The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  He lost just nine games against Murray in the final. It’s possible the real story of that final has never been fully told. Just before the walk on court, a tournament official wished Murray well, to which Murray muttered misanthropically, ‘Hopefully, I can get through it.’ The Scot had been suffering from back problems throughout that fortnight, and while it’s hard to know what exactly to read into his rather pained body language when he’s losing (until recently, Murray seldom lost a match without looking as if he was suffering greatly), he certainly didn’t seem to be at full fitness. And there was almost a sense of relief for Murray that he hadn’t lost embarrassingly. Invited on a couple of subsequent occasions to say whether there was anything hindering him that day, Murray has always denied it, but Nadal may have established a convention among the top players: not to blame an injury for a defeat to an opponent they respect.

  And maybe Murray was beaten, at least in part, by the growing realisation that Djokovic was something of a born-again player. Six months later, Djokovic was to say, ‘After the Davis Cup win I was full of life, full of energy, eager to come back to the tennis court, eager to play some more, win some other tournaments. In a sentence, I lost my fear. I believed in my abilities more than ever. Australia was one of the best tournaments I played in my life.’

  Yet the biggest obstacle to Djokovic dominating tennis was the fact that he lacked self-belief against Federer and Nadal. ‘I had too much respect for them,’ he has since admitted. He had no difficulty believing he could beat everyone else, but there was a psychological block against the top two – certainly against Nadal.

  Given that admission, perhaps the real work in the annus mirabilis was done in the finals of the four ATP Masters-1000 tournaments leading up to the French Open. Over more than a decade, the ATP has done its best to market its top nine tour-level tournaments as a special series, a bit like the European Champions League in football, and they do stand out from the rest of the 60-odd tour-level events that make up the men’s professional circuit. But they have always struggled to get close to the four majors, and in terms of financial turnover the gap is getting bigger, not smaller. Yet for Djokovic in 2011, they were more than just warm-up events. In the finals of Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid and Rome, he prepared the ground for his final climb to the top.

  In the first half of 2011 there was a strange triangle at the top of the men’s game. Nadal clearly had the edge over Federer; in fact, Federer, for all his dominance, has not beaten Nadal at a major since the 2007 Wimbledon final. Federer still felt he could beat Djokovic, though Djokovic’s emphatic win at the Australian Open had made their rivalry very much even. So being able to beat Nadal was the key to Djokovic’s assault on the summit.

  His victory in the final of Indian Wells was a boost, but it’s hard to read too much into results at Indian Wells. Although the tennis facility built by the former player Charlie Pasarell is quite superb, the setting is a slightly rarefied one, in that it’s part of a retirement community, making the average age of the spectators higher than elsewhere on the tour. In addition, the ball can sometimes fly in the Californian desert, so freak results can never be ruled out. In retrospect, there was nothing freakish about Djokovic beating Federer in the semis (his third victory in three tournaments over the Swiss, having beaten him in the final of Dubai a fortnight after Melbourne), but at the time, Djokovic just looked like a player in form.

  When he beat Nadal in Miami on a final set tie-break, the tennis world sat up a little more. Beating the clear world No. 1 twice in successive finals was becoming a statement, but Nadal’s best surface was still to come.

  Djokovic skipped Monte Carlo, but after picking up a second title at his own tournament in Belgrade, he played the back-to-back Masters events in Madrid and Rome, the home straight of the run-up to the French Open. By now people were talking about his amazing unbeaten streak. Going into Madrid it was 28 matches in the year and 30 since his last defeat (to Federer at the ATP Finals). When he beat Nadal 7–5, 6–4 in the final, the tennis world was sitting bolt upright – it was his first ever victory against the Spaniard on clay and Nadal had been beaten in a clay-court final for only the third time. But again there were slightly mitigating circumstances. Nadal has never been totally comfortable in Madrid, where the altitude makes the ball fly more quickly through the air, and the Caja Magica tennis stadium often seems to help those players who play best on hard courts. That’s why the real damage Djokovic did to the Nadal psyche took place in Rome. This had been something of a stronghold for Nadal – he had won back-to-back five-set finals in the days when the final was played over the full distance, and the conditions were much more similar to Roland Garros than Madrid had been. So when Djokovic beat Nadal 6–4, 6–4 in the final, he suddenly became a joint favourite for Paris.

  What was Djokovic doing? He and his team had identified that Nadal’s incredibly heavy topspin allowed him to play relatively safe, in the sense that he didn’t need to hit into the last half-metre of the court – a three-quarter-length shot with heavy topspin that made the ball almost explode off the surface could often do the same damage. So Djokovic stepped in to make use of the shorter ball. He had always been a player to play largely on his baseline but now he stepped even further into the court to take the ball early and rob Nadal of vital seconds. It was a high-risk strategy, as it made him vulnerable to having to play balls off his shoelaces when they were hit deep, but with Nadal’s game built around phenomenal speed and retrieving ability, it was worth the chance to rush the Spaniard. And once the strategy began to work, the psychological dividend kicked in, as Nadal felt the need to hit deeper when he got a softer ball, and frequently overhit.

  By the time the Roland Garros semi-finals came round, Djokovic’s unbeaten streak was up to 45 matches. But on a glorious if gusty spring day in Paris, the streak came to an end on one of the best days of tennis played in the history of the sport.

  After Nadal had celebrated his 25th birthday by beating Andy Murray in the first semi-final, everyone was expecting the Nadal-Djokovic final that would crown the series of their four Masters finals. Djokovic took to the court against Federer knowing that victory would take him to the world No. 1 ranking. But it was to be the day Federer breathed life into his faltering career in the match of the tennis year. He not only served well but he had a game plan that he carried out with great intelligence. When Federer won Wimbledon 13 months later in July 2012, he traced his revival back to the win over Djokovic in Paris, the one that gave him belief that he could still hold his own with the best.

  Although the record books have it as a four-sets win for Federer, that doesn’t show how close Djokovic came. Having dropped the first two sets, he rallied back to take the third, and when he served for the fourth at 5–4, the daylight was disappearing to such an extent that they looked dead set to come back on the Saturday morning to play a one-set shootout. In that, Djokovic would surely have been a clear favourite, but it didn’t get that far. Federer played a superb game to break back, and as the level of tennis rose in tandem with the rapidly fading light, he held his nerve to take the tie-break 7–5 on his third match point.

  Djokovic was gracious in defeat. He recognised that his great run would have to end somewhere and that he had been part of a great sporting spectacle, but it still hurt for him to lose his winning run in such a high-stakes match. The run was over but a feature of the Serb’s career has been his ability to accept that a defeat has gone, regroup and come back stronger. He wisely realised that he needed a break after Paris, so reneged on his commitment to play at London’s Queen’s Club and was next in action at Wimbledon.

  His Wimbledon draw was not without pitfalls. Kevin Anderson, Marcos Baghdatis and Michael Llodra all had the potential to hurt him, but he reached the quarter-finals for the loss of a single set. A four-sets win over the 18-year-old Australian Bernard Tomic should have set up a repeat of the Paris semi-final against Federer but the Swiss was beaten from two sets up by Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. For the
second successive major, Djokovic went into his semi-final knowing that victory would give him the No. 1 ranking. This time he didn’t falter – he beat the Frenchman in a highly entertaining four-setter to set up a final against Nadal, who recovered from a poor start to beat Andy Murray in the other semi-final. The top spot Djokovic had dreamed about as a child was his, but the question was whether he would celebrate it with the biggest individual title of his career or as a consolation for having to make do with the Wimbledon runner-up prize.

  This was the match where the four Masters-1000 finals really paid their dividend. It helped that Djokovic played some of his best tennis in the first two sets; in fact, some of the points in the second set were breathtaking. At times he seemed to be toying with Nadal, and when the score stood at 6–4, 6–1 for the Serb, it was almost like a dream sequence. But could it last? Djokovic’s level visibly went down at the start of the third set. It was no disgrace – few players could have kept up the level he’d shown in the first hour – but Nadal capitalised and broke. When he broke again and took the third set 6–1, he was back on track to repeat his remarkable Paris-Wimbledon double from 2008 and 2010.

  Djokovic was perhaps a little lucky to break early in the fourth, but it was what happened after that that was most remarkable. Nadal is human, he makes mistakes, but he hardly ever makes them on big points – record the first four games of any Nadal set and you’ll find some errors, but record the last two of any set and there are very few. But as the fourth set wore on, he made more and more errors. Djokovic wasn’t playing badly but nor had he rediscovered his level from the first two sets. It was as if the work done in those four Masters-1000 finals was eating away at Nadal, and the seemingly indestructible competitor almost self-destructed.

  ‘I was trying to take myself back to the four matches where I’d beaten him,’ Djokovic explained later. ‘I had that in the back of my mind. I was trying to perform the same way: aggressive, taking my chances, not giving him opportunity to take over the control.’ Easily said but much harder to do. The fourth set was a feast of scrambling, with the noise level from both players’ grunting rising with the tension of the match. But what Djokovic did on several occasions was to throw in a soft ball after a succession of big baseline shots, and on most of them Nadal went for too much and overhit. That was the psychological damage Djokovic had inflicted from the four victorious finals. Nadal even got the break back and served at 3–4 to get back on level terms, but Djokovic broke him again and thus served for the Wimbledon title.

  At 5–3, 30–30, after a long baseline rally that had gone to Nadal, Djokovic threw in a change of tactic. He served out wide and volleyed the return into the open court at full pace on the backhand. If the strategy had misfired and he’d been broken and lost the match, people might well have pinpointed that move and said that was where he blew it. It could have happened, but at that point, Djokovic knew he had his man on the ropes and it was worth the risk to try and ram home his advantage. On the next point he again came to the net, though not behind the serve, but he didn’t have to play the volley as Nadal’s backhand sailed out.

  Djokovic fell to the turf and moments later even ate a mouthful of grass, saying he ‘felt like an animal’.

  Was this what he imagined when, as a seven-year-old, he found a plastic vase and pretended it was the Wimbledon trophy? He’s not the only kid to dream of winning Wimbledon but one of the few who has the drive and the determination to go on to realise that dream, so did he think of his childhood dreams at the point of victory? ‘I did,’ he said. ‘When I finished the match, when I ate the piece of grass, I had a flashback of my whole childhood, what I’ve been through, memories, first tennis courts that I grew up on, days spent in Belgrade. It was beautiful.’

  An hour later when he faced the assembled tennis media in his post-final press conference, he was more considered but still effusive.

  This is what I’m born for, to be a tennis champion. I was just chatting with my brothers and my family and my team in the locker room, just kind of remembering those days of the hard work that we put in in Germany and back in Serbia when I was eight, nine, ten, eleven years old, the dreams I had. It’s really beautiful. I mean, this success kind of makes you rewind the old days, makes you come back to your childhood and remember what you’ve been through to get to this stage. It wasn’t an easy way but I guess that’s necessary in order for you to fight for what you want to achieve. We all know the situation in our country, how it was with the wars and things like that. It was definitely really difficult to become a tennis professional, with tennis being not one of the most popular sports in our country. It didn’t have any history. But then [at] the end of the day, now when you think about it, that’s something that we needed. Not just myself but Ana Ivanovic, Jankovic, Tipsarevic, Zimonjic – all these players who have been successful these last couple of years in men’s and women’s tennis, we had a tough way to go through. That made us mentally strong.

  Djokovic also made the statement, ‘I’m going to celebrate like a Serb’, which went down well with the British who liked the sound of it, even if they didn’t really know what it meant (could a well-oiled Brit really imagine Djokovic singing Serbian folk songs as a way of celebrating?). Back home in Belgrade, an estimated 100,000 fans turned out to greet him in a pop-concert-like reception in Republic Square. He rode in an open-topped bus from Nikola Tesla Airport to the city centre with his replica of the Wimbledon trophy, waving to fans who lined the route.

  In the days after his Wimbledon title, there were instances of kids fixing up ropes between two posts and finding two bits of wood and a rubber ball with which they would pretend to play tennis. It would be wrong to read into this the birth of a popular sport in Serbia, but it was a reflection of a national hero and children traditionally like to ape their idols – this particular idol played a sport that was largely unknown in Serbia but he was no less an idol for it.

  Whatever he had achieved back home, in tennis terms he had shaken up the establishment. Given how the decade starting around 2004–5 has become the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic era, it’s easy to forget what a massive sea change Djokovic’s win at Wimbledon represented. Since Gaston Gaudio’s almost freakish win at the French Open in 2004, just three men (Marat Safin, Juan Martin del Potro and Djokovic) had stopped Federer and Nadal duopolising the 28 major singles titles up for grabs. Djokovic was not just world No. 1, he had beaten Federer and Nadal eight times in nine matches in the previous six months. He had broken the Federer-Nadal bank.

  By the time Djokovic left Wimbledon, he’d played 49 matches in 2011 and won 48 of them. Having achieved two of his biggest goals in the last three days of Wimbledon (the No. 1 ranking and the Wimbledon title) and three in the previous seven months if you count the Davis Cup, he could have been forgiven for losing some of his bite in the remainder of the year. But he said after Wimbledon, ‘I want to win more Grand Slams, I will definitely not stop here,’ and he strolled through his first tournament back, the Canadian Masters in Montreal, and was only prevented from winning the Cincinnati Masters when a shoulder injury caused him to retire at 0-3 down in the second set to Andy Murray.

  That created a couple of days of speculation about whether the man of the year would be able to play in the US Open, but the withdrawal in Cincinnati was largely precautionary, and Djokovic was fully fit by the time the US Open began just over a week later. More than that, he was trying out a new health gizmo. As the US Open got under way, the Wall Street Journal reported that Djokovic was spending three lots of 20 minutes a week in ‘an egg-shape, bobsled-sized pressure chamber’. Many players spend time in hyperbaric environments, which put more oxygen in the blood to allow them to recover from punishing matches, but this was supposed to be vastly superior to your bog-standard hyperbaric chamber. It was made by a Californian company, CVAC Systems, who claimed its $75,000 contraption could enhance athletic performance ‘by improving circulation, boosting oxygen-rich red-blood cells, removing lactic acid and possib
ly even stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis and stem-cell production’. It made for a good story and Djokovic was happy to say he was using it, but when asked 16 months later whether he had one with him in Australia, he said he had only made ‘limited use’ of the chamber in the USA.

  He certainly looked fully fit at Flushing Meadows, dropping just 12 games in his first three matches. Things got steadily tougher after that, with a 16–14 tie-break against Alexandr Dolgopolov, a gruelling four-setter against his Davis Cup team-mate Janko Tipsarevic in the quarter-finals and another bruising five-setter against Roger Federer in the semis.

  For the second year running, Djokovic saved two match points, but this victory was almost a steal. Federer had dominated for the first two sets as Djokovic had struggled to find his rhythm. Federer broke to lead 5–3 in the final set, and at 5–4, 40–15, he had two match points. On the first of them, Djokovic went for a gamble with a big forehand return of serve and made it with a spectacular clean winner. It was clear from the post-match press conferences that this winner had outpsyched Federer. Perhaps it was Djokovic raising both arms to the crowd to milk some support after most of the fans had been shamelessly pro-Federer from the start, perhaps it was the fact that the gamble had paid off, perhaps it was the cheeky smile Djokovic delivered as he prepared to return serve on the second match point. Whatever it was, Federer netted a forehand on the second match point and was a broken man after that. In his post-match news conference Federer seemed almost to imply that going for such a gamble on match point was disrespectful. His comments probably shouldn’t be taken too literally, as the disappointment must have been overwhelming, but it made the point that Djokovic had not just outpsyched Nadal but could outpsyche Federer too. ‘I didn’t want to have him do to me here what he did at the French Open,’ Djokovic said.