A joker with a sometimes embarrassing family
There, at his first academy, where he called home every day for the first few months to relieve his exile, he was known as ‘the elastic man’, because he always arrived thirty minutes before each training session to do some extra stretching, with his obviously well-organised bag. The cult of stretching. It’s all hidden there, the courage and professionalism, configured behind a family that, with his patriarch father Srdjan, set him no limits and no great escapeways either.
Driven by talent or burdened by the negative pressure that sometimes comes with it? His beginnings on the tour, characterised by grunting on the court and fuming family members in the stands, have given him a label that is not easy to get rid of, and it is still questionable whether he has succeeded in doing so in the end.
The tennis world has been stunned by the arrival of this wide-eyed, long-toothed, ambitious but self-confident, playful character, bordering on insolence for those who are most averse to this type of character who stands out in an increasingly sterile world. Before the ‘Djocosmic’, it was the time of the ‘Djocomic’, a well-known backstage entertainer, who enters the court in Bercy wearing a Zorro mask or a blond wig, together with his compatriot Viktor Troicki, referring to the video clip shot by Nadal and Shakira. His colleagues’ imitations are often brilliant, from Nadal’s tics to Maria Sharapova’s serve, before stopping them altogether as they seem to be so annoying to the establishment.
All of the above is done with a naturalness and ease that will be criticised as opportunistic, from press conferences wearing the local national team’s football shirt, to advertisements on the wing of an airplane and even on the court, where he invites a ball boy to drink with him under the umbrella during a break.
He dances to all the hits of the moment to celebrate the victories at the end of a match, he speaks more languages than Federer, he appears on American talk shows where the presenters seem astonished to see such a young face already on a stamp. “Do you want to lick my face?” the Serb asks in a goliardic manner. Although he has mellowed over time, preferring endless tirades on the meaning of life in press conferences, who else besides him can boast of making as many headlines off the court?
But on court, the clan is getting restless, a little too much by all standards. The Djokovic’s are making their way through the tennis world with pushy ways.
The clan is festive, as when at Roland Garros in 2007, the whole family was spotted wearing yellow in a corner of the stadium, but it is also vindictive. “The king is dead, long live the king!” exclaimed Dijana, the mother, on the day of her son’s victory over Federer in 2008. Sacrilege! Even more hated is his father Srdjan, who has often exaggerated and overshadowed the rise of ‘Nole’ with his excesses, obviously damaging his general image. Here he is in the box with his son’s head on his shirt. Always on a mission, in May 2008 in Belgrade, he burst into the studio of the Serbian commentator Nebojsa Viskovic during the broadcast of the Nadal-Djokovic semi-final in Hamburg. The situation is absolutely surreal. The comments are very aggressive. “It’s a disgrace, you are obsessed with Nadal”. Embarrassing. Dijana would later recount that the family saw it as disrespectful. “We had the feeling that Nadal and Federer were being glorified, as if Novak didn’t exist. At the French Open, it took them a while to give us as much accreditation as they gave Nadal…”.
To make matters worse, Djokovic has made his own way into his legend in matches that he has not hesitated to abandon in the middle of a battle, often due to heat stroke. In the eyes of his peers, he seems an unreliable, perhaps sometimes devious man. The climax came at the 2005 US Open, in a first round match against Gaël Monfils full of interruptions that make today’s ‘toilet break gate’ look like an amateur game. “Djoko” interrupted the rhythm to breathe, tie his shoes, pee, have his shoulder massaged, until collapsing on court at 4-3 in the fifth set, in the middle of the match, seemingly dazed, before undergoing a 15-minute MTO. And, most importantly, before winning. “One moment, Djokovic is dead. Next he’s running like a leopard. He was joking,’ blurted Thierry Champion, Monfils’ coach. Later, talking about the match, the Serb will compare himself to ‘a beached whale’.
During those seasons, followers recounted his early successes as well as his slumps. Fatigue against Stan Wawrinka in the final in Umag (Croatia) in 2006; a viral infection in the Davis Cup against the Russians in 2008; respiratory problems against Federer in Monaco in 2008; heatstroke against Andy Roddick in Melbourne in 2009; an allergy against Filip Krajinovic in Belgrade in 2010; gastroenteritis and vomiting against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at the Australian Open in 2010…
In a press conference during the 2008 US Open in which the Serb had staggered through to the semi-finals that will go down in history, Roddick listed all the diseases attributed to the imaginary sick man, from flu to anthrax, from rheumatism to mad cow disease. This episode marked his relationship with the American public. Today, the Texan, like many others, no longer holds the same opinion, as if ‘official’ history had taken a long time to remind him that Djokovic had succeeded above all in erasing his weaknesses rather than constantly exalting them.
A tweet by Roddick during the 2021 US Open sums up this change of opinion in one sentence: ‘He (Djokovic) takes your legs and then your soul’. Yes, over the years the 36-year-old has become almost infallible, although it will be three years before he wins his second Slam title, after his first in Melbourne in 2008.
In 2005, the same surgeon who operated on Silvio Berlusconi corrected his deviated nose and improved his breathing. A loser among the greats, he remains the unchanged world number 3. In 2007, 2008, 2009. And for another year in 2010. ‘There were two men,’ he says, ‘and for them (Federer and Nadal) I was just an occasional problem that could end at any moment…’.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 4: Seeking help from others
