By Giri Nathan
The most reliable omen of tennis genius is beating tour-level opponents as a teenager. Iga Swiatek was doing this. Carlos Alcaraz and Holger Rune are barely removed from teenagedom, so of course they were doing it too. Lots of the eventual greats were doing this. So when someone comfortably beats the world No. 124 before his 18th birthday, as a Croatian kid named Dino Prizmic has just done, it’s a cue to pay close attention. Not that Prizmic had been keeping a low profile this summer. Heading into Roland-Garros this year, he’d already spent almost a year in the pros; he briefly hopped back to the juniors and won the boys’ singles title. The celebration of this momentous achievement could not have lasted very long, because days later, Prizmic was right back on the grind of the Challenger circuit, losing in the first round at Bratislava—pretty hardcore stuff. I probably would’ve just gone to the beach for a while, I don’t know.
In his first year as a pro, Dino Prizmic made it inside the top 300 and played in the quarterfinals of Challenger tournaments, but it wasn’t until this week that he won at the highest level. As a local prospect, Prizmic was granted a wild card into the ATP 250 in Umag, Croatia. He’d only played one ATP-level match before this tournament, a straight-set loss in April courtesy of the Richard Gasquet one-hander, so this level of competition is still fresh. Prizmic won his first-round match on the clay in Umag, earning his first ATP win. But his opponent was Duje Ajdukovic, another young Croatian wild card, whose ranking was also barely inside the top 300—basically, a direct peer. So while this was excellent news for Prizmic personally, and while he did it in great style, that result alone wasn’t yet worthy of this prestigious newsletter. It was the next match that did it. World No. 124 Zsombor Piros was the fifth-highest-ranked player that our guy Prizmic had ever played. And while he hadn’t gotten remotely close to beating any of the others, Prizmic managed to win this one 6–2, 6–3, playing some beautifully aggressive tennis in the first set and benefiting from something of a Piros implosion in the second. “I tried to play short points with this player, and today it worked, so I’m very happy,” the 17-year-old said after, in the very brief English section of his post-match interview. (Croatian readers may find more to chew on there.)
If we are, in fact, looking at a prodigy, what might the finished product look like? This week, Prizmic has been hitting a pretty big ball from the baseline, and I particularly like the simplicity of his two-handed backhand stroke. He slides into his shots with the abandon of a clay-court native. There’s some nice touch to his game—several decent drop shots and at least one outrageously good lob. At 6 foot 2, and possibly still growing, he shouldn’t be troubled by the sign out front that reads You Must Be This Tall To Have A Decent ATP Serve. My primary complaint at this point is the occasional extravagant grunting. But he is, of course, still very young. Someone will tell him. Maybe he will even be told by his manager Ivan Ljubicic, a Croatian tennis legend in his own right, the last coach of Roger Federer, and the current director of the French Tennis Federation. (These guys have so many jobs.)
Friday’s Umag quarterfinal against world No. 90 Alexei Popyrin will test Prizmic’s current form against legit top-100 competition. Another win would get Prizmic in qualifying range for the US Open, which is where his story gets a little more intriguing still. He will turn 18 in August. Of course, these trajectories are never certain. If nothing momentous occurs in the professional tennis career of Dino Prizmic, then at least you spent only about 90 seconds of your life learning some facts about him. (Two more facts before we go: He loves MMA and Balkan rap, which, now that I think about it, feels sort of like one fact said two different ways.) And if something momentous does happen with Dino Prizmic, always remember that you heard it here first.
*As usual.
