by Chris Bowers
Mindful of the pride involved in a patriarchal family where a woman had come in to coach the eldest son in a discipline the family was unfamiliar with, Gencic insisted she only ever told him about table manners and such like when they were alone. And only once did Djokovic ask me why she was telling him about etiquette. ‘Every day I told him, “You will be the best in the world,” starting from the second day I knew him. I said we must work, we must believe each other. If you don’t understand something, you must ask me. If you feel you haven’t put the work in, put it in. I told his parents, “Don’t put pressure on your child, he has to be an individual. The motivation has to come from him.” But these kinds of things I said privately, so Novak didn’t hear what I told his parents and his parents didn’t hear everything I told him.’
As well as etiquette, Gencic was very big into music, literature and general education. One day she told him she liked classical music and, when she was tired, she would lie down and listen to some. She suggested he did the same and introduced him to some of the classics. She said,
I always explained who the composer was. I explained if it was baroque, classical, romantic, who Beethoven was, etc. What we listened to depended on his tiredness and level of interest. When he was very tired, we listened to Chopin, Debussy, Grieg – piano music to which we can slowly relax. And very often because we often finished the day near my home, I played pieces on the piano for him. The first time he was listening, I saw in his eyes that he would prefer to listen to heavy metal and such like but I said he had to learn to listen to classical as well. He would listen to rock and heavy metal for half an hour before he went to bed, so he had both. I never said, ‘Don’t do it.’ That’s a terrible thing to say to a youngster.
One day, when he was about seven, I was very tired, maybe a bit depressed, and was looking for a piece of music to put on. I like to listen to strong music, full orchestra music, so I played the 1812 Overture – for myself. And I saw him – he was listening, so I turned the volume up a little. Suddenly Novak told me, ‘Jeca, I’ve got goose bumps.’ He was listening so strongly. I said, ‘OK, Novak, I’ll explain something very important. In a match, you’ll be in one of two situations. It could be a very good situation where you’re closing in on victory, one or two points away from winning, and you’ll feel goose bumps. In that situation, be quiet and finish the match, don’t get excited, stay calm. But you may be a few points from losing a match, so remember this music and the feeling, remember both, and the adrenalin will start to kick in and you may well win.’ I think this lesson has been so important for his mental strength.
Alongside the poets – particularly Serbian and Russian ones – Gencic encouraged Djokovic to learn at least two languages other than his mother tongue. English was an obvious one and he chose German as his second, which came in useful when he began going to Munich at the age of 12.
And she taught Djokovic about Nikola Tesla. To most travellers, Tesla is just the name of Belgrade’s international airport but the man himself was a leading, if somewhat eccentric, figure in the history of science. A Serb who emigrated to America, he is credited with being the father of alternating current, the AC in AC/DC (DC stands for direct current), and some credit him with the science underlying the major discoveries associated with Edison, Marconi and others. Gencic knew a lot about Tesla and one day found an article about him in a newspaper that had a good cultural section for children. Djokovic, then about seven and a half, was very interested and asked her a question about Tesla. Gencic replied with, ‘What’s the first idea of Nikola Tesla? Answer: visualisation. First Tesla saw in his mind a new idea, then he put it down on paper and then tried to realise it.’ Only once did Djokovic ask her what ‘visualisation’ means. He asked, ‘Do you think you will see into the future what will happen?’ – this at seven. Gencic explained that, for tennis tactics, visualisation is a very important part of practice. So she played Smetana’s symphonic poem Vltava to him, saying he should listen, and when she stopped the music he had to tell her what he saw, what he felt and anything else about the music – in short, what he visualised. Then Gencic shared with him what she had been feeling. She admits to one mistake with Vltava – she told him it was a river but that was because she felt a seven-year-old needed a helping hand, which this particular seven-year-old probably didn’t. At times they visualised with a different piece of music every day, which explains why Djokovic has a very good knowledge of classical music and still uses it to calm his mind today.
The Gencic teaching extended to aspects of nature as and when they encountered them. She once offered her summer group in Kopaonik the option of a training session or a four-hour walk in the mountains – they all, including Djokovic, opted for the walk in the mountains. She told them about the fauna and flora, often explaining why she liked something. She taught him what to pick to make up a small bouquet. One day, when he was about nine, he made a really big and beautiful bouquet; an impressed Gencic complimented him and picked a blue flower that she felt would go well in it. He looked and said, ‘But Jeca, don’t you see? I have this flower in there already.’ Indeed he had, she just hadn’t noticed, and stood corrected. It transpired it was his mother’s birthday that day and it was clearly important to him that he should make his own bouquet for her free from any outside influence.
And, of course, as the niece of a leading artist, the broad education included art. This was a message the young Novace picked up very quickly (in the first few months Gencic called him ‘Novace’, pronounced ‘No-VA-chay’). When he was seven and a half and her birthday was approaching, he insisted to his parents that he wanted to buy her a present – a painting. He spent two hours looking for the right one and eventually found it in a market. It hung in her living room until her death, among the more critically acclaimed Marinkovic works.
To what extent Djokovic would have been the person he is without the influence of Jelena Gencic will never be known. He clearly had the confidence to take in her wide-ranging package of education, and the intellectual capacity to know where she was coming from and why what she was teaching him would help him in the future. Given the determination it takes to get to the top of a ferociously competitive global sport, it’s distinctly possible Djokovic would have had a much rockier road to the top without her input. He might have pursued a route similar to Andre Agassi’s – Agassi’s natural curiosity and good nature eventually triumphed over the rebelliousness of his unchannelled youthful aggression, but it took many years and may well have cost him half a dozen Grand Slam singles titles.
From the beginning, Gencic had an unshakeable belief that Djokovic would be the best in the world, so she saw her role as teaching him to speak very well as much as teaching him a good backhand, encouraging him to speak good English as much as encouraging him to go to the net, and to be very helpful and diplomatic. She maintained he loves everybody – he probably doesn’t, but he does a good job of making those with whom he comes into contact feel very loved.
The relationship between a coach and a player is a strange one. Some coaches are anathema to some players but a match made in heaven with others. It takes a certain chemistry, perhaps allied to the right timing. For some players, Gencic might have been a disaster – maybe there is a potential champion who missed the boat because he or she had a Gencic figure, rather than a more traditional nuts-and-bolts coach. But she was so right for Djokovic.
And even in what proved to be the last few months of her life, she never described herself as a professional coach. ‘I’m not professional because that means you work for money but I never work for money,’ she said. ‘I don’t want money because I coach children. If their parents have no money, I still want to coach them. For most of my life, the tennis courts were excellent in Yugoslavia and Serbia because the government paid for everything in a tennis school. We could buy balls through the tennis school, rackets and strings, and the state paid for coaching.’
In some ways, she was a loveable eccentric. Even in her mid-70s
she spent up to 10 hours a day on court, coaching and supervising other coaches, and there was no shortage of children who wanted to learn. Every day she would break for her unchanging lunch of a baguette and a litre of yoghurt. One year, on her birthday, all her children and their parents gave her a baguette and a litre of yoghurt as an affectionate joke.
Officially, she was Djokovic’s first coach: the woman who taught him how to play tennis. From when he was 12, when he had other coaches in Belgrade and visited Nikki Pilic’s academy in Germany at regular intervals, she became just a friend and ex-coach. He frequently visited her, but once he was full-time on the tour, he had less and less time to see her. There was a period of about four years in his early adulthood when he didn’t see her at all. She said she fully understood, though there was a sense that she was a little upset by the length of time she didn’t see him. During that period, Djokovic had the habit of mentioning a work of classical music in some of his interviews for Serbian television or radio. Sometimes he would say, ‘I like to listen to Tchaikovsky,’ or another classical composer. Gencic interpreted this as Djokovic telling her through television that he was thinking of her, even if he didn’t have time to contact her. Djokovic confirmed in an interview with her that this was how he intended it – whether he was just being nice to an old lady for whom he clearly felt immense affection and gratitude is not certain, but it would be nice to believe such references to the classics genuinely were coded messages sent to her.
Another thing she never said but seemed to hint at was that she was sad never to have travelled with him. The family frequently struggled to find money for tickets, but occasionally there was a budget for Novak to go to a junior tournament with one accompanying adult. So the question was always who would go with him and it was always his father or mother, or Uncle Goran or Bogdan Obradovic – never Gencic, although he would sometimes talk on the phone to her. Only once did Djokovic ever invite her to accompany him to a tournament. That was for the first day of Wimbledon 2012 when he was opening the defence of his title at 1pm on the first day and he invited her to sit with his team in the players’ box. She said she replied, ‘Novak, if you’re only inviting me for one day, I think it’s much better if it’s the last day, not the first.’ So she didn’t come and Djokovic never made it to the final – he was beaten by Roger Federer in the semis and, by the following year’s Wimbledon, she was dead.
But if she never travelled to Wimbledon, Wimbledon came to her. At the end of the 2011 season, Djokovic arranged to visit her and asked if he could bring along a TV crew. In the end he brought two – one American and one Serbian – so both Serbian and US television captured the moment when Djokovic walked through the gate of her house with his Wimbledon replica. ‘This was what we were working for, wasn’t it?’ he said as they gave each other a heartfelt hug – he in a warm winter overcoat, she in a cricket sweater. ‘This is the trophy, this was our dream. We were standing in front of the mirror and lifting up the improvised trophy and dreaming of holding this one one day. I always wanted to do this,’ he said as he placed his replica on the table containing all her trophies, ‘alongside your trophies – not just any trophy, but the one, the one.’ It was a wonderful moment, not cheapened in any way by the presence of the cameras.
That wasn’t the last time they saw each other but it was a form of closure. And the end came suddenly. She was on court until a week before she rapidly went down with the spread of her secondary liver cancer, and she died on the middle Saturday of the 2013 French Open. Word went out on the Serbian Tennis Federation’s website at noon that day, but with Djokovic due to play Grigor Dimitrov late that afternoon in the third round in Paris, Djokovic’s coach and team decided to keep the news from him. After beating Dimitrov comfortably, he did a cheerful on-court interview with Fabrice Santoro, signed a few autographs as he left the court, and was then given the news.
Normally a post-match press conference is obligatory but he was exempted all his media obligations that night. Two days later, after winning his next match, he said of the previous 48 hours:
It hasn’t been easy but this is life – life gives you things and takes away close people. Jelena was my first coach, she was like my second mother – we were very close throughout all my life. She taught me a lot of things that are part of me, part of my character today. I have the nicest memories of her. This is something that will stay with me for ever and, hopefully, I will be able to continue and follow up where she stopped with her legacy because she left so much knowledge to me and to the people who were close to her and I feel the responsibility to continue doing that in the future. She worked with kids from about five and six years to 12 and 13 years old, and she dedicated all her life to that generation and to tennis. She never got married, she never had kids, so tennis was all she had in life. Even last week she was giving lessons to kids, so she didn’t really care about the nature of the illness – she had breast cancer and she survived that. She’s one of the most incredible people I ever knew, so it’s quite emotional, yeah.
The Serbian Tennis Federation hastily organised a service of thanksgiving in Belgrade for Gencic’s life. It took place two days after her death, on the second Monday of Roland Garros, so there was no way Djokovic could be there. But he sent a letter, which his mother read out at the service. It included the passage,
I am completely unprepared for our parting. Not being able to see you off makes me endlessly sad. Still, I know that you’d be mad if I gave up or decreased my chance to fulfil this final wish of ours, winning Roland Garros. Thank you for your patience, your enormous love. Thank you for your everyday support, for the advice I remember, for the warm words which always carried an extraordinary message. You know that I’ve memorised them all and that I always follow your rules.
Our last conversation, two weeks ago, didn’t suggest that any-thing was wrong. I’m sad because even then you made an effort to keep me free from any concerns and assured me that everything was all right, that you were in the hospital for a routine check-up – that I shouldn’t worry but win.
You were an angel. Both when you coached me and afterward, I felt your support wherever I went. Sincere. Strong. Unconditional. You left an indelible mark on Serbian tennis. Everyone who holds a racket in his or her hands today is indebted to you. I promise that I will speak your name to future generations and that your spirit will live on on our tennis courts.
If this was a fairy tale, Djokovic would have won the French Open seven days later. But it isn’t, and he didn’t. He was beaten by Rafael Nadal in a four-hour, 38-minute semi-final in which he had his chances but, ultimately, couldn’t resist the irrepressible momentum that Nadal had created after seven months off the tour in 2012–13. If Gencic was Djokovic’s angel, she was off guardian duty that afternoon. But it’s hard not to see Djokovic having three or four more cracks at the French Open title and maybe winning it will mean just as much a little further down the line.
In many ways, the person of Novak Djokovic, more than the tennis player, is Jelena Gencic’s legacy. She didn’t seem to mind not having had children of her own, saying, ‘All boys and girls are my children,’ but it was easy to feel she would have made a wonderfully nurturing mother. If Djokovic was the son she never had, he’s the kind of son any mother would be proud of. Yet perhaps she needed him too much. She said she’d had two very talented boys a couple of years after she met him but she didn’t want to work with them, ostensibly because she didn’t have time, what with coaching Djokovic and her TV work, but deep down she didn’t want to create competition for him. ‘I wanted to keep him to be the best in his own right,’ was how she put it. Such devotion, though admirable, can be stifling, and maybe Djokovic needed to get his distance from her, which may explain the four years in which they never saw each other.
There was something inspiring yet sad about Jelena Gencic. Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm, yet there was also a sadness there. If she had one regret as a professional, it was that there is very little left of
her work as a television-programme maker. She ended her TV career in 1999 when the Serbian television centre was destroyed in the Nato bombing; the bombing destroyed the archives, so most of the 1,500 programmes she made, many of them award winners, were obliterated.
If she had ever been marooned on the BBC’s fictitious ‘desert island’ (from the long-running radio series Desert Island Discs) with nothing to keep her company except eight pieces of music, she would have wanted a Beethoven symphony (any one would do), the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony, Rachmaninov’s C minor piano concerto, some Chopin piano music and some Serbian national and church music, plus a bit of music she had composed for her television work. But knowing her, she would probably have captured a baboon and spent most of her time trying to teach it how to hit a coconut shell over a low horizontal branch.
As Djokovic summed it up, her biggest legacy is simply her own personal ethos and emotional intelligence, which distinguishes her massively from your average tennis coach. ‘If I give everything from my soul to a child on a tennis court,’ she said in her last interview, ‘this boy or girl must receive it – maybe not all of it but much of it. If they don’t receive it, that’s no motivation for me. I am very proud of Novak. This is a boy who understands me, who learned so much, who wanted to learn so much, who wanted to receive from me. And I received from him too. The biggest thing I’ve learned is to be patient. Never be sad, explain if you’re feeling sad, explain to yourself and speak to each other about it. It’s very important.’