The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  Had he won that match, it’s hard to see Djokovic having beaten Rafael Nadal in the final. The Spaniard was in his raging best form and doused the power of Berdych’s powerful groundstrokes in an emphatic display to claim his second Wimbledon title. But Djokovic had done enough to make himself feel good about where his game was going.

  His victories over Croatia – over the weekend he was introduced to Igor Cetojevic for the first time (see pages 174–5) – were less important in tennis terms than in socio-political terms. This was a local derby, and while the two sets of supporters were very different in character from football fans attending a Croatia-Serbia international or a Dinamo Zagreb v Red Star Belgrade club match, it was still a highly charged atmosphere in Split’s Spaladium. His straight-sets wins were over two friends: Ivan Ljubicic, by then well past his best and only turning out because of an injury crisis in the Croatian team, and the world No. 13 Marin Cilic. Cilic’s win over Janko Tipsarevic meant his match with Djokovic was live on the final day, but Djokovic played an outstanding match, dropping just eight games.

  The real premium from his Wimbledon confidence boost came at the US Open, when he reached the final by beating Roger Federer in the semis, saving two match points in the process. This time Federer was the conservative one while Djokovic went for his shots on the big points – including one breathtaking forehand to end a long rally and save a match point – and was rewarded with a 7–5 win in the fifth set. He was beaten in the final by the all-conquering Nadal, the Spaniard being deprived of a calendar-year Grand Slam only by the knee injury he suffered in the first set of his Australian Open quarter-final – without that, Nadal would probably have won all four majors that year. But the big story for Djokovic for the rest of 2010 involved Serbia’s quest to win tennis’s premier team prize, the Davis Cup. And that US Open final, which took place on the Monday evening because of rain, very nearly thwarted the Serbs.

  Djokovic arrived back in Belgrade feeling worse for wear. The secret was kept from Serbia’s Davis Cup semi-final opponents, the Czech Republic. Indeed, Djokovic was nominated on the Thursday to play in Friday’s singles. But on Friday morning, using a rule that has to exist for pragmatic reasons but undermines other Davis Cup rules, Serbia replaced Djokovic for medical reasons, saying the player had gastroenteritis. His place was taken by Viktor Troicki, who promptly lost to Radek Stepanek. Serbia’s cause was saved by Janko Tipsarevic’s superb win over a tiring Tomas Berdych, whose stellar year was beginning to catch up with him.

  Mirroring what Serbia had done two years earlier when Djokovic was ill for the tie against Russia, Serbia’s captain Bogdan Obradovic opted to throw Djokovic in for the doubles alongside his old mentor Nenad Zimonjic (officially it was the captain’s decision, but most people assume Djokovic calls the shots in the Serbian team and Obradovic has the diplomatic skills to present decisions as his own – this happens in a lot of Davis Cup teams with one dominant player). Djokovic and Zimonjic had won their two previous Davis Cup doubles but this time they were up against quality opposition in Berdych and Stepanek, and the Czechs won in four sets, ending the match with an emphatic 6–1 in the fourth. On that Saturday night, the Serbian dream of a first Davis Cup success, which had looked so favourable given their home draws, looked to be evaporating.

  At least Djokovic had had some court time, which was supposed to help him against Berdych in the first reverse singles. Yet with the Czech leading by a set, and a break up in the second, it was all going wrong for the Serbs. That was when Djokovic summoned up his acting skills. By then (September 2010) he had effectively given up on his impersonations of other players’ strokes, but his ability to act was needed to outpsyche Berdych and turn the tide of a match Serbia had to win.

  In the sixth game of the second set, Djokovic was playing some desperate defence. He threw up a lob, Berdych smashed it into the ground and, as the ball bounced up high, the Serb lunged to try and retrieve it. It was a hopeless cause, and as he came down, he fell and ended up motionless on the surface behind the baseline. As the applause died down, Djokovic continued to lie motionless. A nervous hush descended over the Beogradska Arena. The umpire got off his chair and ran over to the player to see if he was all right. Obradovic left his bench to see if his man was all right. Only with a crowd of people around him did Djokovic start to move. He was eventually helped back to his chair on the shoulders of Obradovic and the Serbian team physio.

  For a few moments, the 17,000-strong crowd thought their dreams were over. Their hero was wounded, already struggling against a fired-up Berdych and now unable to fight back with full fitness. But Djokovic wasn’t really injured. Although he wasn’t going to admit this for fear of bringing the game into disrepute, he knew Berdych was vulnerable to having his rhythm disrupted, so he had to find a way to disrupt it. The Czech is one of the best ball-strikers of his era, and when he’s on song he can beat the very best, but there is a slightly formulaic nature to his play, and Djokovic had figured he just needed to knock the Czech off his stride. So a thin, almost pathetic bandage was put under Djokovic’s left knee, he came back out to continue the match, promptly broke back, broke again to level the match at one-set-all and duly won in four sets. Was it gamesmanship? – probably, but his country came calling, and he did what he needed to. And it was all within the rules, albeit rules written to keep tennis going when a player is injured. The more interesting interview after the match came from Berdych, who clearly felt Djokovic had exploited the rules but refused to make a big thing of it, no doubt because he felt a bit sheepish at having fallen into the trap.

  With Janko Tipsarevic playing one of his best-ever Davis Cup matches to beat Stepanek in the fifth, Serbia’s Davis Cup dream moved on in dramatic style. The nation was in the final, and that final would be at home against one of the giants of Davis Cup history, France.

  The final was clearly Djokovic’s priority at the end of the year. He played five tour events, winning Beijing and losing in the final of Basel to Roger Federer. He reached the semi-finals of the ATP Finals in London but was almost a little lacklustre in going down 6–1, 6–4 to Federer – everyone recognised that his mind was not on winning a second year-ending singles title but on the national challenge a fortnight later. Yet that defeat to Federer on 19 November 2010 should not go unnoticed. Although no one knew it at the time, it was to be Djokovic’s last defeat for six and a half months – or 195 days.

  The Davis Cup final followed a similar pattern to the semi-final – in fact, a similar pattern to many of Serbia’s matches. There is an implicit assumption when Djokovic plays that his two singles are largely counted as bankers, with the Serbs needing one win from the three other matches. With a team of three top-50 singles players and an experienced doubles specialist, that gave the Serbs three realistic bites of the cherry, yet when Tipsarevic offered very little resistance against France’s top player Gael Monfils on the opening day, and with Troicki and Zimonjic squandering a two-set lead to lose the doubles to Arnaud Clement and Michael Llodra, Serbia’s dream rested on the hosts winning both the final day’s singles.

  Djokovic was majestic in beating Monfils for the loss of just eight games. He was feted as a conquering hero as he walked into the Belgrade Arena in his red Serbian shirt, and he crushed Monfils like a man on a mission. But the loss of the doubles meant that win only teed up a decisive fifth rubber – Djokovic couldn’t hit the cup-winning shot himself. Whether it was his decision or Obradovic’s, the responsibility of winning the Davis Cup was given to Victor Troicki and not Janko Tipsarevic, largely because Troicki emerged from his doubles with more confidence than Tipsarevic had emerged from his singles on the Friday. It proved an inspired decision, although the luckless Michael Llodra freezing on the other side of the net also assisted Serbia’s cause. Troicki, an only child who viewed his Davis Cup team-mates as his brothers, played the match of his life and saw Serbia to the most ecstatic of victories.

  It was Troicki who, during the quarter-final against Croatia five mont
hs earlier, had suggested that if Serbia won the Davis Cup, the players and team officials would all have their heads shaved. Such private bets or challenges often happen, but few expected this one to happen so publicly. A hairdresser had been hired for the day, and once Troicki had done his post-match on-court interviews, all four players, plus the captain Bogdan Obradovic, the Serbian Tennis Federation president Slobodan Zivojinovic and even the septuagenarian team supremo Nikki Pilic, all came under the electric razor. It was a nightmare for the International Tennis Federation staff, who were trying to prepare the presentation ceremony of the biggest jewel in the ITF’s crown – respected marketing and organisational executives, power-dressed to give the impression of professional slickness, found themselves with brooms, sweeping away shaved tufts of hair from the presentation stage. What the players will think when they show their grandchildren the photos of the team holding the trophy is open to question – they’ll probably just have to explain that they were so happy they weren’t responsible for their appearance. Asked about his new look an hour later, Djokovic said in an interview, ‘I’m wearing a hat – that tells you all you need to know.’ Despite never having let his thick hair grow anywhere near what could be described as long, or even medium length, Djokovic was delighted that he had a few weeks for it to grow back before his next public appearance in January in Australia.

  There was something touching about the chaos with which Serbia’s Davis Cup triumph was celebrated. There is always an official dinner a couple of hours after the final finishes, in which it is customary for the losing team to turn up smartly dressed in a show of sportsmanship. Such dinners are carefully organised and choreographed, but on this occasion more people turned up than had invitations, and even some of the Davis Cup’s stalwart officials found their promised seat had been occupied because it was just the place to be for everyone who thought they were anyone in Belgrade society.

  Later, in the small hours, there was a party in a club just off Republic Square in the centre of Belgrade. A Serbian brass band played traditional Serbian music as the players celebrated their success. None of the four would want that night to be seen as typical of their approach to the discipline required of top-level athletes – as well as having several glasses of champagne, they all smoked Cuban cigars, a sign of the opulence they must have felt (although smoking is much more a part of national culture in Serbia than in western Europe or America). The Serbian sports journalist Zoran Milosavljevic, who was present, said, ‘The raw emotions Djokovic and the other players let out at that party showed just how deep the patriotism runs in him. You could see why he would do it, why some people say he would prop up Serbia with one hand if necessary.’

  The players were heroes. They had put Serbia on the map and all four were given diplomatic passports in April 2011. On the night of Sunday 5 December 2010, it seemed that this was the height of their careers – what could possibly compare with this? Maybe when they all finish playing some will quote that night as the pinnacle, but for all of them, the Serbs’ Davis Cup success was to prove the springboard to dramatic rises in personal fortunes over the next couple of years, none more so than for Djokovic himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE ROLE OF SPORT IN SERBIA

  To say sport is an integral part of Serbian life and culture would be accurate, but it doesn’t take us very far. For a start, one needs to distinguish football from the rest of sport – football is so engrained that it has for decades been an extension of wider battles, whether inter-nation struggles and self-determination, or nationalist versus federalist systems of government. And the other sports that feature prominently in Serbian life are generally team sports, so while Novak Djokovic may come from a country with sport in its blood, you won’t find many tennis balls in the arteries.

  Having said that, when comparing Djokovic’s standing in Serbia with, say, Roger Federer’s in Switzerland, the sporting backdrop is much more in Djokovic’s favour. The Swiss are a landlocked people with no raw materials – their affluence has been achieved through hard work in a variety of labour-intensive industries: watch and clock making, cheese, chocolate and tourism. As such, the Swiss are happy to admire the exploits of a top-level sportsman but respect for entertainers and athletes doesn’t run to celebrity complexes. Federer has often remarked how he can still walk through the streets of his home city of Basel without too many people stopping him, and a childhood tennis-playing friend of his who went on to become an adviser in Swiss politics said, ‘You couldn’t imagine the Swiss having a David Beckham culture.’ By contrast, sport stands on a sufficiently high pedestal in Serbian life that Djokovic can become a national hero, even if few fully understand his sport.

  Football is clearly streets ahead as Serbia’s top sport. Then basketball comes a clear second. Next would come volleyball and handball, and water polo is also very popular. So the top five sports in Serbia are all team sports, with tennis not really scoring. Until the Ivanovic/Djokovic golden age, tennis was thought of very much as a minority elite sport, played by the old royal family and their cohorts but not really by the people. But then all individual sports struggle for recognition in Serbia – a few boxers, wrestlers and shooters have become short-term heroes and Serbia won gold in taekwondo at the London Olympics. But it’s mainly a team-sport nation, which explains the importance to Djokovic and Serbia of winning the Davis Cup in 2010. In the eyes of his compatriots, that was the ultimate achievement in his sport, especially as he was able to do it on home soil.

  The magnitude of football’s role in Serbian consciousness is probably best understood by the part it played in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, in particular the Serbo-Croat war. A full description of just how closely football and Serbian nationalism were linked in the 1990s appears in Jonathan Wilson’s book Behind the Curtain, and these pages can only offer a brief summary.

  A number of people are willing to say – quite seriously – that the opening salvo in the Serbo-Croat war was fired when Dinamo Zagreb played Red Star Belgrade in 1990. Indeed, there is a statue outside Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium that depicts a group of soldiers and underneath is the dedication, ‘To the fans of this club, who started the war with Serbia at this ground on 13 May 1990.’ The match came shortly after the election of Franjo Tudjman as president of Croatia on a nationalist platform, and Dinamo Zagreb’s most loyal fans had pledged allegiance to Tudjman’s HDZ party. Rocks had been stockpiled in advance; Red Star fans had brought bogus Belgrade number plates with them, which they put on Zagreb cars to con Dinamo fans into pelting rocks at their own nationals. Hundreds were arrested and well over 100 injured, including 79 police officers.

  But if Dinamo v Red Star was a massive grudge match within the old Yugoslavia, the Belgrade city derby between Crvena Zvezda (Red Star) and Partizan is even more intense. Known as ‘the eternal derby’, the two teams were forever associated with rival political ideologies. Red Star was thought of as the Serbian nationalist club, while Partizan was the club of Tito’s Partisans, the multi-nation force that repelled the Croatian Ustase and the Serbian Cetniks to help unify Yugoslavia after 1945. Indeed, in the late 1950s, Franjo Tudjman, a fervent Croatian nationalist, was president of Partizan and is believed to be responsible for the club’s now familiar black-and-white playing strip. Partizan still exists, but the break-up of Yugoslavia means the political element has been severely weakened, even if the rivalry with Red Star is as strong as ever.

  The political lines were never quite as firm as they were talked up to be. Red Star was founded in 1945, presumably by communists, as the red star is a communist emblem – it would certainly have been a smart move, given the way the political wind was blowing at the time. As the club has always been associated with the poor and oppressed, it’s easy to see how it could have been founded by the communists but at the same time be anti-communist, given that Tito’s post-1945 regime was a communist one (albeit without the same degree of economic collectivism prevalent in the Soviet bloc). In the 1970s, rival clubs t
aunted the Red Star fans with the term ‘gipsies’, an insult the Red Star faithful happily took on. It meant that, whenever Red Star’s fans came across fans from another club, violence was almost inevitable, though in fairness, the same could be said for many leading clubs in English football in the late 1970s (the English happily forget that punch-ups were very much part of what many football fans were looking for at that time, despite the mealy-mouthed attempts by football administrators to claim it was ‘only a small minority’). And if that other club was Partizan, the antipathy was at its most fierce. Support for the Yugoslav national team was always somewhat fragmented, as citizens of one constituent republic never quite knew how much to cheer for players from another nation, and that even extended to intra-city rivalry. Some Partizan players representing Yugoslavia were booed by their own crowd if there was a strong Red Star element in the stands.

  The two sets of supporters of Red Star and Partizan amply illustrate the integration of sport, or at least football, into Serbian society.

  Partizan’s supporters are known as the ‘Grobari’, which means gravediggers or undertakers. Formed after Partizan reached the 1966 European Cup final, their home is in the South Stand of the club’s home ground, the Partizan Stadium (formerly the JNA Stadium; JNA was the Yugoslav National Army), and the name comes from the cemetery of a church just by the stadium. They had a fearsome reputation in the 1970s and 1980s, and hooliganism accompanied them across Europe. Officially, the Grobari were shut down as an official entity in the 1990s after a rocket fired from the South Stand killed an eight-year-old Red Star fan during an eternal derby, but the name lives on in local parlance and occasional banners.