by Chris Bowers
Red Star’s supporters are known as the ‘Delije’, a word that loosely translates as ‘hard men’ or ‘strong ones’. The Delije are broken down into several sub-groups, some with belligerent names such as Red Devils, Zulu Warriors and Ultras, and they come together at their spiritual home in the North Stand of the Red Star Stadium in central Belgrade (also known as the Marakana – see below). But this is more than just a fan club. The Delije have become known as something of a self-help society for Red Star fans. If that sounds all very nice, it’s got a real edge to it, almost like something out of gangland culture. Many people in difficulties are helped but in a rather sinister, Masonic way. And when the battle for Serbian independence from Yugoslavia got underway, it’s hardly surprising that the links between the Delije and the unofficial militias supporting the Serbian military should be so pronounced.
The biggest link came in the form of a mythical figure known as Arkan. His life story is pure gangster film script, and if no one has made a film about him, a chance has been missed, certainly in Serbia where – despite or because of his brutality – he is something of a folk hero.
Born Zeljko Raznatovic in 1952, Arkan was forever in trouble with the law, and imprisoned several times, including in Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany. But he always seemed able to escape from jail, perhaps because of contacts he made with the Yugoslav state security service in his teens. He returned to Yugoslavia in 1983 and was one of the fans arrested at the notorious Dinamo Zagreb v Red Star Belgrade match in May 1990. In fact, Arkan was credited with cementing the name ‘Delije’ in an official inauguration in January 1989. At this time he was assembling a paramilitary force to play a key part in the forthcoming civil wars, and his force, known as the Tigers, was recruited largely from the Delije. The Tigers were involved in some of the most horrific battles of the Yugoslav wars, notably Vukovar (Croatia) in 1991 and Bikjeljina (Bosnia) in 1992, often singing the songs they sang on the terraces at football matches. Arkan himself was indicted for war crimes during those battles but died before he could be brought to trial.
Some of those songs of the Delije and the Tigers were sung on the terraces of the flower-shaped San Nicola stadium in Bari, when Yugoslavia celebrated arguably its greatest sporting moment. That was when Red Star Belgrade won the European Cup (the forerunner of today’s Champions League). The history of Yugoslav football was a tale of the nearly men. Three times they had reached the Olympic football final but come away with silver. Twice they had been World Cup semi-finalists but failed to reach the final. Partizan lost the 1966 European Cup final and Red Star lost the 1979 UEFA Cup final. No wonder many were happy to tag Yugoslavia ‘chokers’.
But in 1991 Yugoslavia had a champion football team, albeit just at the moment when the country was unravelling in a sea of blood. The final in Bari was a horribly dour match, in which Red Star and Olympique Marseille – the French club that was about to be embroiled in a massive scandal surrounding its controversial owner, the French entrepreneur Bernard Tapie – played out a goalless draw over 120 minutes of normal and extra time. Red Star then won on penalties. Or perhaps it would be better to say Marseille lost on penalties, as the French club had a team full of players who had blown vital penalties in past shoot-outs and were haunted once more. Europe’s most prestigious club-football title – if not the world’s – was therefore a fillip for the club and, to a lesser extent, for the city of Belgrade, but not for Yugoslavia. Within a few months, the nations of some of the Red Star players were at war with each other, and within a year the club was banned from playing home games on Serbian soil.
In the mid-1990s Arkan tried to take over Red Star but failed. So in 1996 he bought a traditional but faded Belgrade club, Obilic, and within three years they were Yugoslav champions (what was left of Yugoslavia – in effect, Serbia and Montenegro). But the methods used in Obilic’s seemingly amazing rise to the top of the national tree were not always conventional, with stories abounding of referees being intimidated, opposition stars developing last-minute injuries that prevented them from playing, and in one case even a delayed kick-off on the last day of the season when both the title and relegation depended on two matches, the delayed one involving Obilic.
Arkan met his end in January 2000, when someone fired 38 shots through him in a Belgrade café. His killer has never been found, which raises questions about whether the assassination was somehow sanctioned. What is clear is that 2000 was the year football died for Slobodan Milosevic.
Despite the damage to his standing caused by the loss of the Serbs’ gains in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, and the Nato bombing of 1999, the fear created by Milosevic’s communist regime was still very much intact in the summer of 2000. But then something happened at a Red Star game. Red Star were playing Torpedo Kutaisi from Georgia in a Champions League qualifying match. Whipped up by a 4–0 lead, the home fans started a chant that can best be translated as: ‘Do Serbia a favour, Slobodan, and kill yourself.’ The police stepped in as tensions were ramped up, and at one stage, a Red Star flag was seized by two police officers and trampled under foot. At that point, Red Star’s coach, Slavoljub Muslin, spoke to the officers, got the flag off them and gave it back to the fans. Although a tiny gesture, it was seized upon as a sign that Red Star were willing to stand up to the Milosevic regime. After that, virtually every top-flight football match on Serbian territory became an anti-Milosovic rally, and with presidential elections due within two months, the effect was profound. Sixty days after the Red Star v Torpedo Kutaisi match, Milosevic lost the election and his attempts to cling to power were thwarted. Thus does the Delije claim to have orchestrated the downfall of Milosevic and communism.
If that’s not enough of a role for sport in the political fortunes of a nation, the football writer Jonathan Wilson believes it runs even deeper than that. He says Serbia has always had the Brazilian flair, the Serbs have always thought of themselves as ‘European Brazilians’, and even nicknamed their main stadium in Belgrade the Marakana, copying the main football stadium in Rio de Janeiro. But he says it’s more than just copying a style of football:
I suspect it comes from a slave mentality. A lot of Brazilians come from the former enslaved peoples and survival as a slave meant adopting a mentality of cunning and trickery. It even finds its way into certain dances, and at times in Brazil it’s more important to trick your opponent with a bit of clever footwork than it is to win the game. The southern Slavs have had a similar feeling of enslavement – for six centuries they were under the Ottoman Turks, and most of the history of Yugoslavia was a fight for existence in the face of the threat from Moscow. So I think the adopting of a lot of Brazilian habits in football, even if it may be largely subconscious, tells us something about how the Serbs and other former Yugoslav peoples see themselves.
An additional factor that might explain the feeling of enslavement is a theory among some ethnologists and linguists that the words ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ have the same route. According to this theory, Slavs became slaves around the beginning of the ninth century, and the word ‘slave’ can be traced back through old English, old French and medieval Latin to the same word used by the early Slav peoples to define themselves. Even if there’s no truth to this idea, the presence of the theory is enough to create an inferiority complex in those looking for one!
Wilson extends his hypothesis to the extent of calling Yugoslavia, and particularly the Serbs, ‘Europe’s most consistent chokers’ in football. He cites the fact that the Yugoslav national team and its leading club teams always seemed to fall at the last hurdle. But in one case it didn’t. Yugoslavia did in fact win the Under-18 football World Cup in 1988, leading some to wonder whether the country broke up just as its golden age of football was about to begin. But would Yugoslavia have done any better than Croatia did by coming third behind France and Brazil in the 1998 World Cup? No one will know, but past experience suggests probably not.
Extrapolating experience from Serbian football and transposing it on
to tennis is a dangerous game because the two cultures are so different. Two of the leading tennis clubs are the tennis sections of Partizan and Red Star, and when they play each other at tennis, that too is known as ‘the eternal derby’, but there is vastly less sting in the tail than the football derby. The tennis fan base is an altogether more genteel crowd than the football community.
But in some ways, Djokovic has been a pacemaker for Serbian sport in the sense that he has broken the cycle that the Serbs are the perennial glorious losers. It’s easy to forget that, until about 2008, possibly even as late as 2010, there was a feeling on the tennis tour that the Serbs were quitters. Ivanovic and Jankovic had reached the top but had fallen rapidly from it, Djokovic had won the Australian Open but not pushed on, and the men in general had a habit of often not allowing their opponents the achievement of winning – they often seemed to prefer to retire hurt from a match, rather than lose the final point (not just Djokovic – the very cerebral Janko Tipsarevic has retired from 25 matches in his career, tour-level and Challenger). Djokovic has turned that round by cutting out most of the retirements and demonstrating an ability to dig deep in some incredibly punishing matches. If there is a ‘victim trait’ in Serbian sport and society, he has shown that it can be overcome. And it was interesting to see that Sinisa Mihajlovic, the passionately pro-Serb coach of the Serbian national football team, attended all three days of the 2013 Davis Cup final to cheer on the Serbian national tennis team.
If the top five sports in Serbia are football, basketball, volleyball, handball and water polo, it’s fair to ask where tennis comes now that four Serbs have topped the rankings and Ivanovic and Djokovic have become attractive icons for girls and boys. The answer is hard to gauge. Being able to fill a 17,000-seater indoor stadium for Davis Cup ties is a phenomenal achievement, but one-off events where people can tell their grandchildren that they saw the great Djokovic at the peak of his career are not a fair measurement of the general health of a sport. The Serbian Tennis Federation reported a 40 per cent increase in demand for court space in the six months after Djokovic reached the 2007 French Open quarter-finals, but will the current wave of interest last? We will probably only be able to judge 10 years after the Djokovic generation retires, when it becomes clear how many adults of working age want to play tennis having been inspired to take it up as kids because of the Djokovic boom.
One thing that needs correcting is the assumption that tennis in Serbia – even in the old Yugoslavia – began with Monica Seles, and that she and Djokovic are the first two big names. This is grossly unfair: indeed, the first national tennis association was founded in 1922 when the country was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The royal family were keen tennis players, especially King Alexander I, who was assassinated in 1932. And a leading player in the 1920s and 1930s was Mladen Stojamovic, who had been Gavrilo Princip’s principal accomplice in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the act that triggered the outbreak of the First World War.
There were a number of big names in the early years, such as Dora Alavantic, and the 1970s – the growth decade of professional tennis after the end of the split amateur and professional circuits – had a number of prominent Yugoslavs. Nikki Pilic was at the centre of the 1973 Wimbledon boycott, Mima Jausovec was the French Open champion in 1977 and Zoran Petkovic (the father of the German player Andrea Petkovic) was a national champion and played Davis Cup for Yugoslavia. Then in the 1980s Yugoslavia twice reached the Davis Cup semi-finals, led by Slobodan Zivojinovic, and they did so for a third time in 1991 as Yugoslavia crumbled around them, the team of Zivojinovic (a Serb), Goran Ivanisevic and Goran Prpic (both Croats) breaking up after Yugoslavia’s quarter-final victory over Czechoslovakia, as the Serbo-Croat war gathered pace.
By then, Monica Seles was world No. 1 in women’s tennis. An ethnic Hungarian from Novi Sad in the north of Serbia, she won Yugoslavia’s second Grand Slam singles title (after Mima Jausovec) when she became the youngest French Open champion in 1990 at the age of 16. What is interesting is that she was at the top of the world’s sporting headlines in 1992, the year the five-year-old Novak Djokovic really caught the tennis bug, yet it was Pete Sampras’s Wimbledon triumph in July 1993 that Djokovic always cites as more of an inspiration, rather than his compatriot’s dominance of women’s tennis. Seles was the runaway world No. 1 when she was stabbed on court in Hamburg on 30 April 1993. Despite her lead in the rankings, she lost the No. 1 spot within five and a half weeks to Steffi Graf, over whom Seles seemed to have a hold in big matches, certainly on hard and clay courts.
After being coached by her father Karolij and also Jelena Gencic, the Seles family moved to Florida when Monica was 12, so she could be near the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton. The family eventually applied for US citizenship and Seles got hers in 1994, midway through the 27 months she missed of her playing career following the stabbing. It means eight of her nine major singles titles were won as a Yugoslav and only one as an American, but all nine were won with Sarasota, Florida very much her home and base.
So while tennis was recognised in Serbia before the era of Zimonjic, Tipsarevic, Jankovic, Troicki, Ivanovic and Djokovic, and had a long-standing basis in Serbia’s sporting culture, it was by no means a prominent sport. It’s therefore legitimate to view Serbia’s golden generation a little like the emergence of soccer in America in the 1970s, or the emergence of rugby in Argentina or cycling in Great Britain – home-grown success in those sports raised the profile and participation level significantly but couldn’t topple the existing established sports from their places in the national sporting psyche. As such, the future of tennis in Serbia may well depend on the post-Djokovic generation, as only the ability of the next lot to keep the fire burning will guarantee that tennis stays in the Serbian sporting limelight when there’s no Djokovic to cheer and little chance of winning the Davis Cup.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘THIS IS WHAT I’M BORN FOR’
In the press conference that followed his Wimbledon victory in July 2011, Djokovic was asked to comment on a statement his mother had made: that winning the Davis Cup for Serbia seven months earlier taught him to play without fear. Djokovic replied, ‘Well, if my mother says that, then it’s like that. There is nothing else I can say. My mother knows me better than I know myself.’
It’s easy to make the case that winning the Davis Cup freed up Djokovic and formed the missing piece in the jigsaw that allowed him to utterly dominate world tennis in 2011. Djokovic half-makes that argument himself. ‘The Davis Cup title came in the right moment,’ he says. ‘I believe that title, that feeling of sharing one of the biggest titles in our sport with my team for our country, in our country, was one of the best feelings I experienced as a tennis player on the court. That was a great confidence boost and helped me to believe in myself, to believe more in my abilities on the court.’
But that would be too simple an explanation for his annus mirabilis of 2011. There were several ‘last pieces of the jigsaw’, of which the gluten-free diet he discovered in mid-2010 was certainly one (whether actual or only in the mind – the health professionals are divided but his belief in the gluten-free diet was clearly of huge significance to his well-being), and rediscovering the rhythm on his serve was another. To that can be added a whole range of little things, from the orthotics in his shoes to the calm but authoritative backroom team presided over by Marian Vajda. And at the age of 23, he had a greater wealth of experience, including a more mature relationship with his father that gave him the sense of being in control of his own life, rather than having it run for him.
Yet it’s important to remember that there were people at the start of 2011 who felt Djokovic may have peaked. He had won the Australian Open at 20, but since then he had spent three years clearly behind Federer and Nadal at the top of the game. Coming from a country where team sports were valued more importantly than individual sports, his biggest priority – so the hypothesis went – may well have been the
Davis Cup. And with Andy Murray establishing himself as a member of the elite, there was no guarantee that Djokovic had a natural right to ascend to the world No. 1’s throne when the fortunes of the great duo began to wane. So while it may look, with the benefit of hindsight, like the most natural progression, Djokovic’s wonderful 2011 was by no means a given at the start of it.
He was, perhaps, a shade lucky in not having to face Nadal at Melbourne Park. Nadal went to Australia looking to hold all four major titles concurrently but he was undone by his left hamstring in the quarter-finals. Facing his compatriot David Ferrer, who has always seemed to lack belief against Nadal in Grand Slam matches, Nadal called for the trainer after three games and he left the court for treatment. Although he finished the match, it was clear he couldn’t move at anything like his normal level, and Ferrer’s straight-sets win took place in a somewhat bemused atmosphere, where no one at Melbourne Park could quite take what they were seeing at face value. In his post-match press conference, Nadal refused to talk about any injury, except for one hint that he couldn’t move that well. It was an approach that divided the tennis community into those who felt it was all rather a fake and those who respected the dignity with which he refused to blame an injury for fear of undermining one of the best results of a fellow professional’s career.
Perhaps Djokovic’s biggest victory at that tournament was in beating Federer in the semi-finals. Thought of very much as a 50:50 beforehand, Djokovic outplayed Federer with his superb footwork. Federer was starting to put into practice the coaching of Paul Annacone, notably Annacone’s suggestion that he play closer to the baseline to rob his opponent of vital split seconds. But every time Federer drove Djokovic wide, the Serb was there with blistering groundstrokes that would be anatomically impossible for players with lesser ankles, and the Serb won in three tight but clear sets. Interestingly, Djokovic favours his left foot when kicking a football, so it could be that he has an unusually strong left foot which allows him a firmer base than other players have for hitting big backhands when at full stretch.