On Monday, Aug. 30, Novak Djokovic begins his quest to win the US Open and thus the Grand Slam — holding all four Slams (including the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon) in one calendar year. Only two other men have done it (Don Budge in 1938 and Rod Laver in ’62 and ’69), along with three women (Maureen Connelly in ’53, Margaret Court in ’70 and Steffi Graf in 1988, the year after Djokovic was born). Graf remains the only person to win the Golden Slam — the Grand Slam and the Olympic gold medal that year.
Of course, we all know what happened when Djokovic tried for the gold medal in Tokyo in July. He imploded in the semifinals against the inevitable winner, Alexander Zverev — throwing his racket into the empty stands in anger and frustration, something I can understand — and then quit before the bronze-medal match, citing injuries and thus denying his mixed-doubles partner, Nina Stojanovic, the chance to medal, something I don’t understand.
Djokovic is a complex person, one who gives his enemies plenty of ammunition. He’s hot-tempered, doesn’t believe in vaccinations, tries too hard to be liked and doesn’t always think his big ideas through. And yet, as I’ve said many times on this blog, context drives perception. What makes him flawed,makes him in other situations great. His emotional nature led him to bounce a ball in anger at last year’s US Open, catching a lineswoman in the throat. (He immediately went over to assist her and wrote an apology for his behavior on social media.) But great emotion also moved to give his winning racket to a little girl holding up a sign in encouragement at the Wimbledon final this year.
He led the ill-conceived Atria tour amid the pandemic last year, when he and other players tested positive for the coronavirus. But that reckless act was born of his consistent desire to help lower-ranked players get a bigger piece of tennis’ economic pie.
For that reason, he’s been at the forefront of the new Professional Tennis Players Association, which he announced at last year’s US Open without first consulting the women players. Djokovic is regularly accused of being antifeminist, because he said equal pay for equal work depends in part on who brings in more at the gate, with the men’s game being more popular than the women’s. (Frankly, I also think the women should play the best three out of five sets in tournaments in which the men do.) And yet who was the player who reached out to Naomi Osaka regularly in her mental health crisis and invited Serena Williams to dance, however awkwardly, at one Wimbledon Ball — something the other men never did?
“The Djoker” has done impersonations of his rivals and even the women — Maria Sharapova was a favorite, good-natured target early on— and yet he rarely fails to compliment other players, win or lose. The truth is if you are determined to hate him, he gives you reason. If, however, you love him there is reason enough as well, including the Novak Djokovic Foundation, which has helped tens of thousands of children in his native Serbia get a head start in life with early education and has given $1 million in medical supplies to Serbian hospitals. In the words of poet Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.”
That contradiction was born in Serbia, where NATO bombs rained down on Djokovic’s 12th birthday in 1999 during the Kosovo War. This is a person who marched himself at age 5 across from his parents’ pizza parlor to the tennis camp run by the great Jelena Gencic and stood there until she noticed him; who was called “Jacket” by the other children because he didn’t have one;;who practiced for safety in an empty swimming pool;;whose father went to a loan shark to finance his son’s career. He was never going to be entirely “normal,” whatever that is. That he turned out to be brilliantly successful is nothing short of miraculous.
But Djokovic is, by his own admission, deeply flawed, we might even say damaged. Part of that may be his cultural history. As Janan Ganesh wrote in the Financial Times Aug. 24, “Those who begrudge this man his hard edges might consider where he got them.” But part of this has nothing to do with Djokovic. Rather it is the nature of fandom, that peculiar kingdom in which we see what we want to see, never realizing it is not the reflection of our idols but of ourselves — our wants and dreams, our desires and values.
It took me a long time to warm to Djokovic but once I did, it hit me like a thunderbolt. His rise in 2011 coincided with my emergence from the darkest period of my life. His play, his newfound perseverance, gave me hope and helped inspire me to become a novelist.
“Success is not final,” Winston Churchill once said. “Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Djokovic has shown over the years he has the courage to continue, and I wish him the best in his Open bid for history.