The Sporting Statesman

by Chris Bowers

  Maybe that is an underestimated characteristic of greatness – the ability to keep one’s dark side shut down, or at least to detonate it in a safe environment? Roger Federer has done the same, overcoming a hot-headed, sometimes petulant side to his character that threatened to hold him back, and finding ways of releasing it off-court so he can be totally efficient about the management of his emotions when on court. Maybe that is why playing Davis Cup is so important to Djokovic – he’s known to be unhappy about the cup’s scheduling and has left officials of the International Tennis Federation in no doubt about his feelings, but he very seldom skips Davis Cup weekends. He seems to feed off donning his red Serbia shirt and playing for his country, almost as if it allows him to be a soldier for his country in a way that playing as an individual doesn’t. He can certainly let his inner animal have greater expression when playing a home Davis Cup tie than he can in most of his tour matches.

  Another attribute that his friends speak about is his memory. Some say he will always remember a conversation, prompting many of his friends to be careful what they promise.

  The role of humour is also important for him. Those who have worked with him say he has a great sense of humour and a great need to play it out, but he keeps his fun time and his work time strictly demarcated. ‘He’s a lot less funny than people think,’ says Todd Martin, who worked with Djokovic for several months in 2009–10, ‘and he’s a lot smarter than people think. If you sit down with him, he’s not cutting jokes the whole time, he’s a pretty serious guy and very smart.’ That’s why his decision to don a Hallowe’en mask for his walk on to court for a match in Basel in October 2011 was such a break from the strict demarcation between work and fun, and was pretty much a signal from him that he felt his year’s work was effectively complete.

  At the 2014 Australian Open he was asked what the best part of being Novak Djokovic was. He was clearly captured by the question and gave it a few moments’ thought before answering. ‘Usually, I don’t like to talk too much about myself,’ he said, ‘I leave that to other people, but for me it’s important to always know where I come from, be grateful for the life I have, of course cherish and nurture every moment spent on the court. I don’t take any situation for granted. Being aware of all these things is the best of being Novak Djokovic.’

  An element of Djokovic’s life that is hard to assess in the more secular west is the role the Serbian Orthodox Church plays. It would be wrong to suggest that he is devoutly religious, but the ritualistic role the church plays in the life of Serbia is sufficiently strong that it is very much part of his life. He always wears a cross as a medallion on his neck chain, and he frequently crosses himself and looks to the heavens after winning matches.

  He has also contributed to church funds and in April 2011 was awarded the Order of St Sava, first degree, by the church’s patriarch, the highest order presented by the Serbian Orthodox Church. Such is the link between the award and financial contributions that there is almost a tariff for it, generally held to be around €100,000. Djokovic has certainly given well over that amount, largely to help Serbian people and the sanctuaries of the Holy Church, particularly in Kosovo and Metohija. ‘This award is certainly the most important I’ve ever been given,’ he said on receiving it. ‘As an athlete and a religious person, it is hard for me to find appropriate words to describe my feelings of gratitude for the confidence I gain from this. It can be earned only with hard work and self-belief, belief in your loved ones and in God.’ (He has also been awarded the Order of the Star of Karadjordje, the highest civilian award that can be given by the Republic of Serbia.)

  There have been several born-again tennis players over the years, many of whom wear their religion very openly. The Williams sisters often credit ‘Jehovah’ in interviews and trophy ceremonies, and Michael Chang never missed the chance to thank ‘the Lord’ whenever he spoke at trophy presentations and sponsor events. Djokovic is not in this category and will seldom volunteer information about his faith unprompted. But the presence of a faith – even if it is more ritualistic than deeply thoughtful – is no doubt a factor that helps him keep his inner animal behind bars and keeps his job of hitting a bit of fluffy rubber backwards and forwards over a net in perspective.

  Djokovic has put tennis on the map in Serbia and the country has a window of, possibly, another four or five years to make the most of what is likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime player.

  In the ructions that engulfed the Serbian Tennis Federation following the 2010 Davis Cup success, there seems little doubt the Djokovic family – particularly Srdjan – thought about founding a rival national association. But out of that carnage arose a new structure in the existing association that may have left the development of Serbian tennis in the Djokovic and post-Djokovic era in better hands. While much media coverage centred on the ousting of ‘Bobo’ Zivojinovic and his replacement by the politician and UN diplomat Vuk Jeremic, the real change was in splitting Zivojinovic’s job into president of the federation and chair of the board. Jeremic is president of the federation, which in reality means he chairs the annual meeting, while the chair of the board is now Toplica Spasojevic.

  A former basketball player, Spasojevic is one of the most successful businessmen in Serbia, having built up his company, ITM, from nothing into a workforce of 1,400 employees in seven countries. It was the distributor for Nike in Russia after the communist system was disbanded and has had other very big contracts in the sporting world. But he has a sense of noblesse oblige (or perhaps that should be richesse oblige) – a belief that his success in business requires him to put something back – and he is president of various associations and initiatives, including the Serbian chamber of commerce and several promotional societies. He was, for a while, president of Red Star Belgrade and in 2011 took over as chair of the tennis federation’s board.

  Through his broad experience in sport, Spasojevic has observed what works and what doesn’t. He is generally impressed with how basketball built on the boom it had in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, and how the Serbian volleyball fraternity has built on its successes in the last decade. Out of that, he has evolved a four-point plan to make the most of the Djokovic years. Firstly, he wants to improve Serbia’s tennis infrastructure so that there are more courts and tennis facilities. There are putative plans for a national training centre and out of that should emerge a national tennis school or academy. Secondly, he wants to increase the number of tournaments in Serbia, not tournaments that top players should be attracted to (that was the mistake Germany made in the Becker-Stich-Graf era – when those three retired, most of the tournaments on German soil became economically unviable) but for lower-ranking players to provide them with a rising scale of competition, so they can get further up the ladder before they have to travel internationally. In 2010 Serbia had 10 Futures tournaments (the level below Challengers, so generally attracting players between 1000 and 250 in the rankings). By 2013 it was 22 and the number is rising, and it now has 400 local ratings tournaments. Thirdly, there are plans to provide grants for the most talented youngsters to help them with the expenses needed to make the transition from being good juniors to tour players. The federation is budgeting for 30 kids to receive between €15,000 and €30,000 a year, and occasionally more – Serbia’s top-ranked junior Nikola Milojevic received €120,000 from the federation in 2012 to help him travel to tournaments in more exotic places than he could have afforded on his own. And fourthly, there is a programme to train up more coaches and umpires. When all that is in place, the theory is that any Serbian child who has talent and wants to play tennis can find the facilities, support and competitive opportunities they need without having to go abroad.

  What will count as success? ‘We’d like another Novak,’ Spasojevic says, knowing full well that players like Djokovic are rarities that no national association can legislate for. Certainly the chances for one of Djokovic’s brothers look increasingly slim – Marko made it into the world’s top 600 in 2012 bu
t has slipped back badly, while at 18 Djordje still has time but most 18-year-olds who are headed for the top 100 have done more than Djordje has (his highest ranking at the time this book went to press was 1463, which makes him about 30th in Serbia). His role model should be Patrick McEnroe – seven years younger than his illustrious brother John, Patrick had a fraction of the talent but still carved out a career as a reasonable singles player and a top-level doubles player, and went on to be a vastly more successful Davis Cup captain than John.

  Spasojevic may well find that the legacy of the Djokovic era is that Serbia has half a dozen players in the world’s top 100 a couple of decades from now, even if more of them are ranked between 50 and 100 than in the top 50. The immediate outlook for the country is not bad, with Niko Milojevic and Laslo Djere both shining on the junior circuit; in fact Serbia even enjoyed the glow of having two boys in the world’s top three for a short period in 2013.

  Milojevic spent a period working with Dejan Petrovic, who was Djokovic’s first touring coach. Petrovic is well aware of how much easier it is for Milojevic having had Djokovic at the top of tennis. ‘Without a doubt, Novak has played a huge role in the whole of Serbia for the expansion of tennis,’ Petrovic says. ‘It’s now just a matter of how the clubs organise themselves to make the most of the boom, but a lot of small kids want to be like Nole, so they look for the best tennis clubs where they live. A lot of kids choose team sports for financial reasons because the outlay isn’t as great. Novak’s legacy will probably be a stream of players between 30 and a 100.’

  Note too that, while it would help to have Djokovic coming back home to do clinics and hit balls with youngsters, the federation’s four-point strategy is not dependent on him. ‘We recognise that he needs to switch off when he’s here,’ Spasojevic says. ‘We’d like him to do as much with us as possible, but his real value to us is as a role model, and we’d like him to stay at the top for as long as possible.’

  The reason Spasojevic may succeed where others have – or might have – failed is not his experience, although that clearly helps. It’s his belief that his work should be invisible, so he’s not looking to capture the limelight. One of the first diplomatic things he did on taking over from Zivojinovic was to find ‘Bobo’ a role as honorary president-for-life of the federation. That allows Zivojinovic to be an ambassador for Serbian tennis, to carry out the glad-handing side of the role, which his laid-back personality makes him good at, to be on the ITF’s Davis Cup committee and other bodies, and leave the nitty-gritty work to harder-headed and more organised people. Spasojevic, a tall, handsome man with a calming presence, has also overseen a quiet, behind-the-scenes rapprochement with Srdjan Djokovic. Gone are the threats from Srdjan to set up a rival national association, and Spasojevic talks of having a ‘stable long-term relationship’ with both Srdjan and Goran. So peace may be gradually breaking out in the ranks of Serbian tennis. If it is, the chances of the country profiting in the longer term from Djokovic’s legacy are good.

  But the mountain it needs to climb is still a massive one. ‘We have just a thousand kids playing tennis,’ bemoans Bogdan Obradovic, Serbia’s Davis Cup captain and the owner of an academy in central Belgrade. ‘In China you have 50 million kids playing, in America 10 million, even a country like Australia has one million, but we just have a thousand. There are probably around a hundred thousand kids in Serbia who want to play tennis, but it’s such an expensive sport that they don’t even try it because they have no money.’

  The truth is that, despite Djokovic, Serbia will not be relying on tennis for securing its place in the world’s consciousness. Serbia is a relatively small country in a part of the globe where the number of ‘new’ states has exploded over the past two decades, so if it is to stand out, it will have to do so for other reasons.

  Economically, it has signalled its intention to be part of the European Union. Assuming it becomes a member in the next five years or so, it will gain the weight of the EU’s combined negotiating power in world affairs, although some argue it will become just another small member state and therefore lose something of its identity. Harmonised minimum standards, which Serbia would be obliged to sign up to in a whole range of industrial and social areas (everything from limits on working hours to the amount of sulphur allowed in diesel), exist to guarantee roughly equal conditions for trading across all states of the Union and do not have to mean the dilution of a country’s culture. But some EU citizens feel that acquiescing with EU rules has indeed diluted their national and regional culture, and a defiant people like the Serbs might find that difficult.

  Smoking is an interesting social barometer in this regard. The fact that some tennis coaches in Serbia don’t show even a flicker of embarrassment by lighting up in a café, when their work is supposed to be promoting a high level of fitness and healthy living, testifies to how much smoking is very much part of the culture. A meal in a traditional Serbian restaurant resembles a trip down Memory Lane for those from many western European nations, America and Australia, with clothing impregnated with stale smoke the morning after. The EU does not ban smoking but it does require its member states to offer non-smoking areas in restaurants and certain other public places, and to some this is the thin end of the wedge towards a ban. The ‘Novak’ restaurants and cafés have been pioneers in Serbia in offering non-smoking areas (as well as options such as gluten-free food), so Djokovic has helped his people along the road to healthier living. But the Serbs can be trenchant in defending their right to smoke, almost as if they are proud of being different from those in the west.

  Despite its traditional diplomatic, religious and linguistic connections to Russia, Serbia is unlikely to have the same difficulty putting its faith in Europe as Ukraine has had. Moscow is likely to be less worried about Serbia leaning towards the west than it has been with Ukraine – after all, Serbia’s eastern neighbours, Romania and Bulgaria, have both been members of the EU since 2007, Serbia is not as important an economic partner to Russia as Ukraine is, and Ukraine shares a border with Russia while Serbia doesn’t. Serbia was important to Russia in the latter decades of the 19th century but it is too small to be of major significance to Moscow now, whereas Ukraine is a much larger land mass and has (or at least still had at time of writing) a lot of the former USSR’s Black Sea coastline, in particular the Crimean peninsula with its strategically significant port cities of Sevastopol and Yalta. (The big parallel between Serbia and Ukraine is the risk that Ukraine’s mix of Orthodox and Catholic communities could ignite in a civil war similar to that between the Serbs and Croats in the early 1990s, a concern that was very much alive as this book went to press.)

  It’s hard to see an industry in which Serbia could shine transnationally, the way Brazil and Kenya do for their coffee, Argentina does for the tango, and countless cities and states do for their tourist appeal. If Emir Kusturica’s film of Andric’s novel The Bridge over the Drina becomes a hit, the Balkans could become a cultural attraction, a bit like Vienna enjoyed the glow of Carol Reed’s The Third Man for several decades after it was released in 1948, but while Serbia might benefit from much of the ensuing tourism, Visegrad and Andricgrad are not actually in Serbia but just across the border in Bosnia.

  It looks like Serbia’s best chance of achieving international recognition is through another sporting success. The most fertile ground is football, and if either Red Star Belgrade or the Serbian national team could discover a golden generation of players, Serbia could yet find itself much more in the international consciousness than it is at the moment. But then again, Croatia had the massive boost of coming third in the 1998 football World Cup – yet how high is Croatia’s profile in international consciousness today? In a crowded global market place that sees more than 200 countries take part in the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics, it’s very hard to make your mark if you’re not one of the traditional big nations. To that extent, having a global name carrying the flag, as Djokovic did at the 2012 London Olympics, is probably
as much of a magnet for the world’s attention as a country like Serbia is ever going to get.

  Djokovic will of course still be Serbian even after he stops playing tennis, but the question of Serbia’s standing in the world leads on to the question of what Djokovic will do when he finally hangs up his rackets. There are certain jobs he could walk into, like television commentator, entertaining performer on the oldies’ tennis tour (especially with his impersonations), and he can be Serbia’s Davis Cup captain pretty much at the time of his own choosing.

  ‘He can do whatever he wants,’ says his friend Ivan Ljubicic. ‘I can do whatever I want and I’m only two per cent of what he is. I can tell you he’s not going to sit and relax, that’s for sure. Davis Cup captain or TV commentator? He’s bigger than that. I think he has to have an important role where he feels he can make a big difference.’

  That reflects the general consensus of those interviewed for this book – he will want something demanding, something in which he can make a difference. The question is: what? There are three obvious areas in which he could end up: some administrative position in tennis or sport in general, something ambassadorial/diplomatic, or politics.