The old dog who tricked everyone

Men's final - in pictures

The defining moment of Goran Ivanisevic's tennis career seemed for all the world to have occurred three years ago after that crushing third defeat in a Wimbledon final by Pete Sampras. Asked if he wanted to do a lap of honour, he could barely pull his tearful face from his towel before muttering incoherently: "I can't. I just want to kill myself."

In the post-match conference that day, his eyes were blank with despair as he wallowed in self-pity. "I am no use to anyone," he said. "I don't know how I will get over this."

For three years, he never looked as if he had or could. Another 80 tournaments came and went without a win. His slump down the rankings to 125 told the tale of a weary, beaten up nearly man who was resigned to knowing his day had long since disappeared.

Sport is littered with improbable tales of top sportsmen who have suffered real physical trauma yet who have somehow been able through impossible strength of will to fashion heroic comebacks; think of Bob Champion, Steve Redgrave, Lance Armstrong, Gail Devers. Then there was the odd walking miracle, like Ali and Nicklaus, who would defy both the ageing process and impossible odds to climb back to the summit.

Yet those who are mentally shot? Forget it. Logic informs us that there can be no stemming the tide of irreversible decline for them. Which is why today most of us have been left dumbfounded but delighted that we got it so wrong about the perpetrator of the most fantastic Wimbledon story ever told.

Fantastic because in his five-set championship triumph over Pat Rafter on the same court where he had mumbled about suicide three long years before, Ivanisevic had seemed to rediscover his zest for life and for tennis again so completely and irresistibly. Fantastic because old dogs, especially old dogs who are supposed to have long lost their bite, cannot possibly learn new tricks to at last win a Grand Slam at the 48th time of asking.

Who could blame him for telling us in that inimitable English-mangling baritone that we'd misjudged him all along? "Everybody talking about my mental ... if I'm capable. But I mean I can't be eight, nine years in top 10 if I'm mentally not good enough. I can be a little wild on the court. Unpredictable. But I'm mentally actually very well."