At the Philippe Chatrier, while Novak Djokovic is pictured on the clay with his wife (Jelena) and their two children, Stefan and Tara, Goran Ivanisevic takes his place in the center of the venue, listens to the first question from the press, he puts his hand to his forehead and, between laughs, reveals:
-Djokovic has been handcuffing us to the chair for three days. He is not an easy man, let’s put it that way. And less so when things don’t go the way he wants – says the Serbian coach.
– After the title (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 torturing them – they tell him.
– It’s true, he’s been torturing us, he’s pulled our nails. He has done many other things for us that I cannot tell you. But we are still alive. My heart is still fine. I’m an old man, I have to take care of my heart.
(Ivanisevic is 51 years old and has a title at Wimbledon, in 2001).
Reality and delirium are mixed in the speech of Ivanisevic, a kind of alter ego of Djokovic, contradictory, this is how human beings are.
The list of nonsense from the Serbian, the tennis player who has regained world leadership (he has overtaken Carlos Alcaraz; according to Ivanisevic, Alcaraz is “the next incredible tennis player”), is already endless.
Djokovic has hit a ball at a line judge.
He sketched a confused message on a television camera (“Kosovo is the heart of Serbia”).
Against an Alcaraz limp and defenseless because of his muscle cramps, he celebrated every point like there was no tomorrow.
He has organized a tennis tournament bypassing all anticovid safety protocols.
He has faced the world of science for refusing to be vaccinated to compete in 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 still asks to be loved.
As Sebastián Fest wrote in Sin red ( Debate ), “Djokovic is that man who has arrived late to a party and still wants to serve drinks, drink them, play the music, dance, thank everyone his presence, take the girls away and turn off the light when he leaves.”
Because they love him, Djokovic kneels at Wimbledon and chews the grass on the center court. And he salutes the four winds, raising his arms, after having claimed another victory.
(…)
But in the stillness of the night, when everything is over and he is sitting in front of the press, with his two children contemplating the scene, then he relaxes and relaxes and shares his story with us.
(This relaxed family man has nothing to do with the volcano that sometimes erupts on the track).
– My growth was possibly different from that of most tennis players of my generation. In my nineties, when I was four years old, I lived through a couple of wars. Serbia was under embargo. I missed a lot of junior tournaments.
Talk about adversity and challenges.
From a family with limited financial resources that, even so, strives to fulfill little Nole’s dreams.
-In our environment, 95% of the people laughed at us. They said to 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. He worked under the guidance of my parents, who gave him space and permission to invest a lot of time in me. I used to go to his house. She shaped my mind as a human being and as a professional. I was seven or eight years old and she would show me videos of the best players, male and female. And I learned from his shots, all different depending on the surface. And it 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 and my father together, someone who has inspired me with positive thinking, the passion to seek what no one else has achieved.
And he also talks about Niki Pilic:
-If Jelena was my tennis mother, Pilic was my father. He is over eighty years old and still spends many hours on the courts in Croatia, training boys.
If you ask Ivanisevic, the man raises his finger.
– We have had a bad time in the last few 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, that’s when 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 you dig your grave and you’re dead and you have a funeral. Bye. Thanks for coming”.
