by Chris Bowers
Another part of the deal was that 14 planes would be named after iconic Serbian figures. And it should surprise no one that the first plane was named Novak Djokovic. The simple fact is that Djokovic is Serbia’s best ambassador by a country mile, and the nation’s leading lights are falling over themselves to make the most of him while he’s around.
Boris Tadic was Serbia’s president from 2004 to 12. He was frequently courtside when Djokovic and Serbia’s other top players played for the biggest titles and for their country in the Davis and Fed Cups. ‘Serbians feel very proud because of Novak,’ Tadic said after Djokovic’s Wimbledon triumph in 2011. ‘The people have been suffering very much in the last few decades and that kind of victory is very helpful, it makes people very proud. For sure, he’s helping to change Serbia’s reputation. The first association people have of Serbia is Novak Djokovic, not the Serbian president, and that’s very good. We had a first association with Serbia through the former president [Slobodan Milosevic] and that was very bad. Now the situation is totally different and I’m very proud about Novak.’
Dragan Djilas, the leader of Serbia’s Democratic Party and mayor of Belgrade until October 2013, told a group of international journalists, ‘I think it would be very useful if one day the world’s media would start to speak about Serbia not in terms of the wars, not about Milosevic – I know this is interesting and every few months it comes up – but it’s important they speak of Serbia through someone like Novak Djokovic or some other successful guys from Serbia, scientists, professors, young people, people from culture. Djokovic is great – we need more like him to promote a different image of Serbia.’
What’s interesting is that Djilas was clearly trying to find a list of Serbian role models but could think only of Djokovic. For the record, the second person to have a plane named after them in the Air Serbia fleet was Emir Kusturica, the film director, who is playing a similar role to Djokovic in the arts world.
The need for an ambassador may seem a little strange to citizens of countries like the USA or Great Britain; nations which are largely blissfully unaware of the way some parts of the world view them with contempt. The Serbs are in no doubt that their international reputation needs some repair. Two of Serbia’s top tennis players of the pre-Djokovic era, Nenad Zimonjic and Dusan Vemic, had to make their way on the circuit during and immediately after the wars of the 1990s, with sanctions and visa restrictions widespread. ‘There were stories going round in the nineties when they blamed us for things we didn’t do,’ says Zimonjic. ‘There was often proof that we weren’t to blame, but no one talks about that and the bad reputation hangs on. So it’s nice when we have someone who can present a positive image. Hopefully, what Novak is doing will give a chance for the world to look at us objectively and maybe can create the conditions for upcoming generations to question some of the things that were misrepresented.’
Vemic says the problem with Serbia’s reputation went further than just the Yugoslav wars. ‘We were always represented in the late 1990s and early 2000s as criminals and terrorists, not just in the news but in many movies,’ he says. ‘We were always the bad guys. I’m sure he’s helped change that, at least a little bit. He’s given us some recognition in the world in a positive light. He has always represented our country in a really positive and proud way. For the country, he was the best ambassador.’ Vemic is not the only Serb to note that the Serbian terrorist or criminal is a stereotype among film directors, and it throws an interesting light on Djokovic’s cameo performance for Expendables 2 as a racket-wielding killer, even if the sequence ended up on the cutting-room floor. It’s worth noting that there has been a Hollywood convention for many years that when a villain is needed an English accent is normally used, yet by and large the English don’t seem to notice.
It’s possible therefore to make the case that the Serbs have an inferiority complex, but even if they do it’s still real, especially to those who travel abroad and have to deal with the world’s reaction to the name of the country. When an American, a Briton, a Frenchman, a German, an Australian, or indeed a citizen of any one of the four dozen most prominent countries of the world says where they come from, there is normally instant recognition of the country. But until recently, a Serb travelling abroad would encounter either hostility or puzzlement. It’s something Djokovic himself was very aware of when he started travelling. ‘Not many people knew where Serbia is,’ he says, ‘and some of them even thought I was saying Siberia. It was an adventure explaining to them where Serbia is, but I enjoyed it. I felt that I was on a mission to bring as much good as I can to stand next to my country’s name, because the media wasn’t bringing out the best news about my country at that time.’
The Serbian television commentator Nebojsa Viskovic tells the story of the first Grand Slam tournament he covered. ‘It was the 2001 US Open, just before 9/11,’ he says. ‘When I said where I came from, people would say, “Where?” I would whisper it. Since the tennis euphoria it’s such a different story. When I do interviews, people from other television stations sometimes ask me where I come from, and when I say “Serbia” they give me the thumbs-up. Because something nice happened, something nice came from Serbia – not only Novak but the women as well, Ana and Jelena. Now I say I’m from Serbia with pride.’
Ana Ivanovic herself says, ‘Many times I’ve been asked, “Oh, is it safe to go to Serbia?” When you meet people at tournaments around the world and people ask where you’re from and you say Serbia, they often ask, “Is it safe there?” and I say, “Yes, it’s very safe there.” At the movies all the gangsters and criminals, all the bad guys, are either Serbians or Russians, so it’s not really fair. I really hope people can have a better image of Serbia.’
This illustrates the importance to Serbia of having an international role model, and indeed some people interviewed for this book say they now find the instinctive reaction to the word ‘Serbia’ is, ‘Ah, Novak Djokovic.’
Responding to all the big names who say he is the best ambassador Serbia could have, Djokovic says, ‘That’s a lot of responsibility. I feel the pressure. It’s because we have a harder way to succeed in life, we Serbs, because of the past we’ve had, because of the history. We have to dig deeper and we have to do much more in order to be seen and to be spotted.’
Not that Djokovic has any difficulty being spotted; in fact, he seems to be a born performer. He has been invited on to many of the big US television shows and has been happy to oblige with all sorts of publicity stunts that many players would have run away from. He sang a song at the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest which was hosted by Serbia in Belgrade. Asked to take part in a fashion show in Montreal in 2009, he ripped off a silk bathrobe to reveal the briefest pair of briefs. And at the end of 2010 he allowed himself to be strapped to the wing of a bi-plane, wing-walking and volleying tennis balls in a commercial for his racket company Head (‘My mother asked me, “Why did you do that?” – it was crazy, one of the craziest things I’ve done in my life for sure.’). But there’s a valuable dividend for his country in his showmanship. Writing in August 2011 about Djokovic’s appearance on Jay Leno’s talk show Tonight, the Serbian-American writer Ana Mitric said, ‘Before Djokovic, the three most “famous” Serbs were dictator Slobodan Milosevic and military “leaders” Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic [all three of whom have ended up in the UN’s war-crimes tribunal in The Hague] – not exactly the type of guys who get invited on to the Tonight show.’
Although he’s streets ahead of anyone else in Serbia in terms of his international profile, Djokovic is not alone. Four months after his first Grand Slam title at the 2008 Australian Open, Ana Ivanovic won the French Open title and made it to the top of the world rankings, so she and Jelena Jankovic were also ambassadors for their country. Ivanovic says,
It was one of the great honours we had as sports people to represent Serbia. I think sport brings people together and no one judges where you come from; they judge what you achieve. In a way I, and I think every
one else, felt like it was a chance to bring a better name to our country. The few times we had a chance to meet our president [Boris Tadic], he always showed appreciation and gratitude for that. He used to say, ‘You guys are the best ambassadors we can have.’ What Novak is doing now is amazing and it helps our country so much. He’s told me it was a great honour and the chance to show a different face, and to show that we have funny people.
It’s not just that Djokovic is a good role model – how he goes about his nationality is part of what the world finds appealing. He is patriotic and never misses a chance to promote Serbia but there’s nothing messianic about it. Given that his mother is Croatian, it should be no surprise that some of his best friends are Croats (in particular, Ivan Ljubicic and Marin Cilic), but given how Serbia and Croatia fought each other in the early 1990s, it’s a fact that’s not without significance. And there was the trophy presentation in Montreal in 2007 when Djokovic was introduced by the master of ceremonies as being from Croatia. He laughed it off, saying, ‘I don’t mind you calling me Croat. Serbs and Croats, it’s almost the same. We’re all people.’ In an interview with a Croatian newspaper, Djokovic said, ‘I would put myself above all the nationalist conferva. For someone abroad, it is very difficult to distinguish between our people, our borders, who we are, what we are. That is why I am not offended. I know how much effort I need to explain where I come from and where these mountainous Balkans are.’
Although Djokovic would always have been an internationalist in some way, he has perhaps been helped more than is obvious by his friendship with Ivan Ljubicic. A Croatian born in Bosnia of mixed Bosniak-Catholic parentage, Ljubicic could have had one of at least three nationalities but ended up a national hero for Croatia. ‘I feel part of the world,’ he says. ‘I was never nationalistic – people mix up nationalism with patriotism, which are two different things. I love playing for the country and support the country but it doesn’t mean I hate others. I respect everybody. Once you circle the world with other people, you can’t just enclose yourself with such a small environment.’
Ljubicic wonders whether Djokovic’s strong Serbian consciousness has detracted from him being a truly global star. ‘I think he did a tremendous job – I’m not sure how much people in Serbia are giving him credit for this, but Serbia really had a negative reputation in the past and I know he’s done a lot and he’s trying hard. Maybe some people don’t see him as a global star because he’s really proud of being a Serbian and he’s putting Serbia at the front all the time. He’s trying to promote the country harder than anyone else before him, probably because he feels the reputation the country has is not right and he wants to change that.’
The American Todd Martin, who was a member of Djokovic’s coaching team in 2009–10, tells an interesting story about Djokovic the diplomat:
Novak has a pretty good understanding certainly of his own country’s history and some of the relationship stuff with other countries. He’s also a bit of a people person, so he hasn’t wasted this opportunity of travelling the world and experiencing different cultures, and he’s generally pretty aware. That meant there were times when I was the one American with lots of people from the Balkan or Slavic regions. One time in particular it was pretty difficult to be that guy without a great knowledge of Serbia – Serbian-American relations were never a huge part of my course of study, whereas America is the big fish for the Serbians and for a lot of other countries. One fellow we encountered – I forget whether he was Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian or what – thought the American government was to blame for some of the issues his country had experienced over the years. He may be right, I needed some better understanding of the background which I didn’t have, so I did my best to play dumb, which isn’t really too difficult for me. But this guy was particularly aggressive with his opinion, and I felt Novak did a tremendous job of explaining the perspective without necessarily taking a side and without upsetting his friend, so it wasn’t confrontational. I was impressed.
Given the battering Serbia’s reputation in the world took in the 1990s, the question arises as to whether Djokovic could in some way atone for his country’s atrocities. A straw poll of a number of Serbs illicits a near universal answer: ‘That would be treachery’, ‘He’d be a traitor to his country’ and such like. These responses highlight the dual role Djokovic plays as a Serb and an international citizen. As an international citizen, he recognises the need for reconciliation and the part that the acknowledgement of transgressions against human decency plays in that reconciliation, yet as a Serb he has to be loyal to his country. This is why he sometimes seems more of a warrior when playing in Serbia and more of an athlete when playing in the world’s greatest tennis stadiums. And why he has to tread carefully at times. For example, as a noted supporter of the Red Star Belgrade football team, he’s sometimes asked to put on the team shirt for publicity photos, but Red Star is currently sponsored by the controversial Russian energy giant Gazprom, and Djokovic will be aware of Gazprom’s dubious reputation in the west so doesn’t overdo the occasions when he wears the shirt.
The thoughtful Serbian sports journalist Zoran Milosavljevic observes, ‘What drives him is his patriotism and desire to represent Serbia in the best possible way. There’s a lot of defiance in it. His driving force is to show that Serbia is not an aggressive backwater but a modern, civilised country. He does this by his good manners, language skills and general sense of humour.’
Amid all the talk about him representing Serbia abroad, it’s important not to overlook his ability to help heal the still latent divisions within the states of the former Yugoslavia. His mix of being a Serb born to a Croatian mother and an ethnic Montinegrin father from Kosovo is not dissimilar to the mixed parentage of Tito, and while there are plenty of people in the former Yugoslav lands who have mixed ethnic heritage, the importance of such mixed parentage in a high-profile hero could be significant. Dejan Petrovic says of Djokovic’s standing in Serbia, ‘Nole can be like Tito, doing the job of uniting people, definitely within Serbia if not for other countries that were formerly Yugoslavia.’
Djokovic himself says, ‘I actually love all the ex-Yugoslav countries, and that includes Croatia too, regardless of the horrible war. I am not a person who holds a grudge over something for too long, I have a forgiving nature. Maybe it’s because I haven’t experienced the worst from the war, because I didn’t lose my family or my home, like other people who have a much harder time forgiving and forgetting. But I honestly don’t think that we as countries have any more reasons to fight. The media tend to stir the pot way too often. The moment we start forgetting, they keep reminding us and pulling us back into the past, which is not very helpful.’
Through all this talk of Djokovic as a statesman and a diplomat, it’s important not to create the impression that the animal in him has somehow gone away. It is still very much there, and while he knows how to keep it behind bars, it does make occasional appearances.
The most striking of these was at the end of his marathon Australian Open final in January 2012, when, after shaking hands with the umpire and embracing Rafael Nadal, Djokovic ripped off his shirt, roared from the bottom of his gut, and as he went over to his entourage showed the body language less of the goalscorer who wants to hug his team-mates and more of the warrior who wants to show he’s the leader of the pack. There was something of the Maori ‘Haka’ about it.
But there is also the occasional sense that the animal is never far away when things go wrong. In the 2013 Wimbledon final, when Djokovic started getting the sense that everything was against him, he lost a bit of his cool towards the end of the second set, screaming at the umpire Mohamed Layani after running out of challenges. That was nothing compared with the tongue-lashing he gave another umpire, Ali Nili, in the semi-finals of the Shanghai Masters in October 2013 against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, after Nili judged – correctly – that Djokovic had let a ball go, so his opponent’s successful challenge to the electronic review system meant Tsonga won t
he point. And there was a marked transition during Djokovic’s seven-minute monologue in defence of Viktor Troicki at the 2013 ATP Finals – while Djokovic started off calmly and rationally, the emotions gradually took over and he ended up almost ranting.
The task therefore is to keep everything in balance. His former assistant coach Dusan Vemic says,
When he gets the balance of his emotions right, he’s as close to perfection as he could be. If he’s too mellow: not good. If he’s too wild: not good. But when it’s just the right amount, he’s a remarkable tennis player. Tennis is a sport where nowadays most players are very square in the sense of being just another tennis player on the court, but when he’s in the right place he’s amazing to watch. When he plays for himself, you can see he’s sometimes a little more stressed, but when he plays for his country he’s very determined, very focused, a lot of good energy, especially when he plays in front of our crowd – he really draws all that energy from them and always performs extremely well. Sport is a great thing, it can take people of a young age away from a potentially wrong path, but sometimes he needs the aggression to keep the balance right.
He appears always to have been like this. Jelena Gencic talked about the piercing eyes that went with his immense focus and ability to learn. And the Serbian tennis commentator Nebojsa Viskovic, who had a long-running feud with Srdjan Djokovic, remembers meeting the 12-year-old Novak for the first time.
He was very polite, with such nice manners, and respect for my age. But very confident and very serious – he looked like he was going to be a scientist. He’s very clever. He almost has a split personality – one we see, the other is seen only by people in specific situations. And even as a boy he knew how to manage the relationship with me. I can’t say we were friends but we were close. Our relationship was very good all the time. After the difficulties with his father, the relationship stayed strictly professional, but at the highest level. He never told me anything [about the issues Viskovic had with Srdjan], I never told him anything, neither of us brought up what had happened. People around him were protecting him from many of the hassles that Srdjan causes. Like his father Novak has his dark side, but unlike his father he knows how to shut it down and when to bring it out. He’s a great tactician.