At the Philippe Chatrier, while Novak Djokovic takes a picture of himself on the clay with his wife (Jelena) and their two children, Stefan and Tara, Goran Ivanisevic occupies his desk in the middle of the room, listens to the first question from the press, takes the hand to the forehead and, between laughs, he confesses:
-Djokovic has been tying us to the chair with handcuffs for three days. He’s not an easy guy, let’s put it that way. Especially when things don’t go the way he wants -says the Serbian talent coach.
-In his speech after the title (the third in Paris, the 23rd major of his career, more than any other male tennis player), Djokovic apologized to you and the rest of the team for having tortured you -he was told.
-It is true, he has been torturing us, he has pulled out our nails. She has done many other things to us that I cannot tell you about. But here we are, we are alive. My heart is still fine. I am an old man, I have to take care of my heart.
(Ivanisevic is 51 years old and a Wimbledon title, in 2001).
Reality and delirium are truffled in Ivanisevic’s speech, sort of Djokovic’s alter ego, a contradictory man, that’s how human beings are.
The list of nonsense of the Serbian, the tennis player who has regained world leadership (he has taken it from Carlos Alcaraz; according to Ivanisevic, Alcaraz is “the next incredible tennis player”) is already endless.
Djokovic has thrown a pitch at a linesman.
He has sketched an ill-advised message on a television camera (“Kosovo is the heart of Serbia”).
Faced with a limping Alcaraz and helpless because of his muscle cramps, he has celebrated each point as if there were no tomorrow.
He has organized a tennis tournament skipping all the anticovid security protocols.
He has faced the world of science by refusing to get vaccinated to play the Australian Open…
And when asked about the boos he receives at Roland Garros, Djokovic replies:
-I do not care. I keep winning.
And yet, he asks to be loved.
As Sebastián Fest wrote in Sin Red (Debate), “Djokovic is that guy who has arrived late to a party and still wants to serve drinks, drink them, put on the music, dance, thank everyone for their presence, take the girls and turn off the light when you leave.
To be liked, Djokovic kneels at Wimbledon and chews the grass on Center Court. And he greets the four winds, raising his arms, after having claimed a new victory.
(…)
But in the still of the night, when it’s all over and she sits in front of the press, with her two sons watching the scene, then she relaxes and elaborates and shares her story with us.
(This laid-back family man has nothing to do with the volcano that occasionally erupts onto the track.)
-My growth was possibly different from that of most tennis players of my generation. In the 90s, when I was four or five years old, I lived through a couple of wars. Serbia was under an embargo. I missed a lot of junior category tournaments.
Talk about adversity and challenges.
From a family with limited economic resources that, even so, strives to fulfill the dreams of little Nole.
-In our environment, 95% of people laughed at us. They told us: ‘Why do you spend so much money on such an expensive sport?’ And on top of that, we were coming from a country without a tennis tradition. But I found people who helped me.
He talks about Jelena Gencic, his “tennis mother”.
-She died ten years ago, she was my true mentor. She worked hand in hand with my parents, who gave her space and permission to invest a lot of time in me. I used to go to her house. She shaped my mind as a human being and as a professional. I was seven or eight years old and she would put me videos of the best players, men and women. And I learned from her blows, all different depending on the surface. And she also taught me the importance of relaxing by listening to classical music, or reading poetry, singing, breathing consciously…
And he also talks about his parents.
-My mother has been a rock that has kept the family together and my father, someone who has inspired me with positive thinking, the passion to seek what no one has achieved.
And he also talks about Niki Pilic:
-If Jelena was my tennis mother, Pilic was my father. He is already in his eighties and still spends many hours on the slopes of Croatia, training boys.
If you ask Ivanisevic, the man raises his finger.
We’ve had a hard time in recent weeks. Monte Carlo, Banja Luka, Rome… this last tournament went a little better for us. In general, those competitions had not gone well for us. But when we got to Paris, then the software in Novak’s brain was activated. And as Roddick once said, “From there, it takes your legs, then it takes your soul, then it digs your grave and you’re dead and you have a funeral. Goodbye. Thanks for coming.”
