by Chris Bowers
The bombing clearly didn’t help, but the 1990s were hardly a propitious time for budding tennis players in Serbia anyway. With war going on from 1991 to 1995 and then again 1998–99, and economic sanctions to boot, the Serbian economy was in no position to recover and, with Slobodan Milosevic’s state-controlled economic policies still in place, there was little incentive or possibility for foreign firms to invest in Serbia. That meant it was very hard to finance a professional tennis career.
Dusan Vemic was born in 1976. He turned professional at 16, just as the wars were reaching their height, and he struggled to find both sponsorship and the help he needed. He says,
Companies didn’t have money for sponsorship and we needed to get a visa for every country – we’d spend whole mornings standing in line for a visa, not knowing if we’d get it. We skipped one or two European championships because they were in Switzerland and we couldn’t get a visa in time. The federation was extremely poor, so we had to do a lot ourselves. Fortunately, there were some satellite tournaments in Serbia and nearby, so we could play a few tournaments. We were fighting for our livelihoods so we appreciated any help we’d get from anyone but it wasn’t much. In Serbia we had no great players except Bobo [Zivojinovic] and he was a businessman at that time so not able to do much for us. We didn’t have enough coaching, we didn’t do enough fitness work – I can’t say whether that would have made a massive difference to our results but it would have helped us if we’d had proper coaching.
Vemic can thank tennis for taking him out of Belgrade during the bombing – he left the day before it started to play a handful of Challenger tournaments in the USA but it was hardly good for his peace of mind. ‘As I arrived, I saw Belgrade on fire on the TV. It didn’t exactly feel great. I tried calling home to my parents in Belgrade but I couldn’t get through for a few days. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – not knowing what’s going on [with] your loved ones back home. Somehow, I’m able to use sport as my escape from reality, I was able to be in the moment playing but it wasn’t a nice experience, even if it gave me a bit more of a spark. I was probably luckier than many of my friends who were back home.’
It was against this background that Srdjan Djokovic was having to find money for Novak’s tennis. Plenty of top-level athletes and artists have come from unlikely places but there was normally some money there. There was no obvious funding stream for Djokovic.
There are different views as to how much money the family actually had at its disposal. The Djokovics did have two restaurants that were doing reasonably well, which is enough to feed one line of thinking that questions the ‘boy from modest surroundings’ line. In fairness, Srdjan has never claimed the family were poor; he said they always had enough to live but that didn’t leave much over for additional expenses like coaching and travelling to tournaments. Indeed, as the head of a family with three children, it would have been irresponsible if he had thrown everything into one child’s potential career. And he had to be patient and beware the risk of teenage burnout. The tennis wayside is littered with the tales of children whose parents thought their playing ability was the key to untold riches that would benefit the entire family – many such children burned out, if only because they couldn’t handle being the family’s cash cow.
So when Srdjan tells the stories of having knives held to his throat and dealing with loan sharks charging massive rates of interest, it’s very easy to believe him.
It also raises the question of whether the tennis careers of Marko and Djordje were sacrificed because finding the cash for one player was putting the family at full strain. In a rare television interview, Srdjan said of his second and third sons, ‘I tried to discourage them but to no avail. Their own brother is the greatest idol to them. They don’t have to look elsewhere. I am convinced they are going to be good tennis players. How good I don’t know but they’re trying hard and want to be like Novak.’ Jelena Gencic backed this up, noting that ‘Djordje was very good but Srdjan told me he didn’t want to have two or even three tennis professionals playing in his house – for him, Novak was enough. He didn’t stop me working with Marko and Djordje but he told me not to make them the best. I said it was probably too late anyway.’ And Dejan Petrovic, who coached Djokovic for 10 months in 2004–5, says, ‘Djordje has a lot of the same qualities as Nole’ without ever having the full package his elder brother has. The general feeling among tennis observers is that Marko would never have made it as a touring professional but Djordje might have done. Gencic, Petrovic and others never believed Djordje was in Novak’s league but then there are many players who could make a good living from tennis without ever coming close to that.
Gencic also made one observation that suggests that Djokovic was sensitive to the role money played in the family. She recalled that
When Novak started to be famous, Grandfather Vlada came to watch and Novak asked me if I’d seen him. I told him where he was and, when he found him, he asked his grandfather to lend him some money. Novak knew that Vlada didn’t have much money and Novak did – he was in the world’s top 20 by then – but Novak recognised that it was very important for both of them for him to ask to borrow money, to show what an important person his grandfather was. It was a matter of pride for his grandfather to be able to lend him some money. The next day Novak gave me the money to give back to his grandfather, which was always going to happen, but he’d given him the satisfaction of being able to offer him the sum. Novak was sensitive to that.
The issue of money never fully resolved itself until Djokovic was 16 and a deal was struck with a management company that brought a guaranteed income into the Djokovic coffers (see page 83).
The period from age 12 to 14 is the time when Jelena Gencic started to relinquish control of Djokovic, but it was a gradual process and it doesn’t lend itself to a neat chronology. A feature of this time is that there are a number of people who worked to a greater or lesser extent with the young Djokovic, some overlapping. Most of them – understandably – claim their slice of the Djokovic cake. Perhaps this is heightened by the fact that the Djokovic family doesn’t always rush to acknowledge the help they received from these coaches – sometimes all people want is recognition yet sometimes that recognition is very hard to give.
Gencic and others around Djokovic felt he needed a more competitive tennis environment if he was to continue his progress to the top. Gencic said,
In the morning he did his technical practice but in the afternoon I felt he needed a practice match over three sets, four afternoons a week. He was about 11 or 12 at this stage and I couldn’t find players who wanted to play with him. I asked boys a couple of years older but, if they lost the first set, they said, ‘I have to do my homework,’ or some excuse because they didn’t want to lose against this little boy. So I said he could play with older players with ratings and at the beginning it was good because everyone wanted to play with the little boy, the older ones didn’t mind. But he then beat all the older ones too. So I said to Srdjan and Dijana, ‘We must send him somewhere where he has sparring partners.’
The obvious place to go was America but Gencic urged them not to send him there. She recognised that he was a very family-orientated boy who couldn’t be away from his mother and brothers for too long; that the closeness of the family was central to his personal security. At the time, Spain was emerging as the leading European country for tennis coaching, largely because in much of the country you can play outdoors for most of the year, and the Sanchez-Casal academy in Barcelona had created a worldwide reputation for itself (Andy Murray was later to spend two years there). But the wish was for somewhere even closer to home.
Gencic hit on the idea of Nikki Pilic, the controversial Yugoslav left-hander whose refusal to play a Davis Cup tie in 1973 because of a professional commitment had unleashed the furore that led to 81 male professionals boycotting Wimbledon that year. Just three years younger than Gencic, the two had played on the circuit together. He had later moved to Germany and had set up
an academy in Munich, which specialised in players aged 13 and over who were looking to make the transition from junior tennis to the full pro tour.
‘So I called him,’ Gencic recalled, ‘and said, “Niko, I have a very good young player. He’s 12. Can I send him to you?” He said, “Oh no, Jelena, you know I’m not working with players that young.” I said, “Please, only one week, just one. Have a look at him, and if you don’t want to work with him, he’ll come back to me and you can give me one or two suggestions as to how I can help him. But please remember, they don’t have money. He will return your money for the camp because I’m sure he’ll be the best one day.” He sighed and said, “Oh, Jelena, Jelena – all right, send him.”’
A week after Djokovic had arrived at Pilic’s academy, he called Gencic and said, ‘Jelena, why didn’t you send this boy earlier to me?’ Gencic said she answered, ‘Oh, Niko, if I’d sent him earlier, you’d have said, “I’ve discovered and made this great champion!” and I didn’t want that to happen.’
Pilic’s version of that story is, perhaps not surprisingly, slightly different. He says of Gencic,
She had been asking me for some time but I told her we should wait a bit. So Novak didn’t come to me until he was 12 years and 10 months. He came with his uncle Goran and I didn’t think much at first. I saw that he had a little bit wrong with his game. He had wrong grips – he had an extreme western grip and his backhand grip was also extreme. He was moving OK, his coordination was OK, his serve was OK but nothing special and he didn’t volley much. I had to show him what I wanted to see on the forehand and backhand and, for a guy with that coordination and such fine motor skills, and good eyes and good legs, he picked it up very quickly. We also played soccer and he was very good at that.
It would be easy to conclude from this account that Gencic’s coaching was not all it was cracked up to be, that Djokovic was a talent when he went to Munich but very much a rough diamond in need of a lot of polishing. While broadly true, that would be a slightly unfair interpretation. The technique taught to youngsters aged 5–12 is frequently different in subtle ways to that taught when they have teenage growth spurts. In addition, Pilic admits that he’s naturally cautious on first viewing: ‘I’m not that impressed with anyone at the beginning,’ he says. ‘There are thousands of people who play great tennis but they don’t make it because they don’t have character, they don’t have mental strength, they don’t have the will to win. There are lots of components to really winning. But I think nobody could be that impressed [with Djokovic] because he didn’t have great technique.’ Is there, perhaps, also that universal element that makes it easy for any specialist to believe their first job is to undo the work of the last specialist?
Yet even the hard-to-impress Pilic realised after about four months that he had someone a bit special on his hands. Pilic’s wife Mija is Serbian, so she often got Novak into conversation, especially in the early visits when Djokovic lived with the Pilics (only when he moved to Pilic’s academy full-time did he live in separate accommodation). And it was as much in conversation as on the tennis court that Pilic realised that the boy had ‘incredible focus’. Pilic says, ‘He was very professional and always early for training. I remember arranging to hit with him at two o’clock and, 20 minutes before two, my wife saw him and asked him where he was going. He said he was going to warm up and she said, “That’s very good,” to which he replied, “I don’t want to risk my career!” This at 13 years and two months.’
Djokovic paid several visits to Munich for the first couple of years, before basing himself permanently there. That meant he was coached by Pilic part of the time but also had coaches in Belgrade.
One of them was Bogdan Obradovic, who was based at the Partizan club in Belgrade when he wasn’t travelling with Nenad Zimonjic. With Gencic also based at Partizan, Obradovic got to see Djokovic for the first time in 1997, when Djokovic was 10. ‘He was so professional,’ Obradovic recalls. ‘You didn’t need to say anything to him about preparing for tennis – he got there early, did his warming up, his running, a total professional at 10.’ Obradovic liaised closely with Pilic, which gave a degree of continuity to Djokovic’s tennis education, especially as Obradovic also recognised the need to make adjustments to the boy’s technique.
Obradovic coached Djokovic to his first international title, the Under-14 European Individual Championships in San Remo. While there, Djokovic was interviewed by an Italian tennis magazine, which asked him who his coach was. He could have replied Jelena Gencic, as she was very much still on the scene, but he replied Bogdan Obradovic and later proudly showed Obradovic the article in which the quote was faithfully reported.
In April 2000, just as the Milosevic regime was on the wane, an industrialist Djordjo Antelj founded a tennis club about 500 metres from the Marakana football stadium called TK Gemax (sometimes written Gemaks). Gemax was a construction company that had built roads and buildings, and Antelj had become one of Serbia’s richest men. He was also big into tennis, so founding a club was both a business proposition and a hobby. More than that, he offered financial support to all the Davis Cup and Fed Cup players with free winter court hire, and this extended to supporting all the Serbian players that were any good, or might be in the future.
Barely a year after establishing the club, Antelj identified three 14-year-old boys he wanted to sponsor: Branko Kusmanovic, Bojan Bozovic and Novak Djokovic. That same year (2001), Ladislav Kis, a Serbian-born player who had emigrated to Australia at 15, returned to Serbia as coach of the country’s top woman player, Dragana Zaric. But as she was struggling for funding after failing to break the top 150 by the age of 24, Antelj approached Kis and asked if he wanted to coach the three boys. More importantly, he offered Djokovic a deal that effectively made Kis his coach. Bozovic had his own private coach (with whom Djokovic had been working informally) so, effectively, the Gemax club began funding Kis to coach Kusmanovic and Djokovic.
Kis says Djokovic approached him on their first session and said, ‘You’ve just lived 10 years in Australia, right? I really want you to coach me in English.’ When Kis asked why, given that Serbian was the mother tongue for both of them, Djokovic replied, ‘Well, I’m going to need English when I’m No. 1, I’ll have to do all my interviews and press conferences in English, so it’s good if I practise my English now.’ Even today, when Djokovic runs into Kis, he will greet his former coach with, ‘G’day, mate!’ out of affection for Kis’s Australian twang.
‘It’s every coach’s dream to work with a player like that,’ says Kis.
He was such a good student. You could even tell him to do something wrong and he would do it so well that the wrong might turn into a right – he was that capable. And his confidence and self-belief were amazing; no matter what you asked him to do, he would do it. He was so focused. Once he had a shoulder problem and the physio asked him to put his finger in his belly button, just to open up the shoulder muscles. After about 10 minutes the physio started working on Novak’s legs but Novak kept his finger in his belly button. Eventually, the physio asked him why his finger was still in his belly button, to which Novak replied that the physio had asked him to put it there and hadn’t told him to take it out! Whatever I asked him, he did to perfection. I used the old ‘suicide drills’ to see how tough a kid is – you get a basket of balls and move him left and right, front and back, until he gives up. We’d need Srdjan at the back picking up balls and throwing them back into the basket because Novak would always go more than a hundred balls – this at the age of 14. As a coach, you need to monitor that his legs aren’t collapsing because there’s a risk of injury if you let them go on too long, but no, this kid just went on and on and on. After about 120 balls, he’d throw his racket aside and say, ‘I’m done,’ which was good because I was close to telling him to stop. That’s what you see these days with his ability to run and run.
Kis was also taken by Djokovic as a person: ‘He was fantastic, and he still is, even if these days he’s torn
between a million people who all want a piece of him. I was 24 at the time and I wasn’t totally aware then that I had a future world No. 1 on my hands. I think I got the opportunity to work with him because I was a new face at Gemax, so I was lucky enough to get the honour of coaching him. He was a gift, he’s a gift to any coach because, to be honest, he’d be this good whoever was coaching him.’
The story of how Kis’s coaching relationship with Djokovic came to an end is told on pages 94–6 but the six months they spent together offered Djokovic a degree of stability when he was starting to make his way on the international junior circuit. When it ended in early 2002, Djokovic spent the rest of the winter playing at the Partizan club under the eye of Bogdan Obradovic, before moving to Munich full time.
Pilic noted the same massive willingness to learn that Gencic and Kis had picked up. Djokovic constantly asked Pilic questions about tennis, in particular about the top players Pilic had worked with – Boris Becker, Michael Stich, Goran Ivanisevic and others. In November 2000 Ivanisevic came to Munich in a terrible state – he had lost 13 first rounds that year and had ended his tournament schedule with the embarrassment of defaulting in a match in Brighton after running out of rackets in the final set against the Korean Hyung Taik Lee. Pilic told Ivanisevic he had a kid who would be ‘at least top five’ and told him to ‘hit with this boy for a few minutes’. They hit for half an hour and Djokovic didn’t hit one ball into the net. Pilic says Ivanisevic was hypnotised and Ivanisevic himself admits he was seriously impressed. ‘I hit half an hour with him,’ he says, ‘and you could see he was talented, he had that something that he needs to be where he is now. You couldn’t say if he was going to be one, five, 10, 15, but you could see his potential.’