The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  That set up another clash with Nadal, their second successive final both at the US Open and in the majors. Fortunately for Djokovic, this ill-fated US Open, which had had to deal with earthquakes, hurricanes and water seeping through cracks in court surfaces, had to go to a third Monday, giving him more time to recover from his five-setter against Federer, and in another physical match the extra time was probably crucial. Nadal had sounded an ominous warning at Wimbledon. ‘When one player beats me five times, it is because my game doesn’t bother him a lot,’ he’d said after the final. ‘I have to try to find solutions and that’s what I’m going to try.’ Nadal was to find those solutions (a word he uses a lot in English) but it was to take him until the following year. In fact, the US Open final followed a remarkably similar pattern to the Wimbledon final.

  History records that Djokovic beat Nadal 6–2, 6–4, 6–7, 6–1, but the numbers don’t reflect the brutal physicality of the spectacle and the breathtaking nature of some of the rallies. This was tennis at its closest to boxing, and while the two men played a longer final in Melbourne four months later, this was at least as physical, if not more so, even if it did last ‘only’ just over four hours.

  The big similarity with Wimbledon was in Nadal falling away in the fourth set when he had every reason to be mounting a comeback. Djokovic had served for the title at 6-5 in the third set, but Nadal had broken back with some of the best tennis of the match and had then never been behind in the tie-break. Djokovic then took a medical timeout at the end of the third set to have some tightening muscles in his back loosened. Yet with everything lined up for Nadal to muscle his way physically and psychologically back into the match, he fell away. There weren’t the errors that had characterised his fourth-set collapse at Wimbledon, but he did allow Djokovic to play and the Serb took full advantage. When he hit an in-to-out forehand to win the match and fall to his back on the concrete, he had reaffirmed the message he had confirmed at Wimbledon – that he was the world’s best and had not only joined but eclipsed the Federer-Nadal duopoly.

  In the remaining two-and-a-half months of the year, nothing of note was added to the body of work that makes up Djokovic’s annus mirabilis of 2011.

  He wasn’t helped by a scheduling conflict that is understandable but counterproductive. Several years ago, the International Tennis Federation asked the players which weeks they would prefer for Davis Cup ties. The popular response was the week after the majors, which makes sense for most of them, as even a good run at a major means they will be out of the tournament by the second Tuesday, which gives them 10 days to prepare for representing their country. Mindful of its need to keep the players on-side, the ITF acquiesced and has two of its four Davis Cup weekends a year in the week after Slams.

  But that is a terrible week for the marquee names, who find themselves in Grand Slam semi-finals and finals on Friday/Saturday and Sunday (or sometimes Monday) and then have to play a vital singles just a few days later, often on a different surface, often on a different continent. So having just won his first US Open in a brutal four-hour final on Monday night, Djokovic was due on court barely three days later in Belgrade as Serbia took on Argentina in the Davis Cup semi-final. Rumours abounded that he had an injury, but you didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to accept the wisdom of throwing Janko Tipsarevic and Viktor Troicki into singles action on the opening day, to give Djokovic two more days to recover.

  The problem for Serbia was that Troicki was ranked higher than Tipsarevic, so played at No. 1, but his form was on a downward trend. And when David Nalbandian beat him in four sets, it put Serbia on the back foot, especially as Juan Martin del Potro beat Tipsarevic as expected. Troicki and Zimonjic’s win in the doubles kept the tie alive and paved the way for Djokovic to have the hero’s welcome that his exploits during the year warranted.

  On Sunday afternoon he walked out into the Beogradska Arena to the kind of welcome very few people experience. Wearing his red Serbia shirt proudly, almost defiantly, he marched through the dry ice into the arena, highlighted by a spotlight amid dimmed lights, accompanied by the strains of Carmina Burana as 17,000 fans screamed wildly. It was the kind of reception normally reserved for pop stars and prize-fight boxers. If anyone could turn the semi-final round for Serbia, Djokovic could.

  All went well for a set, but Djokovic couldn’t break free from the tall Argentinean. To beat del Potro you have to return well, and Djokovic’s blistering returns were absent without leave. Normally he can run for an hour or two and get himself into the groove, but how much gas did he have in the tank? The set went into the tie-break, and although Djokovic got a mini-break back to level at 4–4, he lost the tie-break 7–5.

  So what happens now? Here was the hero of Serbia, clearly not fully fit, understandably very tired, having played for an hour and still in need of three sets. Something in Djokovic’s subconscious must have given way at that point. He lost his serve lamely to go 0–2 down and, as del Potro drove Djokovic wide to his forehand side on the point for 3–0, Djokovic went down with a scream of anguish and lay motionless on the ground. The exact same thing had happened a year earlier, but if that was partly tactical to get into Tomas Berdych’s head, this was tactical only in the sense that he knew he couldn’t go another three sets to give Serbia a chance of victory in the fifth rubber.

  Such phrasing makes it sound as if the injury was a fake. It wasn’t. It emerged that he did have a tear in a back muscle that he’d picked up at the US Open. He knew he had a chance of aggravating it if he played against del Potro but he calculated he would have a better chance of beating the former US Open champion than Troicki had. In that he was almost certainly right, but in retrospect he had to win the first set. Once that was gone, the game was up and something in the deeper reaches of his being rescued him by sparing him the remainder of a lost cause. As many people are happy to admit, he was willing to try, whereas most players in his position would have considered the risk of aggravating the injury wasn’t worth it. He had a 4–0 record against del Potro going into the match and surely no one could begrudge him the hero’s walk on court at the start. ‘It was my decision but the gamble backfired,’ he said, which is a fair assessment. It was Serbia’s first defeat in the Beogradska Arena and was to remain the only one until a weakened team lost the 2013 final.

  After that, his stellar year fizzled out somewhat. He suffered some defeats that were more the result of anti-climax and fatigue than an opponent playing better tennis, and he had the sense of fun to walk on court for a match in Basel on 31 October dressed in a Hallowe’en mask, complete with a shock of black hair. His willingness to do that – to dispense with the ‘game face’ at a phase of the match where he would normally have been so focused and serious – suggests he felt his year’s work was done, which it effectively was.

  He finished the year as the runaway No. 1. He had broken the Federer-Nadal duopoly and he received a raft of awards. The most prestigious was the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year. This is an award that ought to be the pinnacle of global sporting recognition, and it probably is, although it does seem to have a bias towards tennis that takes a little of its credibility away. Maybe it is just that tennis is enjoying an extraordinary era with Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Serena Williams, but there is always a sense that the best in a year in tennis is always going to feature in the Laureus Awards.

  Nonetheless, Djokovic was a worthy winner when he stepped up to receive his award the week after his endurance marathon at the 2012 Australian Open. ‘It’s really difficult to describe in words how much this means to me,’ he said, before adding significantly, ‘not just me but my family, my team, my country, all the people who’ve been supporting me throughout my whole career.’ It is common practice at trophy-presentation ceremonies for players to thank their team, and many thank their family. But few thank their country. Novak Djokovic had conquered the world in 2011 – he had done what he said he would when his age was still in single digits. And he had done it as much for his c
ountry as for himself.

  How was he ever going to follow his achievements of 2011 in 2012? It’s easy to look back and say 2011 was as good as it was going to get, and that may well prove the case in the course of Djokovic’s whole career. But although he lost the No. 1 ranking mid-way through 2012, he ended the year as the world’s top player, reached three of the four Grand Slam finals and added to his legend with a remarkable third Australian Open title. He also spent most of 2013 at the top of the rankings, and while he was pipped by Nadal in October, he ended the year playing the best tennis, including two drubbings of Nadal in October and November. It would therefore be wrong to put 2012 and 2013 too far behind 2011 – fairer would be to say that from the start of 2011 Djokovic was the world’s most consistent tennis player for the subsequent three-plus years.

  His Australian Open title in January 2012 may well go down as his single biggest achievement. He played four hours, 50 minutes in his semi-final on the second Friday night of the tournament, beating Andy Murray 7–5 in the fifth set. Many thought Murray had done enough to set Nadal up for an easy win in the final by draining Djokovic’s resources of energy, especially after Nadal had beaten Roger Federer on Thursday evening in more than an hour less. But that weekend Djokovic proved that draining his reserves is well-nigh impossible.

  The first week of a Grand Slam often seems a formality for the big names. They can’t win the title in the first week, they can only lose it, but the first week of this one was remarkably important for Djokovic’s chances. He expended the minimum of energy, dropping just 14 games in his first 11 sets of the tournament and reaching the semis having conceded just one set, which was to Lleyton Hewitt in the fourth round. So while he played two punishing matches in the space of 48 hours at the end, his larder was well stocked going into the sharp end of the tournament.

  It was again a case of the big four reaching the semis. Federer took Nadal to five sets but never seriously looked like winning, while the Djokovic-Murray encounter was a genuine 50:50. Towards the end of the final set, Murray often looked the likelier winner, but Djokovic had the confidence of his stellar 2011 and edged the victory.

  Then came the match that was certainly the longest final in Grand Slam history, probably the most physical and, at least towards the end, one of the best in terms of quality. Djokovic was slow to get going, as he often is against Nadal, and found himself a set down after just over an hour. But he bounced back in the second, and throughout the third and most of the fourth he looked distinctly the stronger player. But Nadal came back at the end of the fourth set after a short rain delay and snatched the set on the tie-break. With the tournament now into its third week and the final going past midnight, Nadal looked the stronger. He broke for 4–2 but Djokovic got the break straight back. That signalled another momentum swing, and when Djokovic broke for 6–5, he was serving for the match. If Nadal had seized the break point he had to get back to 6–6, the momentum might easily have swung again, but Djokovic saved it with a boldly angled backhand and then sealed victory with a serve that left Nadal stranded, allowing the Serb to hit an in-to-out forehand to end the match.

  The match time was five hours, 53 minutes, and after embracing Nadal and shaking hands with the umpire, Pascal Maria, Djokovic ripped off his shirt, his inner animal finally released from captivity. His celebration was almost frightening – he walked bare-chested across the court to his entourage, clenched both fists with a primeval scream, and after shaking a few hands, thumped an advertising hoarding several times before retreating back to his chair. You wouldn’t have wanted to meet him in a bad mood when he tapped into that energy.

  Tennis relies on its sponsors, but the farce of having the chief executive of Kia Motors, the principal sponsor of the Australian Open, giving a three-minute speech at almost 2am after the two players had provided nearly six hours of scintillating tennis was painful to watch. It was only when the second of the speeches, given by the president of Tennis Australia, began that someone twigged that Nadal and Djokovic were suffering physically as they waited for their trophies. Eventually, the tournament director, Craig Tiley, signalled to some court staff to get the players chairs, a gesture that elicited the biggest applause of the awards ceremony before the players were allowed to take centre stage again. Within the hour, the two players were sitting in ambulances in the dock of the Rod Laver Arena, both of them on intravenous drips and being monitored, while the ‘bump out’ operation to dismantle the arena as a tennis stadium took place around them.

  Inevitably, Djokovic was asked after the match whether it was the greatest win of his career. ‘I think it comes out on top,’ he said, ‘because just the fact that we played almost six hours is incredible. I’m very proud just to be part of this history, part of the elite players that have won this tournament several times. I was very flattered to be playing in front of Rod Laver, in front of the all-time greats, and in front of 15,000 people that stayed until one-thirty [in the morning].’ Given the dictates of the media and the journalist’s quest to write the first draft of history, it was understandable that he should be asked to assess his victory, but a more considered assessment will have to wait until the end of his career. What is certain is that, even if he never wins another major title, Djokovic’s heroics that night in Melbourne guarantee him his place among the great athletes in world sport.

  Any assessment of Djokovic’s achievements in 2012 and 2013 risks falling into the trap of not having enough elapsed time to assess the true magnitude of them. Despite the blistering start in Australia, he was never going to repeat what he achieved in 2011 – true, Roger Federer won three majors out of four in three years out of four (2004, 2006, 2007) but he had an almost effortless style of playing that took much less out of him than Djokovic and Nadal. The fact that Djokovic ended 2012 as world No. 1, having lost the top ranking in mid-year and ended 2013 playing clearly the best tennis, even if he was pipped in the rankings by the returning Nadal, will probably mean history judges him the world’s best player over the period 2011–13, and possibly longer, but we just can’t tell at this stage as we’re still too close.

  There was a marked difference between the Djokovic of the European springtime in 2012 and the one from 2011. In April he played Monte Carlo, a tournament he’d missed the previous year, and reached the final, where he played Nadal. That Nadal won 6–3, 6–1 to turn the tables on the pattern of the previous year was not the story. Djokovic’s grandfather, Vlada (Vladimir Djokovic), died midweek after a long illness. Djokovic received the news as he warmed up on the morning of his match against Alexandr Dolgopolov and was clearly very upset. He was all over the place in the first set against the mercurial Ukrainian and was perhaps lucky to be playing an opponent who has yet to show he has as much steel as he has talent. Djokovic bounced back to win in straight sets, and then beat Robin Haase and Tomas Berdych before losing to Nadal.

  ‘I definitely don’t want to take away anything from Rafa’s win,’ said Djokovic in his post-match news conference, ‘but it’s a fact that I didn’t have any emotional energy left in me. I just wasn’t there. I’ve never been caught up in this kind of emotional situation before. It’s been a very difficult week for me to go through mentally. I won three matches since the news. I mean, I think I did pretty well.’ Given that this was the grandfather who acted at times as a third parent, whose flat served as a shelter for the entire family during the Belgrade bombing of 1999 and who is reported to have funded some of the tennis facilities the Djokovics set up after it became clear they had a prodigy on their hands, it was generally thought to be a legitimate excuse for winning just four games in a Masters Series final. Yet, regardless of the circumstances, Nadal had the psychological win he needed, and when he also beat Djokovic 7–5, 6–3 in the Rome final four weeks later, he had the form in Masters finals going into the peak Grand Slam season that Djokovic had enjoyed the previous year.

  Djokovic’s US Open triumph meant the French Open was the last of the four majors he had yet to win. W
ith Federer having completed his set in 2009, and Nadal in 2010, it’s easy for modern-day fans to think achieving a ‘career Grand Slam’ is just a milestone that all top players go through. But it’s an extremely difficult accomplishment to pull off. Prior to Federer, only two players had done it with all players eligible to complete: Rod Laver and Andre Agassi. While Laver’s pure Grand Slam in 1969 is a phenomenal achievement that has yet to be matched, three of the four majors were on grass in those days, so only Agassi had won all four since they encompassed the four different surfaces they have today.

  Arriving in Paris for the 2012 French Open, Djokovic was not just going for the career set but also to be only the third man in history to hold all four major titles at the same time. He sailed close to the wind with a five-sets win over Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the fourth round that required him to save four match points, but he came through, and when he set up a final against Nadal, it was the climax everyone wanted to see. Except, perhaps, the weather gods, whose intervention heavily influenced the course of the match.

  Nadal won the first set and, as the drizzle started midway through the second set, Djokovic earned a warning after dropping serve at 3–3 for hitting his courtside bench so hard a bit of it splintered on to the court and had to be cleaned up by a ball-kid. With Nadal leading by two sets and a break up early in the third, Djokovic seemed out of it but used his seemingly hopeless position as a springboard to go for more risks. The tactic worked, and the Serb reeled off eight straight games. At 2–0 in the fourth set, a dramatic turnround was on the cards, but at that point the rain got so heavy it was simply not possible to continue and they came off for the night.