman, a tour stalwart in the early 2000s; 6-foot-8 Kevin Anderson, the 2017 US Open finalist; and of course 6-foot-10 John Isner and 6-foot-11 Ivo Karlovic, the only other two men to play regularly on tour and rival the height of your average NBA center.
The common thread among all these men: serves so dominant they change the trajectory and complexion of a match.
“When you get no rhythm, it’s also kind of difficult [to] sometimes feel and get the shots that you had before,” Tsitsipas said after falling to Opelka in the Toronto semifinals. “It kind of ruins your game very silently, very slow. The main factor there is just to forget all that and just play. That’s how most of these guys win.”
The run in Toronto also briefly catapulted Opelka to the No. 1 American man in the world rankings, supplanting Isner, and raised expectations heading into this year’s Open.
If his first-round match is any indication, there is plenty to be excited about. Opelka was in control throughout against Kwon Soonwoo, who entered the encounter ranked No. 76 and with a game that, on paper, was potentially problematic for Opelka—great return, solid ground strokes and superb court coverage. But the Michigan native and current Floridian was steady from the outset, saving two break points early in the first set—the only two break points he would face—and imposing his will with greater and greater frequency as the match wore on.
The result was a 7-6, 6-4, 6-4 victory that featured a whopping 33 aces and was both routine and revelatory.
“I thought it was a good first round,” Opelka said. “I started off with some adversity the first couple of games—he was returning really well—and then I started to pick up my levels. As the match went on, I made some good adjustments and played really well, especially in the third set. I served great, which took a lot of pressure off myself.”
While his serve may be his calling card, Opelka is hardly a one-trick pony. He has possessed a solid backhand since his early days on tour, and in recent years he has grown progressively more comfortable coming into the net and has transformed his forehand from a liability into a weapon—many of his 55 winners against Kwon came from the forehand wing, many on balls that would be above the head of the average player—albeit one that can still go askew at times. Plus, he moves adroitly for a man his size, gobbling up court with only a few strides.
The biggest key to Opelka’s success, however, may prove to be patience. Men’s players are peaking later than they ever have before, and that seems to be especially true for big men. Karlovic won all four of his tour titles in his 30s and had his best US Open showing (the fourth round) five years ago, at age 37. Isner’s career-high ranking was achieved in 2018, at age 33, the same year he made his best-ever major runs to the Wimbledon semifinals and US Open quarterfinals. Likewise, Anderson’s foray to the US Open and Wimbledon finals came at ages 31 and 32, respectively, and even Norman, dating back to the previous generation of towering titlists, achieved his career-best ranking in his mid-30s.
All of which does not bode well for the rest of the tour, who will be chagrined to learn that the already lethal Opelka is just tapping into his potential. For the man himself, the next step on that journey begins Thursday against Musetti—which he hopes will be the start of something big in New York.
“I think he’ll definitely use our match in Rome, and it will help him feel more comfortable in this match,” Opelka said of the 19-year-old Italian, billed by many as a rising star in the sport. “But it’s not gonna change the way I play. He knows that. Guys know what I am doing out here.
“That’s kind of the beauty of it for me. They know what I’m doing and I know that they know, but I’m sticking to my guns, and if they can get by, too good. That's what also helps keep me calm. I have a lot of clarity [with] what I’m doing.”
