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VIDEO: 6-10 Ivo Karlovic Produces Fastest Serve In Tennis History

You might watch a lot of tennis. You might consider yourself an avid follower of the sport. You might know enough that when you hear Croatia’s Ivo Karlovic recently set the record for fastest serve in the history of the game at a mind-boggling 156 mph (surpassing Andy Roddick’s previous record of 155), you thought, “Oh, of course, the 6-10 guy, makes sense he would do it, his serve is the only real strength in his game.” Here, though, is what the event itself looked like:

And even if you’re the most observant tennis fan on the planet, is there any way you would have looked at that serve and thought, “Oh man, check out how fast that one went, that’s gotta be some kind of record”? If you say “Yes,” we won’t believe you. We’d believe you if you said you can tell Karlovic serves especially hard in general. We might – might – even believe you if you said you saw the serve and said it looked especially hard, even for Karlovic.

But in our case, anyway, there’s no way we’d have ever looked at that serve and thought it was anything especially out of the ordinary. And considering what an impressive feat it is to serve a ball that hard, that’s kind of interesting. To us, anyway. Also, how about the fact that the returner actually got a racket on the ball? Sure, the return wasn’t successful, but the fact that the fastest serve ever recorded wasn’t even an ace goes to show how important placement is in a good serve, too.

[Daily Picks and Flicks via Deadspin]