From Training During Air Strikes To Becoming An All-Time Great: The Story Of Novak Djokovic - Page 2 of 6 - UBITENNIS

From Training During Air Strikes To Becoming An All-Time Great: The Story Of Novak Djokovic

The life of a phenomenon, how he trained under the bombs, and the two people to whom he owes everything. Step after step his successes and downfalls, on and off court. Does he deserve a Grand Slam like Rod Laver? No one has been more complete than him.

By Staff
29 Min Read

JELENA GENCIC, NOVAK DJOKOVIC’S FIRST COACH

Tennis-wise he was born in Kopaonik, Serbia, with a twist of fate that placed some courts very close to the pizzeria run by a family of skiers. Later the family saw it as a sign, as if Novak was the chosen one, spotted from above and, more concretely, on a summer day in 1993 by Monica Seles’ former coach, Jelena Gencic, who happened to be in the area for a training session. ‘My first memory is  seeing a 6-year-old boy arrive with a large tennis bag in which everything was meticulously arranged, with a neatly folded spare T-shirt, a towel, a cuff and a bottle of water,‘ the woman we met one day in Serbia told us. “It took me three days to realise that he was going to be a champion. I went to see his father Srdjan to tell him. It was a shock for him. I didn’t just teach Novak tennis. I made him listen to Smetana’s “La Moldau” and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. I explained to him that tennis was like music, that he had to put the same emotion into hitting the ball, so as to create a crescendo… He is a very emotional boy’.

It doesn’t seem easy to imagine him like that, seeing him with his eyes bursting with rage in moments of tension, or hearing him emit hoarse cries from a sacred fire buried in his ribcage, but this Djokovic, shirt sometimes ripped because of a Dante-like hormonal surge, is the same one who spent hours stroking his grandmother’s hair and who occasionally brought bouquets of wildflowers to his mother.

GORAN IVANISEVIC ON THE FIRST TIME HE MET NOVAK DJOKOVIC

Together with Gencic, while waiting for the adventure to begin, he can see himself running towards the greatest success at Wimbledon, rehearsing the bows and the moment the cup is handed over in the middle of an imaginary Centre Court. The dream is already there. But the reality looks very different. The family had moved to Belgrade, completely focused on the progress of the prodigal son, to the point of sacrificing everything. “We didn’t have enough money to pay the rent,” recalls Dijana, his mother. “When I woke up in the morning, I didn’t know how I was going to buy bread for the family”.

In 1999, due to NATO bombing, they spent seventy-eight nights under American bombs, in the city’s basements, an event which forged in the 12-year-old Novak the character of a survivor who would never be frightened of anything. “During the bombing we trained every day at the Partizan Club, for five to six hours a day,” he would later recall. “There was no school. My mother always said that it was no more dangerous than anywhere else and that if I had stayed at home imagining being bombed, I would have gone mad! There was a feeling of unity among us. Even though it was a very cruel time, it was good”.

In any case, events did not alter his motivation. Did Gencic advise him not to drink Coke? He never drank more than a liter in his entire life. And when he moved to Germany at the age of 13 to train with Niki Pilic, Goran Ivanisevic, who would later become his coach, had the ‘honour’ of meeting young Novak with such a strong character. “Pilic asked me to come and hit some balls with an ‘incredible Serbian boy’,” recalls the 2001 Wimbledon winner. “We played for half an hour and you could see he had something special. Something you can’t learn, that you can’t buy. Something inside. He wanted to win, he wanted to place winners, he wanted to eat me alive! And in the end he gave me chocolates because I had ‘lost too much energy!’

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3: Djokovic’s family vs everybody else

Leave a comment