The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  Because of the intensity of the build-up surrounding Murray, Djokovic was almost relegated to a bit-part player until the match finally began. And yet he seemed to be affected by the hype and even by the heat, which was negligible by the standards of many cities on the tennis tour but was sweltering by British standards. He was never sure whether to wear his cap or not and he was making uncharacteristic errors. He lost his serve twice in the first set and used up his three challenges too early in the second set, so he had nothing left on a questionable line call at 5–5. He ended up losing that set having been 4–1 up and again let a 4–2 lead slip (after being 0–2 down) in the third set to leave Murray serving for the title at 5–4.

  At that point he seemed to succumb to his oft-stated belief in destiny – perhaps somewhere deep down he believed it was Murray’s destiny to win Wimbledon, so he was just going to make sure the home favourite had to win it, rather than get it handed on a plate. If that was in his mind, he played some canny tennis with Murray on the point of victory. Djokovic saved three championship points and had three break points of his own for 5–5. There are many in the tennis world who believe that, if Murray had dropped serve then, the whole match would have turned, and subsequent admissions by Murray that his arm was feeling very heavy with the pressure of the moment suggest that could easily have happened. But it’s one of those ‘what if’ moments of history that serve only to enliven a conversation in the bar. The factual account records that Djokovic netted a backhand on Murray’s fourth championship point, for Wimbledon to explode in the kind of ecstasy many of the 15,000 crowd (and another 15,000 watching on Henman Hill) never dreamed they would witness.

  Djokovic was sensitive and smart enough to recognise that this was a moment in which he was, by now, the invited guest at someone else’s wedding, and his on-court post-match interview was a model of diplomacy. ‘Congratultions to Andy, you absolutely deserved this win, you played incredible tennis. Congratulations to his team, I know how much it means to them and how much it means to all you guys and to the whole country – so, well done! I’m aware of the pressure he gets – there is a lot of expectation on him – and that makes his success even bigger. On my side, I gave it all, it was an absolute pleasure and honour again to be part of this final. Thank you.’

  From the brevity of his interview and the speed with which he came into his post-match press conference and then disappeared, Djokovic just wanted to get out. A great champion who has given everything but still lost may have the awareness to recognise another man’s big moment, but it’s not an environment in which many champions are comfortable and he didn’t want to hang around.

  Another thing great champions don’t like is being struck by a rival. At the Montreal Masters four weeks later, Nadal and Djokovic met in the semi-finals in a three-setter that Nadal won on a deciding tie-break. In the fifth game of the final set, Djokovic played a drop shot and followed it into the net; Nadal played a backhand down the middle of the court, Djokovic was slow to see it coming and the ball struck him on the nose. Nadal instantly put his hand up to apologise; Djokovic saw it but turned away without apparently acknowledging Nadal’s apology. The umpire tried to defuse the situation by announcing ‘Nadal has apologised’ as the crowd began to whistle. After the match, Nadal apologised verbally, even though the play had been entirely legitimate. Djokovic declined to escalate the incident and said it was ‘all fine’. A look at the match video suggests Djokovic was more stunned than hurt (Nadal’s backhand was not particularly fiercely struck), but in his moment of intense competitiveness he wasn’t going to acknowledge the apology. It all happened so quickly that there was no time for premeditated action, but by the time they came off court, Djokovic was able to say the right thing for the issue to pass by as uncontroversial.

  That night, Djokovic and a male friend from Serbia went out for a night on the town. They went to a Montreal night club, bought several bottles of champagne and spent the time in the company of a number of young women who will have dined out on their good fortune ever since. But once again, Djokovic had the ability to temper his own intake of alcohol and remain a dignified reveller. He didn’t drink more than the odd glass and he was at all times respectful to the women who fawned over him. He clearly enjoys himself but has limits he sticks to, both for himself and for those he socialises with.

  And he knew he had to be in optimum condition for the next battle against Nadal, who had clearly bounced back after his shock first-round defeat at Wimbledon. They went to New York each having won one major in 2013 and, when they met in the final of the US Open, it clearly meant a lot to the Serb. At the end of the year he described his defeat to Nadal at the French as ‘my toughest loss’, but he seemed more emotionally devastated by his four-sets defeat to Nadal in the US Open final. It was effectively the match that allowed Nadal to finish the year at the top of the rankings, although that might have happened even if Djokovic had won at Flushing Meadows.

  The match followed a similar pattern to the Paris one. Nadal got off to the better start and took the first set. Djokovic broke back to take the second and have the better chances in the third, before Nadal reasserted himself to take a 2–1 lead. There the scripts departed from each other, Djokovic failing to rally in the fourth as Nadal won in four. But the real damage was done in the second and third sets. Djokovic hadn’t broken the Spaniard until the sixth game of the second set but finally did so at the end of a 54-stroke rally. There had been one of 54 strokes in the Djokovic-Murray final a year before but this one was more punishing, both players delivering the kind of strokes that would have been clean winners against most other players but having to see the ball come back with interest. To think Nike built a TV commercial around a 24-stroke rally played by Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi in the first set of the 1995 US Open final – that was club afternoon tennis compared with this!

  Yet, far from being the rally that changed the course of the match, it almost undid Djokovic. He had finally broken serve but that rally had taken so much out of him that he lost the subsequent service game to love as Nadal looked fresh as a daisy. The psychological advantage Nadal took from that proved crucial as the match wore on. Djokovic was able to get his break back and serve out the set, and when he led 2–0 at the start of the third, he had won six of the previous seven games. Nadal bounced back but Djokovic had three break points at 4–4. Had he taken one of them, the outcome might have been different (or might not), but Nadal saved all three, broke Djokovic in the next game to take the set, and then raced through the final set for the loss of just one game.

  Again Djokovic said the right thing at the end – ‘He was too good, he definitely deserved to win this match and the trophy’ – but this time it was said with the energy of someone who was genuinely devastated to have lost a hard-court final to Nadal. He was to beat Nadal twice more before the end of the year; in fact, it was to be his last defeat of 2013. But it seemed to hit him hard, however quickly he was able to bounce back from it.

  After leaving the Beogradska Arena with a torn back muscle on the final day of the 2011 Davis Cup semi-final, Djokovic announced he would sit out the 2012 Davis Cup year. For an athlete for whom playing for one’s country is a massive part of the sport, this was a slightly risky move, even if it made total sense in practical terms. But unlike Roger Federer, whose relegation of Davis Cup in 2005 to lower-priority status in his schedule led to a lengthy downgrading of how he viewed the team competition, Djokovic promised he would be back in 2013 and was as good as his word.

  His loyalty to his country was sorely tested in the first round when Serbia was drawn away to Belgium. Belgium may be an unfashionable country in tourism terms but it has some beautiful places. Unfortunately Charleroi isn’t one of them, yet the Belgian tennis authorities have a habit of choosing Charleroi for Davis and Fed Cup ties (it even played a Fed Cup final there at the height of Justine Henin’s and Kim Clijsters’ fame). So having just beaten Andy Murray in a four-set Australian Open final, Djokovic had to fl
y to Brussels to be on duty five days later against Olivier Rochus. At least it was only the world No. 127, and Rochus’s best days were behind him, but it was still a major effort. Less well known is that the Serbian team had five hours to kill at one stage in the Charleroi trip, and Djokovic led players and backroom officials in several hours of the game of charades, frequently revelling in the role of acting out the clues. One of the members of the Serbian team said it ‘showed he was a real leader, not just on court but in the way he dealt with everyone involved’.

  His loyalty was tested still further in the quarter-finals, when he went from the Miami Masters to the sleepy Mid-West town of Boise in Idaho to lead the Serbian team against the USA. After beating John Isner on the opening day, Serbia lost what was thought to be the vital second singles, when Sam Querrey beat Viktor Troicki in five sets. With the Bryan brothers expected to beat Serbia’s makeshift team of Nenad Zimonjic and Ilija Bozoljac, it looked set to go to a nervy fifth match. But the Serbian pair posted a remarkable win, 15–13 in the final set, to leave Djokovic with the chance to put Serbia into the semis. In the third game of his reverse singles against Querrey, Djokovic twisted his ankle, fell to the ground and writhed in agony. He continued to grimace as the Serbian team trainer strapped the ankle, and he continued playing, gingerly at first but then with more conviction. He was clearly worried about it and said afterwards, ‘If I wasn’t playing for Serbia, I don’t know if I’d have gone all the way.’ Although Djokovic took the first set, Querrey took the second on the tie-break, which put wind into the sails of the Americans, especially as Djokovic’s ankle might have become more painful as the match wore on. But from the start of the third set Djokovic played outstanding tennis and blew Querrey away. He dropped just one more game after that, and the ankle proved to be mildly bruised rather than a more serious injury.

  September’s semi-final allowed him to use the hero’s welcome he always gets in the Beogradska Arena to help overcome the disappointment of defeat to Nadal in the US Open final four days earlier. On a clay court laid to blunt the big serve of Canada’s Milos Raonic, Djokovic found himself playing to keep Serbia in the tie after Zimonjic and Bozoljac had played another marathon doubles, this time losing to Daniel Nestor and Vasek Pospisil. But his straight-sets win showed how much ground Raonic still had to make up against the players at the very top, and he then cheered his team-mate Janko Tipsarevic as he beat Pospisil, the strains of Saturday’s doubles certainly giving the Canadian a much harder task than if he’d had a day off.

  In his on-court interview after beating Pospisil, Tipsarevic said, ‘Hopefully, we’ll have Viktor [Troicki] back for the final.’ Not only did Serbia not have Troicki for the final (see pages 250–1) but it didn’t have Tipsarevic either. At the tournament in Valencia in mid-October, Tipsarevic picked up a heel injury that proved agonisingly slow to heal. He turned up for the final, and even on the Wednesday night he was saying he hoped to be able to play. But he was playing in pain, and on Thursday morning he bowed to the inevitable and withdrew from the Davis Cup final. Djokovic clearly had a say in the decision to pick Dusan Lajovic as Tipsarevic’s replacement for the final against the Czech Republic, but the bigger decision was whether Djokovic would play doubles. He had said throughout the year he was up for two singles but Serbia had to find the third point from somewhere else – now with both Tipsarevic and Troicki unavailable, would he step in for Saturday duty in the hope of seeing Serbia through? The answer was no. He told his team-mates on the Friday night he would give everything in the singles but couldn’t add the doubles at the end of a punishing year that had seen him finish with 23 matches unbeaten. He made it 24 by taking apart Tomas Berdych, leaving him with seven singles wins out of seven for the year in Davis Cup and just one set dropped. But Lajovic, at 117 in the rankings, was no match for the wily Radek Stepanek, who was playing some of the best tennis of his career, and the Czechs retained their trophy with an anti-climactic win in the fifth match of the final weekend.

  Would Serbia have won if Djokovic had played doubles? It’s impossible to say with any conviction. Berdych and Stepanek have a phenomenal record together and they played with such confidence that they would have been hard to beat by any pair. But Bozoljac had a nightmare and Djokovic would certainly have got more returns in. At the end of the day he stuck to his deal, but when a team of – essentially – three singles players finds it’s down to one, it’s very hard to win a Davis Cup final.

  With Tipsarevic still absent (though by now more though paternity leave than injury) and Troicki still suspended, Djokovic decided not to play in the Davis Cup first round in February 2014. The decision was a late one, and who knows what went through his mind when he found that Roger Federer was on the plane to Novi Sad to join his compatriot, the newly crowned Australian Open champion Stanislas Wawrinka, in a full-strength Swiss team? Maybe Wawrinka’s win over Djokovic in Melbourne made Djokovic reluctant to face him so soon after such a painful defeat? Or maybe the presence of both Swiss meant Djokovic couldn’t have helped Serbia to win unless he’d played on all three days. Either way, it meant 2014 was not to be a Davis Cup year for Djokovic and the Serbs.

  In the second half of 2013, Djokovic’s role as a statesman intensified markedly. In August he became one of the very few athletes to address the United Nations General Assembly. The UN had called a press conference to announce 6 April 2014 as the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. The announcement was made by Vuk Jeremic, the Serbian foreign minister who was at the time president of the General Assembly and who the Djokovic family had installed as president of the Serbian Tennis Federation after the ‘coup’ they instigated in early 2011. Jeremic had asked Djokovic and the outgoing International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to accompany him.

  Djokovic addressed the assembly on behalf of the global sporting community. He said he hoped the international day would motivate people to do more to cultivate intrinsic sporting values such as fair play, teamwork and respect for opponents. ‘These ideals are universal,’ he said. ‘Every successful society is built on them and the more we instil respect for these ideals in ourselves, the better the world will be that we leave to our successors.’

  Asked about the experience afterwards, he said,

  I think the invitation was the coolest part. Just having this privilege of speaking in the name of the global family of athletes on such a historical day. Historical because it’s in the United Nations and we all know how the United Nations is important as an organisation. You have over 120 member states deciding about the biggest issues in the world. So there was definitely a special feeling that I didn’t experience before. You had this kind of sensation that you are part of something that is very big – just that experience, you know, brought me chills. Being in a position to speak was quite an honour. The president of the General Assembly is a Serbian, so to have two Serbian people speaking on such a historical day is even bigger for our country. It’s something I will definitely never forget.

  If his speech was a safe, set-piece appearance, a few days later he ventured more of a controversial opinion. After trouncing Joao Sousa in the third round of the US Open, Djokovic was asked in his post-match press conference what he thought of the prospect of air strikes against Syria. The Middle Eastern country was at the time in the midst of a brutal civil war, and evidence was emerging of the use of chemical weapons by the governing regime against its own citizens, news that had prompted the US president Barack Obama to seek a majority in Congress for intervention in Syria.

  Few tennis players venture opinions on international political issues, but Djokovic showed no reticence. ‘I’m totally against any kind of weapon, any kind of air strike or missile attack,’ he said. ‘I’m totally against anything that is destructive. Because I had this personal experience, I know it cannot bring any good to anybody.’ And in another answer in the same conference, he said, ‘Those particular times that me and my fellow countrymen and colleagues from Serbia have been th
rough is definitely, you know, a period of life that we don’t wish anybody to experience. War is the worst thing in life for humanity. Nobody really wins.’ An interesting footnote is that he checked the transcript of his press conference with the transcribers before he left the interview room, just to ensure they had down what he intended to say (if that sounds like censorship or rewriting the record, there are occasional discrepancies between the typed record of a press conference and what was actually said).

  And after the US Open when he was back in Serbia for the Davis Cup semi-final, he appeared alongside the British former royal Sarah Ferguson at the opening of a primary school in central Serbia. The school in Kadina Luka had been renovated with funds from the Novak Djokovic Foundation. The school is entitled ‘Skolica Zivota’, which doesn’t translate exactly but is probably best as ‘small school for life’ (see page 286).

  And in the fortnight between the Davis Cup semi-final and the China Open in Beijing he got engaged to his girlfriend of eight years’ standing, Jelena Ristic. She had been taking on an increasingly large administrative role managing his international sponsorship and PR work, not dissimilar to the role Mirka Vavrinec took on before she married Roger Federer. The engagement certainly did nothing to harm his tennis, as he won his next 26 matches.

  His friend Dusan Vemic says of Djokovic, ‘He’s very happy in the limelight.’ It’s not said with any inherent criticism, merely as a statement that Djokovic is a performer, so when the China Open asked him to recreate the infamous ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis match from 1973 by playing China’s top tennis icon Li Na in Beijing, he was happy to oblige, though more in a spirit of fun than fighting for gender equality. Throughout 2013 there had been many 40th anniversary tributes to the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association and Billie Jean King’s victory over the chauvinistic American Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome in 1973. Li’s victory over Djokovic was somewhat more low-key – like King and Riggs, they played a best-of-five match but it was best of five games, not sets, and Djokovic began all five games 0-30 down. Li emulated King’s achievement by winning for the women by three games to two, after which they were treated to an enormous cake to celebrate the tournament’s 10th anniversary. It’s not known whether it was a gluten-free cake. What is known is that Djokovic beat Nadal in the final a week later.