by James Blake
“It’s almost a selfish thing because it makes you feel good to help people,” Navratilova responded in her usual straightforward way. “You can affect people in a positive way and it takes so little of your time or effort to speak up for them. It helps them not feel so alone. Whether it’s people of color, or of certain religions, or sexuality, whatever. Just to know that someone who is important, who has done well, has your back is extremely empowering for people. We athletes have such an opportunity to do that, especially now when you can connect so much easier with your fans with Twitter and social media. But I still get disappointed in some athletes who have a chance to speak out but don’t because they don’t want to upset somebody who might buy their sneakers or rackets. Let’s put it all in perspective about what’s really important. Is it for you to have another deal or make more money or to actually uplift thousands of people by what you do and what you say?
“It seems to me like the more things change the more they stay the same.” She sighed deeply, as though she had seen what we’re going through today as a country, all before. “We’re still dealing with the same sexism, racism, phobias, or isms that we were then,” she continued. “Now they’re coming out more because of the current political climate. My eleven-year-old goes to private school. She came home the other day and told me that a boy in school said that if I’m not careful Trump will deport me. She replied to him, But aren’t you from Mexico? I think you’re going back to Mexico first. So she went right back at him, but seriously, kids think this is okay. Eleven-year-old kids, and by the way, his family voted for Hillary Clinton, but it’s in his head that it’s okay to say things like that because he’s hearing it.
“It’s pretty scary nowadays. All these phobias are coming out, so it’s even more important to speak out now because we seem to be going backwards. The possibilities are endless today with social media. You can definitely be heard and connect with your fans and make a difference in a much faster and easier way. At the same time you subject yourself to a lot of negativity, so it takes a strong person to speak out still. Especially with the immigration ban. As if they haven’t suffered enough and they’ve already been vetted for two years.
“‘Extreme vetting,’ what does that even mean? It’s all so subliminal and nonspecific that you can’t really attack it, and it’s done on purpose that way. But to make these blanket statements and have blanket bans, blanket anything is just horrible. To put everybody in the same basket seems self-defeating. To me, everything should be done on a case-by-case basis. That executive order was just horrible. People are either the best or the worst today, there is no in between. [Mike] Pence is terrible but he won’t blow up the world. With him it will be the fight for human rights and gay rights all over again, but at least, he won’t blow up the world.”
Serbia: The Swimming Pool Alumni
We have to wonder why historically, professional athletes, almost more than any other group, have been the catalysts for social change. To answer that question we should look at the journey athletes often take to excel in their sport, and to train their mind and body to persevere. For athletes to be the best they can be in their sport, they must often overcome not only their competition but also their self-doubt, their backgrounds, or their own physical or financial circumstances. The sports world is built on inspirational stories of phenomenal achievements of athletes prevailing over unimaginable obstacles. It is often these very trials and tribulations that not only make them the fierce competitors they are but also inform their worldview, and inspire—no, compel—them to reach back to help others in the same situations.
In war-torn Serbia, two aspiring young tennis players fought against all odds to find a place where they could practice in safety from early-morning air raids. That place happened to be an empty swimming pool in an often bombed city. Novak Djokovic and Ana Ivanovic grew up amidst the hum of low-flying bombs during the Balkan conflict. The swimming pool in which they practiced had been drained and outfitted with makeshift tennis nets and green carpeting. That they both rose to be number one in their tennis careers is a testament to their strength of will and is inspirational not only to promising athletes and anyone facing seemingly overwhelming obstacles, but also to all the people of their homeland.
Serbia is a country known for war crimes perpetrated at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic, its former president. Under his rule, the Serbian people faced atrocities including genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.
Imagine being twelve years old in the midst of the bloody conflict ravaging your city. Imagine the drone of low-flying bombers during daily air raids, the horrors of brutal ethnic cleansing, food and water shortages, and buildings and windows shaking from bombs dropped nearby. These things were part of Ivanovic’s childhood, yet she was no different from any child. She grew up with her younger brother Milos, whom she liked to play basketball with. Her mother, Dragana, a lawyer, and her father, Miroslava, a self-employed businessman, tried to shield their children from the horrors outside their door.
Ivanovic developed a passion for tennis at five years old after watching her fellow Yugoslav Monica Seles on television. She begged her parents to buy her a racket and then memorized the telephone number of a local tennis clinic from an advertisement. With the local tennis courts destroyed or too expensive for the family to afford, Ivanovic spent freezing winters practicing her strokes in an abandoned Olympic-size swimming pool not far from her home. The aspiring tennis player rose before the sun to practice at six o’clock during lulls in the regular morning raids. Ivanovic, along with her fellow teen players Jelena Jankovic and Novak Djokovic, had ninety-minute practices in the makeshift tennis court and often played against each other. They would sometimes have to hide in a bomb shelter during surprise air raids.
Finding tennis facilities to practice in was only the start of her difficulties. Her parents were living on just a few hundred euros a month, barely able to meet the costs of lessons, equipment, or travel to games. During the conflict, flights in and out of Belgrade were suspended. Ivanovic had to travel seven hours by bus to neighboring Hungary because it was impossible to get a visa out of Serbia for international tournaments.
Ivanovic’s future was transformed by a fateful meeting with Dan Holzmann, a Swiss businessman with a passion for tennis. Holzmann was taking tennis lessons when his Serbian coach mentioned a girl in Belgrade who had an exceptional talent but no financial resources to improve. That girl was Ana Ivanovic, who at fourteen was the twenty-second-ranked junior player in the world, despite how difficult it was for her to get to tournaments, and her lack of money for good equipment, suitable training facilities, or professional coaches. Intrigued, Holzmann wanted to meet Ivanovic, and in 2002 Ana and her mother flew to Switzerland after he helped them secure visas.
When Holzmann asked Ivanovic what she wanted from life, she answered, “I want to be number one in the world.” He decided then and there to offer her financial assistance. Holzmann would make monthly payments to her family. The money would be an interest-free loan, not a donation. The loan, which eventually reached around $305,000, enabled Ivanovic to hire a good coach and allowed her to play in mainstream junior tournaments.
Ivanovic left Serbia to train in Basel, Switzerland, because of better training facilities and coaching. Holzmann, who was now her manager, was also from Basel. Ivanovic and her mother stayed with him until they could afford an apartment. Holzmann flew to her next junior tournament in Rome, which she lost in the first round. Devastated, Ivanovic started to cry as she left the court. Afraid that Holzmann would abandon her because of her loss, she locked herself in the locker room for four hours. After Ivanovic was finally convinced that he believed in her, she improved. The same fighting spirit that got her through the freezing 6:00 a.m. practices in the converted pool while planes dropped bombs overhead gave her the drive she needed to focus on and improve her game.
Driven to succeed, Ivanovic reached the final of the
2004 Junior Wimbledon tournament at seventeen. That year she also held her own and came close to beating Serena Williams. The next year she won her first career singles title. By the end of 2006, Ivanovic was ranked fourteenth in the world, then the next year she climbed up to number four. She started 2008 strong, by reaching the final of the Australian Open. Her biggest victory to date came at the 2008 French Open, where she won her first Grand Slam singles title.
Ivanovic has to date won fifteen WTA Tour singles titles, and five International Tennis Federation (ITF) women’s circuit singles titles. Ivanovic was the first Serbian woman to reach a Grand Slam final at Roland Garros since Monica Seles became at sixteen the youngest person to win the tournament in 1991. Eventually winning over $15 million in prize money, she was able to repay every penny to Holzmann, whose belief in her gave her the opportunity to reach her full potential.
Ivanovic’s journey has been a testament to persevering and overcoming emotional obstacles not only for yourself but also for those who believe in you. She was lucky to have had early support, and she in turn gives back. As a UNICEF national ambassador for Serbia and ambassador of the Quercus Foundation, which helps children in underprivileged areas of the world, Ivanovic is a staunch advocate for children’s rights, education, and health. In 2016 Ivanovic was honored by the Quercus Foundation as its female icon for International Women’s Day. In accepting this honor and for her work as a Quercus ambassador, Ivanovic said, “The Serbian mentality is very determined; we are aware that you have to work hard to achieve something. That’s the mind-set that has shaped me as a player more than anything else. I never gave up and was lucky enough to have met people who helped me. I worked hard and kept pushing myself.”
Novak Djokovic was Ivanovic’s practice partner in the pool. Born in 1987 in Belgrade, Djokovic is the eldest of three sons whose younger brothers are Marko and Djordje. His friends and family call him “Nole.” Djokovic became interested in playing tennis at age four and went on to become the first Serbian player to be ranked number one by the ATP and the first male player representing Serbia to win a Grand Slam singles title. He became the number one tennis player in the world in 2011 and as of 2017 was ranked number two in men’s singles tennis. He has also won three Australian Open titles, a US Open title, and he won Wimbledon at twenty-four. After Djokovic won Wimbledon in 2011, a hundred thousand people gathered to celebrate in front of Belgrade’s Parliament.
Djokovic wasn’t driven to tennis the way Ivanovic was, but they share a Monica Seles connection. It was a fluke that Djokovic started playing tennis. His family was athletic. His father, Srdjan, and his mother, Dijana, were skiing instructors, and Srdjan had been a competitive downhill skier. But no one in the family was a tennis player. Although Serbia has produced its share of talented players, such as Janko Tipsarevic, Nenad Zimonjic, Viktor Troicki, Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Jankovic, and Djokovic among them, as a nation, Serbia was traditionally more noted in team sports, like basketball, water polo, and volleyball, in which many Serbian teams have won Olympic medals and world and European championships. Serbian athletes have often trained in more-than-poor conditions, and they have frequently lacked the necessary financial resources, but despite everything, many of them have become worldwide champions.
Novak started playing on the tennis courts in Kopaonik, a resort town where his family lived and owned a restaurant, where he sometimes would work as a waiter. Kopaonik is a popular tourist and skiing area between Serbia and Kosovo. Improbably, that was where the Serbian government decided to build a tennis facility, and that was where Jelena Gencic, Djokovic’s first trainer and coach, who had once coached Monica Seles, first noticed him. After working with Djokovic, Gencic proclaimed him as the biggest talent she had seen since Monica Seles.
“When Djokovic was six, he told his parents that it was his mission to become the No. 1 tennis player in the world,” wrote a profile of the athlete in The New Yorker. “When he was eleven, NATO began bombing Belgrade. Each night at eight o’clock, as the air-raid siren sounded, the family would run to an aunt’s apartment building, which had a bomb shelter. For seventy-eight nights, they crouched in darkness, praying amid the screams of F-117s. Djokovic kept up his tennis throughout the bombardment, playing on cracked courts bereft of nets. He writes, in Serve to Win . . . ‘We’d go to the site of the most recent attacks, figuring that if they bombed one place yesterday, they probably wouldn’t bomb it today.’”10
For almost three months Djokovic and his family and the rest of Belgrade lived in fear for their lives, uncertain what the next day would bring. “On 22 May 1999, I was celebrating my 12th birthday,” Djokovic told the UK Spectator in 2013. “I don’t like to remember this, but it is one of my strongest memories. That birthday celebration in the Serbian tennis club Partisan, when everyone was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ while the aeroplanes were flying over the sky dropping bombs on Belgrade. I think that at that time I was too young to conceptualise what was happening. Instead, I learned to refocus and to not listen to the sirens. I learned to focus on pleasure in having so much ‘free time’ to play tennis. I thought if I focus on the talent I believed I had, I can be the No. 1, I can win Wimbledon one day. That determination was crucial in my development as a professional athlete. Even today I draw on those foundations.”11
This early adversity taught Djokovic how to manage and overcome fear at a young age, and ultimately these experiences would help him persevere as a tennis player who could focus during stressful, high-stakes matches. During the war, the economy collapsed and his family struggled to survive. The country was under embargo, and families faced extreme poverty and hardship. Under those conditions, life is a struggle just to survive, and the development of children in any sport, let alone in tennis, seemed impossible. Knowing they had a talent with Novak, his father, Srdjan, sold the family’s gold and borrowed money from a loan shark. They sent Novak to a tennis academy in Munich, while the family stayed in Serbia. Novak left his family at the age of twelve, with the weight of their expectations on his young shoulders. This was one of the two turning points in his life. He had to grow up overnight and adjust to living on his own, not depending on his parents.
Djokovic considers leaving home one of the major markers in his life, which would define him as an athlete and a man. He trained hard and entered the top 100 in 2005, at the age of eighteen. In 2007, he became the third-ranked player in the world. In 2008, he won the Australian Open, his first Grand Slam. Despite the hardship of his early life, Djokovic has a goofy sense of humor. His other nickname is “the Djoker.” His spot-on imitations of other tennis players like Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer have endeared him to the crowds.
Djokovic’s troubled childhood and the tough times his country faced deeply informed his worldview. He is the most famous person in Serbia; he is also the world’s most famous Serbian. Never forgetting his roots or the struggles of the people in Serbia, Djokovic gives back through the Novak Djokovic Foundation, which he founded in 2001. The foundation gives grants to educational initiatives and encourages childhood sports and education in Serbia. Understanding the struggles of growing up in the midst of a war, Djokovic has geared his foundation to helping children from disadvantaged communities or areas of conflict to grow up, play, and develop in stimulating, creative, and safe settings. The foundation’s motto is “Believe in Their Dreams,” because although Djokovic is from a country that was in conflict, he was able to achieve his dream of becoming the number one tennis player in the world, with the help of his family, who believed in him and supported him. But first he had to not only dare to dream but also believe he could achieve it.
In Serbia, and in many other countries afflicted with famine, war, or poverty, Djokovic believes that children don’t dare to dream big. They lack the access or means to an education, they are plagued by illness, or they have suffered the loss of their parents. He saw a lot of this in his home country, and he decided to focus most of his efforts on helping children in Serbia. He believes tha
t through education, children can be part of the collective effort to decrease poverty and social exclusion. They can learn by his example that if you work hard and believe in yourself, anything is possible. Now that he is in a position to give back and create a legacy, Djokovic wants to focus on helping young people fulfill their dreams.
In 2015, Djokovic was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. His foundation partnered with the World Bank in August 2015 to promote early childhood education in Serbia. Following his historic 2016 Australian Open victory, in which he became the first player in the Open era to win the tournament six times, Djokovic donated $20,000 to Melbourne City Mission’s early childhood education program to help disadvantaged children.
And as a UNICEF ambassador for Serbia, he helps raise the awareness of low enrollment rates in preschool education in his native country, which are among the lowest in the world.
Through the accomplishments of Ivanovic and Djokovic—talented athletes, advocates, and philanthropists—their countrymen and -women see that even the impossible is possible. Their success, driven by their focus and spirit, inspires others to believe that they can also overcome seemingly insurmountable circumstances. It allows them not only to have hopes and dreams, but to aspire to them. Ivanovic and Djokovic have also made great strides to help redeem their country in the eyes of the world after it was tainted by atrocities and war crimes.
The swimming pool alumni Ivanovic and Djokovic were cheered by a crowd of 15,000 when they returned to Belgrade from the French Open in 2007. They both made the semifinals at the Grand Slam. They had earned every one of those cheers. Their journey has been a testament to the strength of will and purpose of fierce competitors who did not let circumstances define them, who instead defined themselves, and in so doing, redefined their country. They showed the tenacity of their people, who have survived years of conflict and stigma, and will not be defined by them.