by Chris Bowers
But Petrovic had long-term plans. He planned to settle in Serbia and open a tennis academy. At 26, he had a couple of injuries and was struggling to improve on his best singles ranking of 157, yet he had been one of the highest-ranked Serbs since Slobodan Zivojinovic. Even though tennis wasn’t that popular, he felt his status as a Serb who had competed at all four Grand Slams could help him be successful. But suddenly the landscape was a little different – perhaps the best thing he could do for his post-playing career would be to invest in a player he felt could be an icon of Serbian tennis? True, the opportunity to do so had come a few years earlier than he’d hoped, but here was this 17-year-old who Petrovic believed was going to be ‘the next big thing in Serbia’ and, if he made it to the top, what better advertising for the hoped-for academy?
Petrovic therefore gave up his playing career to become Djokovic’s first travelling coach. ‘I had an agreement with Srdjan for three years and a contract for one,’ he says. ‘I was very aware that I was doing it for Novak, that I’d be very happy if I could one day see him in the big scene but I also knew that, to get tennis started in Serbia, we needed a superstar. Srdjan first approached me in May [2004] and I didn’t really hesitate, although I guess it took me about three months to formally say yes to the offer. Coming from Adelaide, I’d known Lleyton Hewitt as a kid – Lleyton lived 500 metres from me, he was the youngster and I was the leader of the pack, and I saw a lot more in Novak than in Lleyton.’
The 10 months that Petrovic and Djokovic worked together saw a massive improvement in the player’s fortunes. In statistical terms, he went from 272 in September 2004 to 94 by July 2005. More importantly, Petrovic helped Djokovic negotiate the often tricky passage from the ‘Futures’ tournaments (the lowest level of professional competition, though still with a very high level of play), first to the ‘Challengers’ (the intermediate level for players ranked between about 60 and 250) and then to the full tour, including Grand Slams. Petrovic had experienced that transition as a player, so he was one of the few Serbs who knew what it took.
Djokovic’s progress in the first four months was considerable. He beat the former Australian Open runner-up Arnaud Clement in three sets in Bucharest for his first tour-level victory – Clement’s best days were behind him but he was still ranked 67 to Djokovic’s 272. He was hammered 6–1, 6–1 by Wesley Moodie in the first round of qualifying for another tour-level event, the Swiss Indoors in Basel, but a month later he qualified for the Aachen Challenger and won it. OK, so he didn’t beat any big names of the time (he did beat Stanislas Wawrinka in the first round but Wawrinka was only 19) but he’d won eight matches in little more than a week and dropped just two sets. More importantly, he had broken into the world’s top 200 before the end of the year. In addition, Petrovic used the fact that he himself still had a reasonable doubles ranking to get him and Djokovic into the doubles of the Helsinki Challenger – the coach-and-pupil pairing reached the semi-finals.
Mark Woodforde, the doubles legend who was later to work with Djokovic, tells an interesting story from January 2005. ‘I was co-tournament director of the South Australian Open,’ he says, referring to January’s tour-level tournament in his home city of Adelaide.
Novak was working with Dejan. I knew Dejan pretty well and I remember him coming into the office and saying, ‘Look, Mark, I’ve got this youngster who I’m practising with who’s been here in Adelaide. Have you seen him?’ He told me his name but it meant nothing to me. So he asked me if I’d be able to get him a wildcard into the main draw. I said to Dejan, ‘Look, I can’t give a foreigner a wildcard,’ because my job was to use the wildcards to promote local interest and help young Australian talent. But he was very forthright and said, ‘What about qualifying?’ I said, ‘Because I’m working for Tennis Australia running this tournament, I can’t do that. You know how short we are on player opportunities.’ But he persisted, saying, ‘But this guy is going to be good.’ This is a story you hear a lot as a tournament director, so I said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ But Dejan said, ‘No, you don’t understand, he’s really good.’ And I said, ‘OK. I’m sorry, it’s definitely not going to happen in the main draw. As for qualifying, if there’s no one that comes because there are other tournaments going on, it’s a possibility, but it’s a long shot.’ So he asked me how he could get Novak a wildcard into other tournaments. I told him he was following the right path by coming to me and asking me directly because there aren’t too many people who would go up and boldly predict that their player is going to be that good. So I suggested he call Colin Stubs [the former Australian Open tournament director who was in charge of the pre-Australian Open exhibition tournament at Melbourne’s Kooyong Club] and call the other tournament directors, because if they don’t know that he’s after the wildcard, word of mouth isn’t going to happen. But still he persisted: ‘But Marco, I was really hoping you might be able to help here because of the Adelaide connection.’ Nole was just around the corner, so he introduced me and I shook hands with this youngster. That was the first time I met him and it meant I had Dejan’s words in the back of my mind when Novak asked me to do some work with him just over two years later.
As it happened, Petrovic’s persistence paid off. Djokovic did get a wildcard into the Adelaide qualifying tournament, and while he lost to Brian Baker in straight sets, the experience served him well for his next qualifying tournament, the Australian Open. After beating Francesco Piccari and Stanislas Wawrinka, he came up in the final round of qualifying against Wesley Moodie, the South African who had crushed him in Basel just 10 weeks earlier. This time Djokovic was ready and, on a 6–4 final set, he reached the main draw of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time.
And who should he be drawn against but the man who had been celebrating with him in Nenad Zimonjic’s entourage a year earlier, his idol Marat Safin. It’s easy to dismiss Safin as the tennis circuit’s wild child, and for much of his career he was. But approaching his 27th birthday, Safin had begun to realise that, if he was going to add to his sole major title (the 2000 US Open) before hanging up his racket and going into politics, he needed to get a move on. He had teamed up with Roger Federer’s former coach Peter Lundren during 2004 and had very nearly beaten Federer in the semi-finals of the Tennis Masters Cup in Houston, losing on a memorable 20–18 tie-break. So he was up for doing something big at the 2005 Australian Open and Djokovic was a bit like a hedgehog caught in the path of an oncoming juggernaut. Djokovic won just three games but he’d been given star billing on the first night session of the centenary Australian Open on the Rod Laver Arena. It was a landmark match for both men – Djokovic’s first main draw at a major, Safin’s first step towards his first and only Australian Open title.
There’s a saying in tennis – and in various forms in all walks of life – that you learn more from defeats than from victories, and Djokovic suffered a much more painful defeat two months later. Playing for the first time in Euro-African Zone 1 of the Davis Cup, Serbia’s experienced player/captain Nenad Zimonjic said he couldn’t do both duties, so he remained a doubles player and was replaced by Petrovic as Serbia’s Davis Cup captain. Their first match was a comfortable 5–0 win over Zimbabwe in Novi Sad, but then in April came the match in Belgrade that would have seen Serbia into the playoff round for the 2006 World Group. Belgium were the visitors and it was no embarrassment for Djokovic to lose to the 33rd-ranked Olivier Rochus on the first day. But with Janko Tipsarevic having come back from two sets down to beat Rochus in five to level the tie at 2–2, Djokovic, by now ranked 142, faced Belgium’s Kristof Vliegen, a man ranked just 38 places higher, in the live fifth rubber. Vliegen won it in four sets, having never looked in danger, and Serbia were left with another year in the second tier of the team competition (two, as it turned out).
Despite winning the Challenger tournament in San Remo in May – the scene of his 14 & Under European Junior Championships triumphs – Djokovic’s ranking was still not high enough for him to get automatic entry into the m
ain draw of the French Open and Wimbledon (a player’s ranking needs to be 104 to be guaranteed entry into the main draw of a Slam but 110 will normally suffice given a few injuries to higher-ranked players), so he had to go into the qualifying tournaments. In Paris, qualifying took place in the week of his 18th birthday, on 22 May 2005. And as with the Australian Open, he came through his three rounds comfortably.
Knowing his birthday would clash with French Open qualifying, Djokovic rescheduled his party, which took place at the Calling Club in Belgrade. It was a big party and one which showed that Serbia’s business community had started to get wise to his potential. He got a car from a sponsor, albeit one he had to return a couple of months later, and one of Serbia’s leading movie actors, Sergej Trifunovic, was present to sing a song he had composed about Djokovic beating Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the lyrics indicating that the time would come when he would beat these guys.
It was not to come at the 2005 French Open or Wimbledon. At Roland Garros, Robby Ginepri became the first man to lose to Djokovic in a Grand Slam main draw, before Djokovic retired at one set all in his second-round match against the previous year’s runner-up Guillermo Coria. At Wimbledon, Djokovic beat Brian Baker, Jimmy Wang and Wesley Moodie to qualify for the main draw and then beat Juan Monaco and Guillermo Garcia-Lopez (the latter from two sets down) before losing to Sebastien Grosjean in the third round.
The story of how Petrovic’s time with Djokovic ended is told on page 102. It is arguable that Djokovic would have made more progress between 18 and 20 if he’d stayed with Petrovic than he actually did – he talked at the time about a ‘golden team’ of himself, Petrovic and the physio Milos Jelisavcic. But given that Djokovic was a Grand Slam champion by the end of January 2008 and was the all-conquering world No. 1 in 2011, it’s hard to make a case that the decision to part company was wrong. True, he seemed to stagnate, certainly in ranking terms, during the subsequent eight months working with Riccardo Piatti and Ivan Ljubicic, but in retrospect it’s clear he was learning things from the Italian coach and Croatian player that were to help him in the long run.
Petrovic remains endearingly relaxed about his stint coaching Djokovic. ‘That 10 months was a great time,’ he says.
We have a great relationship, Novak is like a son to me. Yes, it was nice playing Davis Cup and it was a wrench to give up that part of my playing career, but to have had that 10 months working with him – I don’t regret it at all. He appreciates it and that’s the most important thing for me – I don’t need any financial reward, I’m just happy with the fulfilment of being a piece of the puzzle at a crucial period of his playing career and in helping him move up to the top 100 so quickly. Players like Becker, Federer, Nadal and Novak – they’re one in a million, not really from this planet, so I feel blessed to have been able to work with one of them.
So was Djokovic’s time with Petrovic the last chapter of his childhood or the first chapter of his professional career? It’s hard to say and ultimately it doesn’t matter. Djokovic had a path dotted with stepping stones and Petrovic clearly escorted him to a very important place. But it’s possible to argue that the laid-back Petrovic could only have taken Djokovic so far and that, eventually, he would have needed a stricter and more focused team. By qualifying for the Australian Open, qualifying and winning a round at the French Open, and qualifying and winning two rounds at Wimbledon, Djokovic had laid the launch pad for the explosion in his career that was to start within a year.
CHAPTER SIX
FATHERS AND SONS
The period in Djokovic’s development from about 2001to 2010 – from the ages of 14 to 23 – features a recurring theme. Or perhaps that should be a recurring sore because it adds an unsavoury element to the Djokovic story but one without which the story cannot be properly told. The theme is the role played by his father, Srdjan. It is a difficult topic on which to remain scrupulously fair but which is ultimately understandable in context. All the elements of a turbulent Russian novel are there – pride, family loyalty, hate and a lust for revenge.
Srdjan Djokovic was always going to do his best for his eldest son, but it would have been a lot easier for him if that son’s gift was in football or skiing. Because he knew nothing about tennis, he was to a certain extent out of his depth. Yet faced with wise counsels telling him he had not only a very gifted tennis-playing child but potentially a world-beater, he set about trying to do what was necessary to fund Novak’s rise. Ultimately, he succeeded but, having gone through a number of harsh learning experiences along the way, his abrasiveness left its mark on many of those who were crucial to Djokovic’s rise. If Srdjan had been blessed with his eldest son’s benevolent temper and willingness to see the good sides of people, he would probably have had an easier ride. But the combination of an indifferent – sometimes hostile – environment and the insecurities of his own temperament meant that, at several stages in the Novak Djokovic story, his father was the villain in the background, and sometimes the villain in the foreground.
There are many who witnessed Srdjan’s stormy modus operandi. Some are more willing to speak about it than others. Many say he was right, or mostly right, but in the wrong way. All speak more in sorrow than in anger. None seems to take any satisfaction from the volatile father of Serbia’s favourite son, and many are willing to recognise an element of bravery in his single-minded pursuit of his son’s career. As one victim of Srdjan’s tempestuous reactions put it, ‘He stuck his head where most people wouldn’t put their feet, all in the best interests of his son.’
The case for the defence comes later but it’s worth outlining some of the episodes that led to Srdjan Djokovic becoming such a divisive figure.
One of the first people to be aware of Srdjan’s impetuosity was Ladislav Kis. Kis was Djokovic’s coach at the Gemax club in Belgrade under an arrangement funded by Gemax’s founder and owner, the industrialist Djordjo Antelj. What exactly the arrangement entailed is not known as it was a private agreement, but it appears to have been a generous one by any standards, especially by the standards of Serbia’s precarious economy just two years after the Nato bombing. It is thought to have involved Djokovic getting three meals a day in the club’s restaurant, massage, all his coaching, plus trips to tournaments with Kis and one accompanying parent – all paid for. Kis was contracted to coach Djokovic and another promising junior of the same age, Branko Kusmanovic. Kis recalls,
I was being crucified. I was on court in the morning for two hours with Novak and then two hours with Branko, and then in the afternoon it was another two hours with Novak and two hours with Branko. I was starting to get seriously tired – these boys could play, it wasn’t like doing basket drills all day long. So I asked to adjust the daily schedule so Novak could hit with Branko. Novak was the better player but it wasn’t like Branko couldn’t train with him – whenever they did play a training set, it was always close, even if Novak won five out of six on average. So the schedule was changed to put them together three days a week for two hours in the afternoon. But Srdjan didn’t like it: he said his boy wasn’t playing with a kid that’s weaker than him. I said this is an arrangement that everyone has approved and it’s better having me fresh for all the lessons, but he just threw the piece of paper on which the agreement was set out back at me. When you think about it, it’s nonsense! Who does Novak practise with now he’s No. 2 in the world – with Rafa? No, you don’t need always to have better people to practise with. Branko was good for him and Novak didn’t mind, but Srdjan wasn’t having his son practising with weaker players, and Novak had no word in it.
According to Kis, Srdjan then went to Antelj and asked for Jelena Gencic to be allowed to accompany the Djokovic team on his next trip. Antelj said it was out of the question – he was paying a lot of money for one coach (Kis) and one accompanying parent, so he wasn’t going to fund a second coach, especially one who had coached Novak before he was 12. Srdjan is reported to have stood his ground, whereupon Antelj threw him out, apparently with a l
etter saying all the Djokovic family were banned from Gemax except Novak. ‘Novak was crying his eyes out when he left that day,’ says Kis, ‘because we really did work well together. But that was the end of the working relationship.’
Another person to get a tongue-lashing from Srdjan around the same time was Vojin Velickovic. Velickovic is the tennis correspondent for Sportski Zurnal, Serbia’s national sports daily newspaper (similar to the French daily L’Equipe), and he attended a junior tournament in 2001 because there were two promising Serbian boys, Dejan Katic and Djokovic. Katic had won the Orange Bowl under-12s competition the previous December (the Orange Bowl is the most prestigious junior tournament outside the four Grand Slam junior events and the culmination of the junior year), so was ahead of Djokovic at that stage. ‘Because Katic had won the Orange Bowl and Novak hadn’t won anything, I put Katic in the headline,’ says Velickovic. ‘When he saw it, Srdjan called me. He was furious because he thought his son was always to be No. 1 in everything. He was very angry about that – that was my first contact with him.’ For the record, Katic never made it into the big time – he broke into the world’s top 600 but never graduated beyond the ‘Futures’ satellite circuit.
Something similar happened at the 2004 Australian Open. Djokovic had done very well to reach the semi-finals of the boys’ singles but the mixed doubles was won by Nenad Zimonjic, partnering the Russian Elena Bovina. ‘OK, so it was just the mixed,’ Velickovic recalls, ‘but it was the first Grand Slam title of this generation and Novak had only reached the semi-finals of the boys singles, so we could easily have put Zimonjic on the cover. But we decided to put them both on the front page. The editor of my newspaper then got a call from Srdjan. He was furious because his son was given equal status as someone who had won the mixed – “What is the mixed?!” he was saying. With him, there’s always something happening.’