by Chris Bowers
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you have shoes and everything?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘All right, see you at two.’
Before leaving for her lunch, Gencic called over her coaches and told them, ‘Please watch this boy. In particular, watch his eyes. He came alone, without parents, without anyone – that’s very interesting.’
Gencic’s apartment in Kopaonik was also close to the courts, in a high-rise building, so she could see the courts from her window. At 1.30pm she looked down and saw the boy waiting with his kit bag. So she made sure she was there before 2pm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she lied to him, ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘My name is Novak,’ he said. ‘You should not forget my name.’
‘I’m sorry, son, I’ll never forget your name again.’
She looked at his kit bag and said, ‘OK, come in, let’s talk about tennis. What do you have in your bag?’
‘Everything I need,’ the boy replied, showing her one racket, one bottle of water, two sweatbands, a towel, a banana and three clean T-shirts.
‘How do you know what you need?’
‘I’ve seen it on TV.’
‘Who have you seen on TV?’
‘Sampras, Agassi, Edberg.’ It was the second week of Wimbledon, so there was a lot of tennis on television at that time.
‘Who packed your bag?’ Gencic asked. ‘Your mother?’
The boy frowned with anger. ‘I packed it! I’m playing tennis here, not my mother.’
‘Oh, Novak, that’s the second mistake I’ve made – please forgive me.’
Only in December 2012, more than 20 years later, did Djokovic admit to Gencic that he’d lied and his mother had indeed packed the bag, not him, although he had told her what she needed to pack from his television research. But somehow it doesn’t seem to matter – he was making a statement and Gencic got the message. ‘He was five years old and so strong,’ she said. ‘He was convinced I should not forget his name – I hadn’t forgotten, I was testing him, I’ve always tested him – and his ability to keep his eyes focused on me when we were talking made me think right away that this was a very unusual boy.’
Gencic insisted that she saw enough in that first afternoon to know that she had a potential world-beater on her hands. At the time, Monica Seles was world No. 1 in women’s tennis and here was a boy who she said she felt could be the same in men’s tennis.
I tested him the way I test all my beginners, and he could do everything. At first I showed him how to hit strokes, but I soon realised that he had great motor skills, massive concentration, an ability to listen and watch. I called other coaches over and said, ‘Watch this boy.’ Within a few minutes I offered to hit with him – he was so happy. I had three or four coaches I’d been working with for about 20 years and I called one of them over and said, ‘I don’t want to say this but I’ll do it anyway – I predict that Novak won’t be in that group for long, he’ll be in the older group.’ I didn’t want to say he was excellent because he had to show that he is. I didn’t want to put pressure on him – he had to fight for it mentally.
At the end of the day, Gencic asked the boy to introduce her to his parents. It wasn’t a long trip as the pizzeria was just across the road. And so ensued the conversation that was to set Djokovic on the road to being the world’s best tennis player. Gencic explained:
He was standing behind his mother with his head nestling into her side. I told his parents what I’d seen in Novak and said, ‘You have a golden child. In the eight years since I stopped working with Monica Seles, I’ve never found as great a talent as your child. By the time he’s 17, he’ll be in the top five in the world.’ They were shocked. They looked at each other and looked at me. They didn’t know who I was, they only knew that I was a coach at this camp. Suddenly it became clear how much emotion there was between Novak and me. When I said he’d be in the top five when he’s 17, slowly, one step after another, Novak came up to me and put his head in my back. I knew that our emotions were on the same wavelength.
Such was Gencic’s recollection of the events of that late June day in 1992. Is it really true? It’s a great tale but has the story perhaps improved with the telling? Possibly it has – after all, Gencic was a consummate film-maker who knew how to bring artistic and cultural stories to life through her television work, so it’s possible a few details have been embellished. But Djokovic himself has corroborated a lot of it in interviews, and others who were around at the time say it all stacks up.
A central feature of Gencic is that she was interested only in tennis and personal development. She was not into money – she received countless offers to run private tennis camps but always turned them down. She was a woman of left-of-centre political views and was clearly at home in a state-controlled economy where, if a service was offered, it was offered to everyone regardless of income or other means. She said, ‘I was a tennis player, so I didn’t want to receive anything, I wanted only to help.’ She also had a deferential attitude to those she coached: ‘I never say I’m the best, I only try to get better and help the children get better. The best is the child who is No. 1.’ In the course of her interviews for this book, she was given plenty of opportunities to claim clairvoyant skills for other aspects of Djokovic’s progression but declined, often with a firm ‘no’. So even if the story has improved with the telling, it is likely to be a true story at heart.
However true it is, the sequence of events was weird and rushed enough for Dijana and Srdjan Djokovic to have been forgiven for being a tad mistrustful when this fifty-something coach walked into their restaurant with their first-born and said he could be a world-beater by 17. Gencic had clearly got the bit between her teeth and was purring enthusiastically about little Novak. She even claimed to have said to them, ‘This boy is mine, I must make him the best in the world,’ which sounds almost dangerous. Shortly afterwards, she said, she came to the conclusion that she needed to give up everything except her TV job – which she needed to earn her living – to make sure Djokovic had the start he needed.
At first the Djokovics didn’t say a word. Then they went away and tried to find out who this strange woman was and whether she was as crazy as she seemed. Everyone who knew her told them she had discovered and worked with Monica Seles, which at the time was about the best reference she could have had. So they let Gencic work with their boy.
She did, however, bring them somewhat down to earth the following day. She told them, ‘If you want me to work with Novak, I have only one condition – I will do my best for his tennis but don’t ask me about money – that’s your problem not mine.’ Gencic knew that within a couple of years they would need much more money for equipment, tournaments, travel, etc. Initially, it all came free – Gencic didn’t charge anything; she used her position as president of Partizan Belgrade, one of only two state-funded tennis clubs in the country, to get him rackets, balls and everything else he needed. But to make it in the fiercely competitive world of professional tennis, he would need to find some money before long.
Gencic and Djokovic started to work on day two of the summer camp. Gencic worked out a programme for him – one that lasted for five years. It needed to take account of the fact that he went to school in Belgrade but spent the summer months and part of the winter in Kopaonik when there was money to be made from the pizzeria and the boutique. He only had three weeks’ Christmas holiday but Gencic went to his head teacher and asked for one week more so she could do more work with him.
Gencic’s insistence that she would look after the tennis but the family had to find the money shielded the young boy from the family’s and country’s growing financial challenges, which were becoming more acute anyway – the Serbo-Croat war was raging and an embryonic capitalist system was replacing the collectivist economy that had been Yugoslavia’s reality since 1945. The programme she prepared for him was not just a coaching plan but also a tournament plan for years one to five, including how much it was likely to
cost year by year and thus how much money the family had to be prepared to find. ‘This is the terrible part of the Djokovic family’s life,’ she said. ‘I knew they didn’t have anything but neither did I. So I said they had to go to find some sponsors. They did find the money but with some terrible conditions. Srjdan has said publicly that he got loans with high interest rates, and when the day came to pay the money back and he hadn’t got any, he sometimes found a knife at his throat. The only way out was to take out a second loan to pay off the first loan, normally at very high rates.’
These days, while Djokovic enjoys a very high standing among his compatriots, the same cannot be said for the rest of his family. His father and uncle have made enemies, both in broad society and specifically in tennis. In early 2011 a coup led by the Djokovic family resulted in the president of the Serbian Tennis Federation, Slobodan Zivojinovic, being ousted shortly after Serbia had won the 2010 Davis Cup and replaced by Vuk Jeremic, the president of the United Nations General Assembly and an ally of Srdjan Djokovic. But Gencic said the wider context has to be understood:
People who criticise his parents don’t know or don’t want to know the full story of the Djokovic family from the beginning. They see only money now; they think he [Srdjan] is arrogant. The family were very friendly until they needed money for Novak. That was terrible. They knew that Novak would be the best, but how do you find money? They went out every day looking for money. Srdjan did get very angry but then he knocked on every door, including the government’s, asking for help – he constantly came up against ‘Who is this boy?’, ‘We don’t have money for this little boy.’ Now they like to say, ‘We made him.’ I’m very happy for Srdjan to claim the credit for it because what he did allowed Novak to go to tournaments. The Djokovic family has had a terrible life until now. These days they have the money but I’m not interested how they’re living. I’m only interested in how Novak and [his younger brothers] Marko and Djordje are doing.
The work developing Novak Djokovic into a world-class tennis player progressed slowly but surely. He learned quickly but was a small boy, so Gencic sometimes had to wait for his body to catch up before she could move forward.
Having grown up in the pre-Connors and pre-Evert era, Gencic’s natural inclination was to teach the one-handed backhand. So for the first year or so of his tennis career, Djokovic hit his backhand one-handed. Then one day, when he was about six and a half, he walked up to Gencic and asked very politely, ‘Please, Jeca, can I try to play the backhand with two hands?’ Gencic replied, ‘Of course, why not, but first of all I must explain to you how you must hold the racket for a two-handed backhand because you have three options: a left-handed forehand, a one-handed backhand with the second hand, or a genuinely two-handed shot. Try all three and after a week you will tell me which one is the best for you, and whether you want to play with two hands or one hand.’ Exactly a week later, Djokovic came up to her unprompted, saying, ‘A week has passed and I’d like to explain to you – I’d like to play the backhand with two hands.’ She told him that was OK, as long as he stuck to a one-handed backhand slice and worked on it as a tool to get him to the net. He said he felt his backhands were much stronger with two hands than with one, so she said, ‘OK, we’ll go to work on that.’ They then worked very slowly without any pressure from Gencic, but she found him so intelligent and able to learn that he picked up the two-handed backhand very quickly.
One of Djokovic’s principal attributes is his footwork, and he was complimented on that from the beginning. Gencic said she recognised from day one that he was a good skier, something she could also claim for herself, so essentially she taught him to adapt the basic flexibility in the ankles and legs that are core features for the skier to his tennis game. That even allowed him to slide on hard courts, something that’s a common feature today but was very rare then.
Another feature of Gencic’s coaching was that she tried to link it with the heroes her kids were seeing on television. She asked Djokovic what appealed to him when he saw the likes of Pete Sampras, Stefan Edberg and Andre Agassi playing in the biggest tennis arenas. On one occasion Djokovic said he wanted to play Sampras’s running down-the-line forehand, so Gencic said she’d teach him. He wanted to serve and volley like Edberg, so she taught him that (and was a little aggrieved that he doesn’t do that much of it as a professional). And when he said he wanted to hit Agassi’s forehand, Gencic told him to watch where Agassi was standing during rallies. ‘Agassi stands inside the baseline,’ she said, ‘so I taught him to stay on or inside the baseline. This was important because he was very little and didn’t have much power, so he had to take the ball early and go forward, with a very fast follow-through. He looked at Agassi, and started to play that way. That was good, because he didn’t have much power so he had to finish points much sooner than you think. I told him not to get involved in long rallies – when you get a shorter ball, go for it.’
Djokovic also had very good volleys but was reluctant to make great use of them. He once told her, ‘Jeca, you want me to play volleys, but when I go to the net I feel like I’m in a battlefield facing a thousand bombs.’
Another observation Gencic made about the young Novak was that he never once said he was tired. In fact, he was more likely to ask to stay another hour at the end of the programmed practice period. ‘They were all playing four hours in the morning,’ she said of her camps in Kopaonik, ‘then two hours off and then two hours more in the afternoon – so six hours including two hours of fitness work. We did it every day except when it was raining.’
And he never tired mentally. Whenever they finished a practice session, Gencic knew the boy would ask her something about what they were doing. At one stage she said to him, ‘Novak, I have two university degrees – I think I now have a third degree because of all your questions I’ve answered!’
Gencic even claimed she had done her best to make him taller. ‘He was very late in growing,’ she observed.
I read physiology books and asked people which exercises they could do to make a boy taller. And I found nine exercises every day, three times a day, and you will be taller than you would have been. They’re very easy but you must really work at them; if you don’t work, you don’t get anywhere. I worked on fitness but only on the tennis court, only on flexibility and agility, speed off the mark. I never worked on power with him, and no long-distance running. When you’re through puberty, you can start to work on power and your musculature will be long, which gives them flexibility and you can then work on the strength. But I wasn’t coaching him by then.
As the months went by, word spread that this was a boy worth watching. Part of that word was spread by the boy himself. At seven he was invited on to a national television programme where children interview children – appearing with the peak of his cap turned to the back, he turned in a very cocksure performance that included the prediction that he would be No. 1 in the world. The clip is still available on the Internet, and even if you don’t understand Serbian you can see the confidence shining through – but it’s the seven-year-old’s confidence without arrogance; he was just answering a question as honestly as he could. ‘When I was seven or eight, I said I was going to be world No. 1,’ Djokovic told the American television station CBS in 2012, ‘and most of the people laughed at me. Those were very critical times for our country, so it seemed like I had a one per cent chance to do that.’ But he believed he could do it and even enacted the scene of his greatest individual triumph that was to come nearly 20 years later – he fashioned a trophy-like vessel out of a cheap plastic vase and, speaking English for one of the first times in his life, raised the vase above his head with the words, ‘Hello, I’m Novak Djokovic, I’m Wimbledon champion.’
The precocity of the young Novak was spotted by a man who was later to become a Davis Cup team-mate and one of his coaches, Dusan Vemic. Vemic, 11 years older than Djokovic, was still in the youth squad at the Partizan club in Belgrade when he found his squad coaching sessions ta
king place on a neighbouring court to one being used by Gencic to coach the seven-year-old Djokovic. ‘Even at that stage, he was almost independent in some way,’ recalls Vemic. ‘You could see he was like those kids brought on to TV shows as little prodigies in different spheres of life – maths, music – they’re like little professors. He was one of those kids: very intelligent, very eloquent, great ideas, very clear in his head. He had something about him and the whole situation brought out more from him. The tougher the situation, the better he is. He’s proved that over and over as a professional.’
Although he was spending three-quarters of the year in Belgrade, Djokovic thought of Kopaonik as his tennis home. He would play on the three hard courts in summer and, in winter, when those courts were covered with snow, he would profit from the indoor sports facility at the Grand Hotel, which had been built by the state tourism authorities in the 1980s and could be used as an indoor tennis court. Together with the clay courts of the Belgrade facilities, it gave him access to hard, clay and indoor surfaces, so a well-rounded tennis education. But it wasn’t all tennis – Gencic wanted all the boys and girls on her camps to socialise together, so it was a massive youthful community with all the friendships and frictions that go with it. Reminiscing with Gencic in his twenties, Djokovic said to her, ‘You know, Jeca, Kopaonik is my Mount Olympus.’
Djokovic refers to Gencic as his ‘tennis mother’, and having coached him from when he was five until he was twelve, she certainly taught him the fundamentals of tennis. But she saw her role as much wider than that.
If the term hadn’t been commandeered by a branch of the personal development industry, you could describe Gencic as Djokovic’s life coach, in the sense that she coached him in various aspects of life that she knew he would have to deal with. She taught him about table manners; she recognised that the family he came from had just about enough to live on but no more, but that as a top-level tennis player he would sit at tables with more than one knife and one fork, more than one glass, so she told him which glass was for the aperitif, which for the white wine, which for the champagne, etc.