Novak Djokovic doesn't inspire the widespread devotion that Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer do. But with a win at the U.S. Open, he'd pass both with his 21st major victory, resolving every conceivable GOAT debate in his favor. girinathan writes
Photo: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images Clattering on concrete steps after being flung in fury into the empty stands at the Tokyo Olympics, this racquet announced that rare occasion: An important tennis match in 2021 was not going Novak Djokovic’s way. The world’s top player had won 34 of his 37 matches this year heading into the Games this summer. He tore through his first four opponents but then floundered late in his semifinal match against a rival ten years younger.
Perhaps no athlete has evoked inevitability more acutely than Novak Djokovic. Even when the scoreboard shows him trailing badly, he feels somehow like the favorite. He offers no vulnerability to attack. He carries no excess fat on his body or weakness in his repertoire. As the running joke goes, his one flaw is the overhead smash — the simplest shot, in which a lobbed ball is almost ceremonially put out of its misery with a clean crack of the racquet — which he does bungle from time to time.
Djokovic simply does not inspire the widespread devotion that Nadal and Federer do. There are many theories about why this is so, the most strained of which may be the ethnic one.
Photo: Matt King/Getty Images It’s that contortion, his most visible gift, that defines him. His taffylike physique elongates to reach balls no other player could get to — not just reach them but then punch them with weight. He often resembles an undone paper clip, bendable at every juncture, with unexpected divots and dips along the straights. Djokovic learned the value of flexibility early in his playing career, under his childhood coach Jelena Gencic.
Djokovic’s enduring legacy may well be his professionalism, which has allowed him to stay at the bleeding edge of a rapidly professionalizing sport. Dead and buried are the days of tennis played in cardigans with wooden racquets and no perspiration. Attaining the shape to play tennis, it turns out, is a full-time job layered on top of the full-time job of actually playing tennis.
His deep rotation of quacks also includes Pepe Imaz, a Spaniard who preaches the power of long hugs and the viability of telekinesis and telepathy. For about two seasons, Djokovic’s play was hampered by an elbow issue that he addressed only in vague terms. Some, like his coach at the time, Andre Agassi, wanted him to have surgery. He finally relented in 2018 and said he cried for days after the procedure and felt guilty for a month or two.
That streak began at the 2014 Wimbledon final, where Djokovic defeated Federer on Center Court . It was the type of crowd that cheered Djokovic’s unforced errors, even double faults, which by tennis standards is about as crude as it gets. A similar scene played out at the 2019 Wimbledon final, again against Federer, where Djokovic survived two match points and went on to win in a fifth-set tiebreak. Afterward, he described a grimly beautiful coping mechanism.
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