“I want to win as many Grand Slams,” he said afterward, and who can blame him? (He means majors; strictly speaking, the grand slam refers to winning all four majors in the same calendar year.) These are the biggest stages on the tour. Joel Drucker, a learned and keen observer of the game for many years, reminds his readers that the importance of the majors is a relatively modern phenomenon, linked to the flattening of the sport. With the evolution of equipment and a year-long schedule, tennis has gone from individual to team sport.
A defensive player, he kept improving his return of serve, said by many commentators to be the best in the sport today. He breaks at will, it seems — in the ninth game of a set, for example, so he can serve it out; midway through a tiebreak, to the same effect. Indeed, he closed out the first two sets in the Australia Open with the same serve over the alley on the deuce side. Stefanos Tsitsipas lunged and caught them both, and both times sent them long.
Was it all due to patience? Of course not; but he needed patience to get here and to keep going. The same age as Murray, he had to wait for the older Federer and the slightly older Nadal to show him their vulnerabilities, which he learned to exploit. He had to counter their specialties, Nadal’s huge topspin and Federer’s pinpoint service and bull’s-eye forehand. Among others — because, obviously, these two (Federer in particular) were adapting and improving throughout their own dominant years, no less than he.
Thus, the man of Belgrade. At 35, he has had a few physical ailments, including a hamstring injury, which he played through at Melbourne Park, but by all accounts, he is good for another five years at the top, if not 10. If not 20, for that matter. Statistically, he is on course to get the most majors (presently, he is tied for the tops with Nadal at 22), the most Australian Opens (already tops with 10), and more.
Murray and Nadal are still on the tour, but Sir Andrew exited after two courageous rounds at Melbourne Park, playing with a reconstructed hip, and Nadal was beaten in the second and revealed afterward that he would be out for at least eight weeks with a hip problem. Federer retired last year, saying that the surgeries on his knee had not got him back to where he could compete at the level he expects of himself.
His great rivals now are fading away into their post-tour careers. Roger Federer has an Africa-oriented foundation and a shoe brand, among other interests. Rafael Nadal has what is said to be the best tennis academy in the world located on his native Mallorca. I have never visited, so I cannot say for a fact that it is better than the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Bradenton, Florida, which is now called IMG Academy, and anyway these things are not easily quantifiable. Hillsdale or Harvard? Bronx Science or Dalton? Ask Diane Ravitch. And Andy Murray has his own activities, notably medical philanthropy; he was a recipient of the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award in 2022.
It sounds simple, but it is one of the aspects of this game that is most pleasing to watch. And with the great maestri of the sport, typically the Big Four of the past two decades, Djokovic is as good or better at this than any of his peers. Particularly compared to Roger Federer, who likes to close the point as quickly as possible, and does so with some of the most breathtaking, acrobatic, graceful shot-making in anyone’s memory, Djokovic is fundamentally a defensive player, who knows he will make the shot that will make his opponent make the last one — into the net or out of bounds.
Like his friend Andy Murray, he is a big-hearted gutsy, never-quit player, and, like Roger Federer, he is an analytical, thoughtful player. He uses his brain all the time. What all coaches tell their charges, he does perhaps more consistently than almost anyone else: “build the point” and “wait for the moment” to “release the trigger.” The idea is not only to “hit it where they ain’t,” but to put them in a position where you can do that.
Novak Djokovic learned both patience and intuition with good teachers and countless hours of practice and training, and it stayed with him. He had to listen for incoming bombardments when, as a child in Belgrade during the NATO air war against Serbia, he hit against pockmarked walls and uneven broken courts, learned when to finish an imaginary point quickly and dash for shelter or hang in a little longer to get into a better position.