by Chris Bowers
Given the following the former Iranian professional Mansour Bahrami developed on the seniors’ tour for his impressions of John McEnroe, Boris Becker and others, there will always be a market for Djokovic’s impersonations, certainly when he retires from top-level tennis. But his strict demarcation of business and pleasure means there will always be limited scope in his schedule for performing them.
The victory over Georgia in April had taken Serbia into the playoff round for the Davis Cup World Group for the second year running. But this time the Serbs were drawn at home against Australia, for whom Lleyton Hewitt was still the leading player. This tie, in effect, marked the birth of Serbia as a modern Davis Cup powerhouse, not because the Serbs were particularly dominant against Australia but because they discovered a venue that became not just their default venue for big home ties but their spiritual home.
Djokovic’s victory in Miami in early April had created a massive burst of interest, so faced with a home tie to get into the World Group, the Serbian Tennis Federation opted for the Beogradska Arena (Belgrade Arena), a new venue whose troubled construction history reflected the rollercoaster ride that Serbia as a country and Serbia’s players as individuals had all been through. It was a gamble because the capacity for basketball was 20,000 and for tennis it would be very close to that. Having played in front of just a few thousand spectators in a compact, makeshift indoor court in April, it was an act of faith to hope that around 17,000 tickets could be sold just five months later. But Djokovoic’s run to the US Open final increased the anticipation, and a full house christened Serbia’s natural Davis Cup home.
The arena was conceived in the late 1980s as Belgrade applied to host the 1994 world basketball championships. In 1989 it was awarded the championships, on condition that the new arena was built. Construction work began in 1992, but with Yugoslavia falling apart and economic sanctions imposed on the country, Belgrade was stripped of hosting rights for the basketball in 1993. Yet the project had begun, and on some of the prime business real estate in New Belgrade, an area being developed for business just across the Sava river from the historical centre of the city. So there was a strong will for it to be completed, and when Belgrade was chosen to host the 1999 world table tennis championships, work on the arena resumed. But those championships were also withdrawn after the Nato bombing of Belgrade in the spring of 1999, leaving the arena with an air of being jinxed.
It had by then been built sufficiently to stage some events, and the first one that took place there was a political rally for the 2000 Serbian presidential election. In an attempt to show he was the architect of the modern Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic held his final rally of the election campaign there. He went on to lose the election, and while he tried to cling to power, he was forced to resign after his continuation in office was made impossible by a series of street protests that culminated in a march of 100,000 people and the setting on fire of the state television building. That appearance in the Beogradska Arena proved to be Milosevic’s final speech in public.
When the International Basketball Federation awarded Belgrade the 2005 European basketball championships (‘EuroBasket’), it acted as the incentive to get the arena properly finished. It opened for basketball in 2004, hosted EuroBasket and the European volleyball championships in 2005 but then had to close because it didn’t meet the necessary safety requirements of a modern indoor venue. So when it was chosen for the Serbia v Australia Davis Cup playoff tie, it had only hosted about half a dozen public events. It has since gone on to become a major tennis venue, with Serbia’s women setting a Fed Cup attendance record when Ivanovic, Jankovic and colleagues attracted around 19,000 spectators for the visit of Japan in February 2009. Since then, it has also hosted judo and handball along with other sports and a string of musical events, notably the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest, after Serbia’s Marija Serifovic won it in 2007 with the song ‘Molitva’.
These days the arena is sponsored by a bank, Kombank, so is officially called the Kombank Arena. But its position right by the main highway from Belgrade to Novi Sad and Budapest makes it a sight from the ground, as well as from the air, as many routes into Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport fly within easy visual distance of the arena.
In the run-up to the Serbia-Australia tie, Serbia changed its Davis Cup captain. Whether Srdjan Djokovic used his influence behind the scenes to effectively engineer the change is not certain – he clearly had something to do with it but the impetus seemed to come more from the players. Dejan Petrovic had become captain in early 2005 after Nenad Zimonjic decided that being player and captain was too much for a team just one level below the World Group and very much aspiring to get there. Petrovic remained captain when Srdjan fired him as Djokovic’s coach in the summer of 2005, but with the impending tie against Australia and Petrovic having played the early part of his career under the Australian flag, there were questions about whether he was the right man for Serbia. He was also thought of as too laid-back to be the ideal captain – he was liked by the players, but some of them found him a little too relaxed. So on Tipsarevic’s initiative, Bogdan Obradovic was approached. Obradovic, who had worked with all the Serbian players, took on the job, with Nikki Pilic as team supremo (the captain of a Davis Cup team has to be a national of the country but the other members of the team don’t, so Pilic was able to help Serbia; he has dual Crotian and German nationality and is the only man ever to have captained two nations – Croatia and Germany – to the Davis Cup title).
The tie itself was never close and Djokovic never needed to play his best tennis. Australia were effectively a one-man team, relying on Hewitt to win two singles and team up with the veteran Paul Hanley to win the doubles. Although the score after day one was 1–1, Janko Tipsarevic had done Serbia’s spadework by keeping Hewitt on court for five sets. Hewitt won the match, but when he and Hanley lost to Djokovic and Zimonjic in four sets on Saturday, the game was up. In fact, Hewitt couldn’t appear for the first reverse singles and Djokovic had no difficulty blunting the big serve of the Australian left-hander Chris Guccione. His 6–3, 7–6, 7–6 win unleashed joyous scenes in the arena. Serbia was in the team-tennis elite for the first time as Serbia (as opposed to Yugoslavia) – it had a young team that looked like getting better and it had an arena to act as its fortress.
Elsewhere in Belgrade, the Djokovic family were starting to make plans for cashing in on Novak’s success. Having spent much of his youth scrabbling for money to fund the investment, it was now time to underpin that effort by investing in the future.
The first outward sign of it came in a restaurant, ‘Novak’, which opened one block removed from the Beogradska Arena. It still exists today, adorned by the statue of Djokovic presented to him at the 2007 Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai – all eight qualifiers were given statues looking approximately like them in the style of the ancient Chinese terracotta army, and Djokovic brought his home to stand outside his first eatery.
A second restaurant followed as part of the tennis centre that he opened in the historic part of Belgrade, which formed part of his plans to create a tennis legacy. He had wanted to open a tennis academy but he initially had difficulty getting a piece of land in Belgrade. So he was offered a piece of land in Kragujevac, a town about 130 kilometres south of Belgrade. The mayor of Kragujevac thought he was on to a winner when he teamed up with the Djokovic family, but, as the piece of land was a public park used by lots of families and children, the mayor found himself up against the wishes of the people. The people won, leaving Djokovic back at square one. He then bought a piece of land in Belgrade, which he used as a bargaining counter to secure some city-owned land where the University Games had taken place. The city agreed to invest in the complex, so Djokovic now runs his Novak Academy and restaurant on land he rents from the city of Belgrade. The site was also the location for the Serbian Open, an ATP tournament that ran from 2009 to 2012. The academy concentrates not just on tennis but on the development of the students’ character – that may soun
d a little trite, or from a good PR manual, but given how much sport in Serbia found itself in the grip of gangsters and other corrupt and dubious folk during the 1990s, and Djokovic’s own personal philosophy, the point has some resonance.
Cynics may look at the academy as a money-making exercise for the Djokovic family, rather than an attempt to invest in Serbia’s tennis future. Both are true: in fact this is what business is meant to be – both sides profit! Serbia’s elder tennis statesman Nenad Zimonjic says, ‘We need to use this generation we have of incredible players to invest in the future,’ and in many ways, that is what Djokovic is doing. And while Serbia’s economy is in better shape than it was in the mid-1990s, it is still a long way from providing large sums of money to invest in non-essential services like tennis facilities. It therefore makes sense for Djokovic to invest money for the benefit of tennis in Serbia, and if it ends up benefiting him and his family, then everyone ought to be happy.
It’s easy to think of Djokovic as the new golden boy of Serbian sport in the middle of 2007. He was, but there were two golden girls who were slightly ahead of him that year.
Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic are thought of by many tennis observers as two of a kind. Striking, with outgoing personalities, they reached the top relatively quickly but then slipped back and have lived in Djokovic’s shadow ever since.
Jankovic is nearly three years older than Ivanovic. She was the world’s top girl in 2001 (at the same time as Janko Tipsarevic was the world’s top boy) but had a much slower route to the top. She was 21 when her run to the US Open semi-finals in 2006 announced her as one to watch. In 2007 she notched up Serbia’s second Grand Slam title (after Nenad Zimonjic’s mixed-doubles triumph at the 2004 Australian Open), when she and Jamie Murray won the mixed at Wimbledon. By the end of the year she was third in the rankings.
Ivanovic was very much a contemporary of Djokovic. Just five and a half weeks younger, she had announced her potential as a 16-year-old, winning a round at the 2004 Zurich tournament and impressing everyone with her poise and confidence, wrapped in a shell of captivating politeness and good looks. She burst on to the scene on the clay in May 2007, winning what was then the leading women’s warm-up event for the French Open in Berlin and going on to reach her first Grand Slam final, when she lost to Justine Henin at Roland Garros. A run to the semi-finals at Wimbledon meant Serbia had a player in the world’s top five by mid-July, and the end-of-year women’s rankings in 2007 show both Jankovic and Ivanovic in the top five, a remarkable triumph for a country still piecing its way out of the traumas of the 1990s.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see both Jankovic and Ivanovic as something of a pacemaker for Djokovic. That was never their intention – they were out there for themselves – but Ivanovic especially played that role. In a glorious weekend for Serbian tennis, Ivanovic reached the final of the 2008 Australian Open and, despite losing to Maria Sharapova, climbed to second in the women’s rankings, while Djokovic won the men’s title the following day and climbed to third. Ivanovic then went on to beat Jankovic in the semi-finals of the French Open, in what was a direct eliminator for the new No. 1 ranking, and followed that up by beating Dinara Safina in the final to join the Grand Slam and world No. 1 rolls of honour in one fell swoop. But Ivanovic sustained an injury to her right thumb in the days after winning in Paris, lost her momentum and was never the same player again. Despite several years of considerable effort and isolated good results, she has never really looked like getting back into the world’s top 10, let alone the top three or winning another major title. Even if she doesn’t win another tournament, she has still achieved a tremendous amount, but her rapid demise suggests an awful lot of her success was down to belief, that fragile commodity that somehow deserted her after her ascent to the top in June 2008.
For Jankovic, it was a similar story. Her best year was also 2008, when she reached the top of the rankings in August, got to her first major final at the US Open and ended the year as the world’s best female player. But she never had a really big shot the way Ivanovic could crush opponents with her big forehand; Jankovic wore opponents down with her retrieving and counter-punching, and having expended masses of effort to get to the top of the rankings, she seemed exhausted when she got there. Four weeks into 2009, she lost the top spot and has never regained it. She has had more success than Ivanovic in recent years and finished 2013 in the top 10, but she remains one of three women players to have been ranked No. 1 without ever winning a Grand Slam singles title, a status she has never seriously looked like losing (the other two are Caroline Wozniacki and the now retired Dinara Safina).
Djokovic’s subsequent achievements have since dwarfed those of Ivanovic and Jankovic, but the two women deserve more than a footnote in his success story. One of the biggest problems for rising athletes in any discipline is the hope and expectation invested in them by their fans and countryfolk. For Djokovic to have had two stalking horses who were capturing a lot of the limelight when he was fighting to break through into the top echelon of men’s tennis was clearly a major benefit for him. And the fact that he gets on with both of them – especially Ivanovic, thanks to their time spent together as kids – means any competition between them was a friendly and constructive rivalry, rather than a bitter fight for the national attention.
Winning the title in Montreal in August had taken Djokovic to third in the world rankings. That effectively made him leader of the chasing pack behind Federer and Nadal, but such was the duopoly those two held over the rest of the tennis world that not even reaching the US Open final could get close to improving Djokovic’s ranking position.
At least Djokovic was guaranteed a place at the year-ending Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai (now the ATP World Tour Finals). He won another tournament en route, beating Stanislas Wawrinka in the final in Vienna, and then lost to David Nalbandian in the semi-finals of the Madrid Masters. But he failed to make any impression in the season-ending finale, losing all his three group matches to David Ferrer, Richard Gasquet and Rafael Nadal. He left Shanghai with his terracotta statue but with a year that had brought him five titles rather fizzling out. He was glad of the break at the end of his most successful year, a break he extended to eight weeks by opting not to play a warm-up tournament for the Australian Open.
There’s no question Djokovic was a worthy winner of the Australian Open but the old adage that even the best need a bit of luck was well and truly proven. A week before the tournament began, there was real doubt about whether Federer could play – he spent a night in a Sydney hospital with a stomach complaint that defied diagnosis but was later confirmed as mononucleosis. The fact that Federer made it to the starting line-up in Melbourne at all is a considerable achievement, but there was something of El Cid about Federer’s appearance – like the Spanish mythical hero who was paraded in battle despite being severely wounded, just to instil fear in the enemy. Federer had reached the semi-finals or better in his previous 14 Grand Slam tournaments and ended up holding the trophy in 10 of them. It was certainly worth a try and, by the time the tournament was down to the last four, it looked all set to be another Federer-Nadal final.
But once again it was Janko Tipsarevic – once the leader of the Serbian new generation who had been totally eclipsed by Djokovic, Ivanovic and Jankovic in the previous 12 months – who did some of Djokovic’s spadework for him. The previous Saturday, Tipsarevic had taken Federer to a 10–8 final set in a 63-game, four-hour, 37-minute third-round match. Federer had come through it thanks largely to 39 aces that saved him having to do too much additional running, but it had taken a lot out of his already depleted body. Not that he would be a pushover for Djokovic, and when Federer served for the first set, few would have expected an upset. But Djokovic won three games on the run and Federer started to make a number of unforced errors. Once Djokovic had saved a set point on his own serve in the third set, he stormed to a 7–5, 6–3, 7–6 victory. One of Djokovic’s post-match comments stands out: ‘I’m
just very amazed I coped with the pressure today,’ he said, revealing perhaps that the way he had lost to Federer in the US Open final four months earlier had indeed built up a concern about his match temperament in the minds of others, and perhaps also his own.
The other massive stroke of luck was that Nadal had been beaten a day earlier in the first semi-final by the flamboyant Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. This was effectively the unseeded Frenchman’s coming-out party and he was on fire against Nadal, allowing the Spaniard just seven games in a thumping display. So after three years of Grand Slam singles finals dominated by Federer and Nadal (it was the first major final since the 2005 Australian Open not to feature one or both of them), the tournament had a final of the young pretender against a largely unknown newcomer.
Suddenly Djokovic was the favourite. Not only was he the third seed and world No. 3 but he had the experience of the US Open final four months earlier; for Tsonga, it was totally uncharted waters. Yet when Tsonga hit two stunning forehands to win the first set – one a passing shot winner off a Djokovic smash, the other a lob at full stretch as Djokovic surged to the net – it seemed the tide was with the Frenchman.
For a match not remembered as a great final, it had periods of outstanding tennis and a wonderful atmosphere, characterised by two expressive players and their passionate supporters. That in itself is interesting. Both at the time and in retrospect, this final is thought of as something of a blip in the glorious rivalry that Federer and Nadal had created. Perhaps the fact that both men were wearing black didn’t help. They weren’t exclusively in black, both had patterns down the front of their shirts, but from the main television camera angle, it looked like both were wearing the same shirts (they were both with the same clothing supplier at the time) and the world’s colour therapists might mull over whether the final would have left a more positive memory if either or both players had worn a warmer colour. Perhaps also there was, for the first time since Lleyton Hewitt had played David Nalbandian in the 2002 Wimbledon final, a major final featuring two players who played pretty much the same way with pretty much the same technique, a foretaste of the Djokovic-Murray matches to come that were always fascinating but not always easy on the eye. For whatever reason (or reasons), it wasn’t always easy to tell the two players apart during the rallies while watching on television, and perhaps that explains why some of the great tennis the two men offered hasn’t helped the final to stand out in tennis’s collective consciousness.