The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  It was, in effect, ethnic cleansing, a term that only came into widespread use in the 1990s. When people talk about the Yugoslav civil war, they generally refer to the battles of the 1990s that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the establishment of new sovereign states, but the period 1941–45 saw an equally brutal civil war which left unresolved many of the resentments that flared up again in the 1990s. The Ustase’s brutality (even some members of the Nazi high command in Berlin felt their acolytes in Zagreb were going too far) led to resistance from the Cetniks, a pro-monarchist Serbian movement, and from the Partisans, a communist movement led by a former Russian revolutionary, Josip Broz Tito. So while the Second World War raged to the north, the Ustase, Cetniks and Partisans fought out the bloody civil war for the remains of Yugoslavia.

  In short, Tito and his Partisans won that civil war and set up a new Yugoslav republic taking in six federated states: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. The Yugoslav capital was the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Tito’s pitch was a communist one (in the sense of a state-controlled economy working in the interests of the working class), with the slogan ‘brotherhood and unity’. He also had immense personal charisma, plus a transnational profile based on having a Croatian father, a Slovenian mother, and operating from Serbia’s principal city. Having gained material support from the Allied powers (Great Britain, the USA and the USSR), he was seen by many of his compatriots as the man who had liberated Yugoslavia, so he was a popular leader after 1945.

  Tito ruled Yugoslavia for the next 35 years. Originally a supporter of Stalin’s communist state in Russia, he broke from Moscow in 1948, pursuing his own form of communism independently of the USSR’s influence. During the Cold War, Tito and Yugoslavia gained a respected global position as one of the leading players in the Non-Aligned Movement, a loose association of largish countries who refused to ally themselves with either the USA or the USSR. He also oversaw an economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s, and allowed Yugoslav citizens to travel abroad for work and pleasure, something other countries in the Soviet bloc did not permit.

  The West loved Yugoslavia. As western nations battled with the threat posed by the Soviet Empire run from Moscow, they enjoyed having a communist state in eastern Europe that was not under Moscow’s thumb. But as Tito aged, so the fears grew about whether it was only he who could hold together the six disparate states, and many asked what would happen when he died. Some were unworried, saying the governing structure of Yugoslavia would survive the demise of one man, or another leader would emerge, while others feared the worst. Both were proved right, after a fashion.

  Tito died in 1980 and for a while Yugoslavia carried on as normal. But the nationalist passions that Tito had held under control (at times by raw oppression – his regime has been described by some as ‘an iron fist in a velvet glove’) gained in confidence and, as the concept of communism fell into disrepute across eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the nationalism of the six Yugoslav states grew and grew.

  Those who had hoped a dominant figure might emerge to assume Tito’s role thought they might have found their man when Slobodan Milosevic became the president of Serbia. He was certainly a very charismatic and ambitious leader, who wanted to preside over the whole of Yugoslavia. But Tito was a war hero who had the mixed Croat-Slovene parentage and was at home in Belgrade, whereas Milosevic was Serb through and through. And while his oratory might have roused the Serbs, it was anathema to the other peoples of Yugoslavia, so he was never going to become a leader in the Tito mould.

  Once he realised that Serbia was never going to take over the whole of Yugoslavia, Milosevic embarked on a policy that effectively laid the foundations for the wars that broke up the federation. He was relatively happy for peoples that formed different nations to secede from Yugoslavia, as long as they didn’t take any predominantly Serb areas with them. So, for example, he was content for Slovenia to go, as there were very few Serbs there, and he was also willing for Croatia to have independence, as long as it didn’t take the mainly Serb region of Krajina with it. Yet Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montengrins, Macedonians, Albanians and others had migrated and intermarried within the southern Slav states for decades (including Novak Djokovic’s Kosovan Serb/ Montenegrin father and Croatian mother), so such a clean division into ethnically defined states was always going to create massive problems.

  When Milosevic met with the emerging Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, a veteran of the bloody civil war of 1941–45, to agree the ethnic divide of Bosnia in March 1990, so Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats could be part of the emerging Serbia and Croatia, they were effectively setting out the conditions for war. That war broke out the following year with appalling consequences.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOLE AND JECA

  There used to be a saying: Behind every successful man is a powerful woman. The dictum has somewhat fallen victim to changing social circumstances – marriage break-up, same-sex relationships, and support teams rather than old-fashioned family structures. But it can still prove to be true. There is certainly a woman behind Novak Djokovic’s success but not quite in the way one would expect. That woman is Jelena Gencic.

  Some day an imaginative film-maker might like to make a film about the relationship between Djokovic and Gencic. It might be called ‘Nole and Jeca’ after the names the two used to call each other (‘Nole’ is a classic nickname for ‘Novak’, pronounced ‘No-lay’; ‘Jeca’, pronounced ‘Yet-sa’, is a common short form for Jelena among a certain age group). It would be a quiet, understated film, in which the eyes of the boy playing Novak would be crucially important and the use of classical music would play a central part, perhaps with the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony reprising the haunting role it played in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 epic Death in Venice. The scope is certainly there because the relationship between the two is a remarkable one, partly because it defies all conventional attempts to categorise it. And while Djokovic would probably have become a great tennis player without Gencic, it’s likely he wouldn’t have become the person he is without her.

  As well as Djokovic, Gencic worked with Monica Seles and played a minor but significant part in the formative years of Goran Ivanisevic. For that, she is entitled to be regarded as one of the leading tennis coaches of her era. She not only rejected that notion, she didn’t even like calling herself a tennis coach. In an era where it’s virtually impossible to do anything professionally unless you have a formal qualification, she coached until a week before her death having never taken a test or exam that led to a tennis-coaching qualification. Her university degree was in art history, she had a secondary qualification in psychology, and her career was as a television producer, editor and director.

  Jelena Gencic was born in October 1936 to a Serb father and Austrian mother. The family was moderately prominent in Yugoslavia. Her grandfather Lazar Gencic studied medicine in Vienna and went on to become surgeon general and set up a military hospital. He was a great believer in a healthy mind residing in a healthy body and insisted on outdoor exercise for his children and grandchildren every day, whatever the weather. Her great-uncle was interior minister in the first Yugoslav government after the First World War. Her father Jovan wanted to be a pianist – it didn’t work out but he became a respected lawyer. And she had an aunt, Ana Marinkovic, who was a prominent artist (1882–1973). As a child she followed her father’s example and learned the piano to a high level, but her passions were two sports: tennis and handball. She played for the Yugoslav national handball team and won 32 national tennis titles.

  At that time, tennis was an amateur sport and Yugoslavia was a country with a collectivist (state-controlled) economy. Gencic had everything paid for but was expected to give something back, in the form of helping youngsters. She therefore began informal coaching well before her tournament-playing days ended in 1976.

  The restrictions of Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s meant that only the best two players were allow
ed to travel abroad. There were no entourages the way there are today, and Gencic would frequently have to play a match at Wimbledon or Forest Hills (the former home of the US Open) the day after an arduous journey. It was one early-round defeat that started her on the road to helping the likes of Seles and Djokovic. ‘Because I knew that when I stopped playing tournaments I wanted to help young people play tennis,’ she said, ‘especially those who didn’t have a coach, and I knew I wanted to explain and show them how to play, I used a defeat in the second round at Forest Hills to go out and buy some books. America has very good articles and books about tennis, so I bought nothing but tennis books, that’s the only thing I bought, in particular Vic Braden, and I built up my library.’

  By the time tennis went ‘open’ (professional) in 1968, Gencic was 31 and, realistically, past the age when she could earn her living as a player. Besides, by then her career in television was well in train. But inevitably she was asked to get involved in the administration of tennis. As she had played for Partizan Belgrade (the leading clubs in many European cities are multi-sports clubs, so Belgrade’s teams Partizan and Red Star are widely known as football teams but have all sorts of other sporting teams too, including tennis), the board of the tennis club asked her to join them with a view to preparing her to be president of the club and possibly the Yugoslav Tennis Association. So she worked her way up the lay administrator ladder, all the time doing her day job in television. It was a dual existence she clearly revelled in.

  There was a potential overlap between her two worlds but it never actually happened – she never worked in sport in her television career. She worked almost exclusively on cultural programmes, mainly history of art in Serbia and the world, but she also made programmes on classical music and theatre. Every five years she changed her emphasis as she had a lot of interests. But she never worked in sport because Yugoslav television grouped political reporting and sport together; sport and politics came under one heading, while culture and the arts were separate.

  Things began to change in the early 1980s when Gencic, by then in her forties, saw a little girl who looked smaller than her eight years. She was an ethnic Hungarian from Novi Sad, a city in the north of Serbia whose population was made up of around 20 per cent ethnic Hungarians. Her name was Monica Seles. ‘She was so little, so tiny,’ Gencic recalled, ‘but I saw something in her eyes. I watch the eyes with every child. If a little boy or little girl comes to me, and if they have the patience to look at me for more than 10 or 15 seconds without their eyes wandering, I say, “This boy or girl has a good concentration, motivation and patience – maybe this boy or girl would be very good at practising.” If you try to speak to a six-or seven-year-old, they’re looking all around. I was watching Monica. She was eight and her father Karolij asked me to come to Novi Sad. I ended up working with her for more than three years and doing a lot of travelling with her.’

  Many accounts say Gencic coached Seles. She was never her formal coach – she was effectively captain of the Yugoslav Tennis Association’s juniors and therefore travelled with the country’s best youngsters. Seles was not the only one of whom great things were expected: there was another gifted Yugoslav tennis player just a year and a half older than Seles, a Croatian boy called Goran Ivanisevic. Gencic accompanied Seles and Ivanisevic to tournaments like Bruehl in Germany (Steffi Graf’s home town) and Blois in France, and Gencic gave Seles and Ivanisevic coaching tips. But the only formal coaches Seles ever had were her father Karolij and her brother Zoltan, in the sense that they spent hours on court with her (she doesn’t even count Nick Bollettieri as her coach, even though she acknowledges the immense value of the assistance he gave her).

  The shift in Gencic would probably have happened anyway – with her sporting, emotional and educational make-up, it’s hard to see her not having become a tennis coach in some way. But what seeing Seles did for her was to put her various skills together and goad her into helping young tennis players formally. One day, when she was off work sick, she said to herself, ‘Jelena, some day you will stop working on television. We don’t have a coach, you’ve been a tennis teacher at university, you’ve got a second degree in psychology – why don’t you become a coach? It’s easy to teach everyone forehands, backhands and smashes but not how to win matches, how to be mentally strong. How do you recognise a future champion? I could learn something myself too.’ It was more than just learning. Gencic was one of seven children (four girls, three boys) but never had children of her own. Working with Seles was the start of her own extended family, the start of a process that saw her work with a number of talented youngsters.

  Seles speaks very highly of Gencic:

  I have so much respect for her – not just [because of] what she’s done in tennis but what she’s done for women and girls in Serbia. Women were not put on the same rank as men, they didn’t have the same opportunities – my father was always fighting for us to have good facilities to practise, I started by playing in a parking lot and it was one of the reasons we decided to leave when I was 11 – we often just couldn’t get a court. Jelena was a pioneer in women’s sports, and Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic probably owe more to her than they realise. I never saw her after I was 11 years old but I remember her very fondly. She was a very positive influence, always smiling. She was a gentle soul who dedicated her life to tennis in a country where tennis and women had no real place in the sports culture.

  The ‘gentle soul’ found herself tested with the young Ivanisevic, who even at that stage was known as a wild child. ‘When we were alone, I never had a problem with him,’ she said. ‘Goran, Monica and me – we travelled everywhere together and everyone asked me how I handled Ivanisevic. And I replied, “He’s an excellent boy.” I never told him any ugly words, I’m always positive. Everyone had a problem with him except me. Monica helped me handle Goran too – they were very close. They were like a son and daughter of mine.’

  The general gist of that comment may be true, but lest anyone think it was all plain sailing, it wasn’t. Gencic was with Seles and Ivanisevic for the European under-14 championships in Heidelberg – the 12-year-old Seles dutifully won (she was only four years away from winning the French Open) but Ivanisevic was disqualified in the semi-finals, having behaved badly and broken at least one racket. ‘His nerves were so bad,’ Gencic admitted, ‘it was very ugly to see.’ On another occasion, Gencic, Seles and Ivanisevic shared a room together at the prestigious Orange Bowl tournament, a situation ripe for tensions to rise inside the head of the wild child. One afternoon, while Gencic and Seles were having a nap, Ivanisevic ripped the head off Seles’ doll. ‘Jelena punished me,’ recalls Ivanisevic. ‘She said, “Don’t do that again,” and I had to run laps, all because I took the head off the doll.’ Asked why he felt the need to decapitate a doll, Ivaniseivc replies, ‘Because it was an ugly doll and it was getting on my nerves. When you’re 12, you do these stupid things.’ Seles has no recollection of this incident.

  *

  In 1992 the president of Genex, the state tourism operator in Yugoslavia, asked Gencic if she would be the director of a tennis camp it wanted to run at its complex in Kopaonik. Kopaonik is a ski and walking resort in the mountains on the Serbian-Kosovo border. It does well during the winter months but, despite its setting in picturesque countryside, it struggles a little in the summer months. So running summer-holiday tennis courses on the handful of hard courts it had built opposite a small shopping precinct seemed a good idea.

  Gencic was interested but had the problem that the summer camp was nine weeks. She hadn’t taken any holiday but even to use up her entire holiday allowance wouldn’t have covered the nine weeks. But the board of Yugoslav TV decided to give her an extra three weeks, so she was able to say yes. There was no question of a fee – Gencic didn’t want one and the camp was effectively run by the state, so while she didn’t get any payment, she did get all the equipment she wanted and enough coaches for one per court. That allowed her to work out her programme,
tell the coaches what she wanted and keep a watchful brief, monitoring all the courts like a foreman. Because Jelena Gencic was a name that meant something to the parents of athletic youngsters, the camp proved very popular.

  After about an hour on the first morning, Gencic became aware of a small boy who wasn’t part of the group but who had pressed himself against the fence behind one of the courts and was watching the action intently. At first she ignored him but after a while, with the boy still there, she remarked to one of the coaches that they had a very keen spectator. She then moved to another court and observed that the boy moved court too so he could see what Gencic was monitoring. He stayed there until the end of the session.

  As the camp broke for lunch, Gencic walked up to the boy and said, ‘Hello, I saw you watching us. Do you know which sport this is?’

  The boy replied, ‘Yes, this is tennis. I tried to play one month ago in Belgrade.’

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘OK, would you like to play with us?’ asked Gencic.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ask me to join you,’ he said.

  Gencic took a step back at this boldness by the tiny boy. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘you can join us this afternoon. What’s your name?’

  ‘Novak. Novak Djokovic.’

  ‘How long are you staying here?’

  ‘I’m here all summer.’

  ‘You live here or what?’

  ‘My mother and father work here; they have a pizzeria just across from the tennis court.’

  ‘Can you come at two o’clock? We’re having lunch now for two hours and at two we will continue working. Do you have a racket?’