Bobo the Boomer Finds the Range--’Danger Man’ Next

When Slobodan (Bobo) Zivojinovic is on his game, which isn’t often, except almost always at Wimbledon, nobody is safe.

Bobo Zivojinovic stands 6 foot 4, weighs 223 pounds and serves the ball with approximately the same finesse as a carnival patron trying to ring the bell and win a Kewpie doll.

Bobo the Barbarian has what you would call a big serve. At least it sounds big. In his first-round match last week, Bobo served an ace. The ball took one hop and skulled a woman line judge. She had to be removed from the court.

In each of his last two matches here, both of them straight-set wins, Bobo has slugged out 24 aces. By comparison, Ivan Lendl had nine aces Tuesday.

“He’s on a search-and-destroy mission,” former Wimbledon champ Arthur Ashe said Tuesday, watching Zivojinovic dismantle Peter (The Man Who Beat Boris Becker) Doohan, 6-2, 6-4, 7-6. “He’s like an M-1 tank.”

Today Bobo takes his mission to Court No. 1, where he’ll play Tuesday’s Wimbledon miracle man, Jimmy Connors.

The ultimate server vs. the ultimate return-of-server. Bobo vs. Jimbo.

Two tennis originals, two of the great grunters, two of the great characters in tennis.

Bobo is like no other tennis player you’ll ever see. He is huge and he is strong. His legs are muscled and bowed like those of a middle linebacker, and his right arm is a clump of muscles. Only his left arm, half of the circumference of his right, is scaled to human tennis-player proportions.

He is a Larry Csonka who made a wrong turn at the football field. And he’s not quite sure how he got so big.

“No weights, nothing,” Zivojinovic said when asked if he had ever done any weight training. “I think it’s just my generation. I have older brother who is small. But everyone in my class at school is big like me. I think after the War, everything is a lot of good food, vitamins.”

There were no football coaches in Bobo’s home town, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to tempt him away from tennis.

“I was play soccer and basketball,” he says. “I consider I was play quite well. But I was liking tennis. Why to change?”

Why indeed. Instead of finding a sport to fit his physique, Bobo simply designed his tennis game around his strength, which happens to be strength.

Like no one else in big league tennis, Bobo simply stands up there and violently pounds the ball, shot after shot. His first serve is a rocket. Several times Tuesday, Doohan--who gained fame by successfully returning Boris Becker’s powerful serve--swung at Bobo’s first serve and missed the ball completely.

Bobo’s second serve is a Sandy Koufax curve, a wickedly cut ball that bounces off the turf as if it had struck a pebble. But there are no pebbles at Wimbledon.

“His second serve has so much work (spin) on it, I couldn’t control it off my racquet,” Doohan said.

And that is Bobo’s game, that and his volley. After Bobo serves, if there’s still anything standing on the other side of the net, he rushes forward and slashes away like a man fighting his way out of the jungle with a machete.

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to call Bobo the Greg Kite of tennis. The Goose Gossage of tennis might be more accurate. For sure, Zivojinovic will never be nicknamed Silk or Doctor.

“When it comes to tennis he’s an animal,” Britain’s Jeremy Bates said before losing to Zivojinovic Saturday. “He clubs everything in sight.”

Not surprisingly, Bobo does his best on grass. In fact, it’s about the only place he can play. He made it to the Wimbledon semifinals last year, losing to Ivan Lendl in five sets. He also owns grass-court wins over John McEnroe and Mats Wilander.

Zivojinovic is ranked No. 21 in the world, but in his five-year career, he has won only one tournament, last year in Houston.

This game of his, based on the big serve, is like a wild beast. It can be difficult to control.

“For sure you feel confident,” Bobo said of the way he was serving Tuesday. “You have a confidence. But it’s very difficult to serve two days, two weeks, three weeks, all the time good.

“If I make 25 aces one match and a lot of first serves, it’s very difficult for sure, difficult mentally to keep all this together. One game you make three aces, you expect to make another game aces.

“It’s very difficult to keep yourself for two hours making aces, making winners.”

Today the pressure is on again. Bobo is playing his hero.

“I’ve said that Jimmy Connors is the greatest player I’ve ever seen,” Zivojinovic said. “He is better than McEnroe and Borg. He’s been in tennis so many years at the top. That’s most difficult. He’s 34 and fighting like a 22-year-old.”

Bobo served warning, well before Connors’ miracle comeback win Tuesday.

“Connors is danger man,” Bobo said.

Bobo, too, is danger man.