Super Novak: the world according to Djokovic

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jun/22/super-novak-djokovic

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For the greatest tennis players, the fortnight between the end of the French Open and the start of Wimbledon, in which the hard-baked clay of spring is swapped abruptly for slick lawns of summer, stamina for speed, sun for drizzle, is the most disconcerting of their gruelling calendar. Top seeds tend to grow their success out of repetition and routine, of nothing out of the ordinary; thoughts are drilled to stay within the rigid lines of a tennis court. The sudden shift in surface is like an enforced move into a different time and space altogether and, control freaks all, they rarely find such shifts straightforward.

This year, though, for Novak Djokovic, losing finalist in Paris – again, over three and a half hours, to Rafael Nadal – it has proved a more unusual change of pace than ever. In April the six-time grand slam winner announced, somewhat breathlessly, by Twitter, that "Jelena is pregnant!!! We will be parents soon!" It was then reported that he and his girlfriend of eight years, Jelena Ristic, would use this period between the two major tournaments to get married before the baby arrived. A guest list that apparently included Richard Branson, Andy Murray and the Duchess of York was placed on high alert. In fact the player postponed his nuptials until an unspecified date after Wimbledon, but that did not stop him, immediately following the latest bruising defeat to Nadal, taking 10 of his mates on a #bachelorparty to Ibiza.

This was not the kind of stag do that ever threatened to see the rigorous Serb handcuffed to a traffic light or escaping the clutches of a roly-polygram. Djokovic is a man, after all, who checks the precise colour of his urine at the same time every morning to reassure himself he is not over- or under-hydrated, who celebrated his third Australian Open triumph in 2012 with a single square of chocolate, his first in 18 months. But still, it represented quite an anarchic excursion from the tennis players' Land of Perpetual Focus.

When I met him in London last Sunday, after his lads' week away, Djokovic looked the diametric opposite of groggy. As paparazzi pictures of him "happy and shirtless" in Ibiza had shown, he is not a man plagued by body fat, and that otherworldly leanness always appears to extend to his state of mind. His thought processes, in five fluent languages, are six-pack toned; his concentration is ripped.

Our interview takes place in a motorhome parked in Grosvenor Square in London, into which a dozen representatives of Djokovic's kit sponsor, Uniqlo, mostly over from Japan, squeeze at various times, making meticulous preparation for a fashion shoot and video with their global brand ambassador. If Djokovic feels like Bill Murray in an on-the-road version of Lost in Translation, he certainly does not let on. Though he has never looked like a man who requires much in the way of hair and make-up, exponents of both arts are standing by in readiness in case a strand of his buzz-cut should stray or a blemish suddenly appear on his hollowed cheek.

Djokovic is currently the greatest returner of a tennis ball alive. He approaches our conversation in something like the same quick-eyed manner. Asked about the break from routine that his Ibiza holiday represented, he says: "I had 10 guys with me, and we had a lot of fun. Of course after losing another French Open final to Nadal, it took a lot emotionally from me, so I needed to recover and do something differently. I am very fortunate and blessed in the people around me. They care about me and I take care about them. I am always looking to have the right balance. I need a few activities like this one, that keep my mind off tennis. It is extremely important for your mind to be fresh."

The best clue to the particular state of mind of any tennis player is his entourage. To those people around him, Djokovic has recently added Boris Becker as mentor and coach. The arrival of Becker at the beginning of the year seemed to suggest a mini-crisis in the career of Djokovic who had, since his stellar triple-grand-slam year in 2011, lost twice as many finals against his triumvirate of rivals – Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray – than he had won. He is, like his competitors, always looking for that extra half-percentage point of advantage and he believes Becker, the most dominating of front-foot competitors, will deliver that edge.

"We are still getting to know each other, really, it takes time, the process will go on," he says of their relationship, before making it clear that he has hired Becker primarily for his experience of playing the biggest points under the biggest pressure. "He knows the situations I'm going through; he was number one in the world and had to cope with the expectations." Djokovic himself had until recently been number one in the world for 91 consecutive weeks and 101 weeks in total. He goes into Wimbledon number two, to Nadal.

At 27 – the average age of the top-10 ranked tennis players invariably hovers between 26 and 26.5 – he trusts this is a blip rather than a slide. Even so, he is approaching that age at which the descent begins to beckon as the ascent once beckoned. "It is very difficult to repeat 2011," he says, "but I believe that I can. It is much more physical nowadays, I think. It is hard to keep up. And, of course, there is a new wave of tennis youngsters coming through and challenging the top guys." Becker is just one of his strategies against that inevitable mortality.

Another, strangely, is his keeping of a journal. He has written down his stray thoughts most nights for as long as he can remember, sometimes in notebooks, sometimes on hotel paper, some of which his grandmother, his one-woman archivist, has filed, along with a room full of press cuttings in multiple languages. The journal, he says now, is one way of making the "out of body" experience of grand slam tennis real. He uses the entries as a kind of therapy.

"We are all humans. One day we will get up and think: I don't feel like playing, don't feel like practising, don't feel like living that day," he says. "From time to time everything goes bad in your thoughts, so it is good to have that record of how you got through things before."

This strategy extends back to Djokovic's childhood, which required more coping mechanisms than most. He still digs out those journals to read. "I like to go back through those memories," he says, "because it reminds you who you were then, and who you are now."

Djokovic grew up in Belgrade in some of the worst years of that city's troubled recent history. Even so, he says, "the life I had in Serbia was fantastic. I owe that to my parents. They did everything they could to give me and my brothers a carefree childhood, despite the fact that we lived through two wars, 1992 and 1999, and in between times we had an embargo on everything, so people would have to queue for milk and bread. The economy was non-existent and often it was just a matter of survival. To have been able to move from there to here is incredible to me every time I think about it. Sport was not a priority at the time. In the state of emergency we learned to appreciate and value life itself."

In the autobiographical introduction to his diet book Serve to Win, Djokovic recalls the experience of living through the "humanitarian" Nato bombing of the city, for 78 nights in a row in 1999. Running to the bomb shelter at his grandmother's house one night he remembered falling to the pavement in the dark and seeing an F-117 bomber overhead, discharging its laser-guided missiles into, he says, their local hospital. Tennis was his refuge in those months. He and his coach would try to practise on courts near areas that had been bombed the night before, on the basis that they probably wouldn't be hit again.

Djokovic still cannot bear loud noises, he suggests. He is too, perhaps, living proof of that psychological theory that argues that far from demoralising a population aerial bombardment produces the counterintuitive reinforcement of invincibility. The more often a random air attack spares you, and not your neighbour, the more your own life feels charmed. Not surprisingly, Djokovic approaches his career with a powerful sense of fate, of things happening for a purpose. He describes himself now as an "orthodox Christian" though "less a religious person than a person of faith". Some of that no doubt goes back to his growing up.

"We started the war living in fear," he observes in his memoir, "but somewhere during the course of the bombings, something changed, in me, in my family, in my people.

"We decided to stop being afraid. After so much death, so much destruction, we simply stopped hiding… We began to make fun of how ridiculous our situation was… One friend dyed his hair to look like a bull's eye… a target."

Is such a spirit ingrained in the way Djokovic so thrillingly and characteristically stares down defeat and comes out fearlessly swinging? It's tempting to think so.

Certainly these days whenever he is "nervous, not happy with something, or frustrated" he recalls those years.

They are also the inspiration behind his charitable organisation, the Novak Djokovic Foundation, which supports education projects for the most disadvantaged children in his homeland; his fiancée is its director. "At the end of the day all kids need the right to dream," he says from experience.

The foundation is also a way, he says, of keeping him properly connected with home. He lives in Monte Carlo these days, in part because of the way he is adored in Belgrade. When he won his first Wimbledon, 100,000 people turned out to see him come out on to a balcony in the city's main square in a white blazer. It was the greatest night of his life, he suggested at the time, but it was also too much to cope with. In addition, no doubt, to the tax benefits, he appreciates Monte Carlo, once a playground of tennis players, mostly for the meditative "peace and quiet" it affords him.

Djokovic is, even by the standards of the tour, in thrall to the pursuit of perfection. Having seen the benefits of the wheat-free, dairy-free diet he adopted in 2010, he has the born-again evangelist's zeal about all aspects of self-improvement. His life feels to him like a series of befores and afters. "There was something about me that was unhealthy, broken, unfit," he says of his former junk-food eating self (his parents ran a seasonal ski-resort pizza parlour at which he worked as a waiter).

There was a period on the circuit when he became a byword for perpetual injury. Once, when asked what was ailing Djokovic, his opponent Andy Roddick replied: "Cramp, bird flu, anthrax, Sars, common cough and cold…" His diet changed all that and has led him to explore all aspects of his mental and bodily health in conscientious detail.

Much of this he records in his journal entries, which, with the approach of fatherhood, have taken on a more profound purpose.

"I am trying these days to write something for my kids to have," he says. "My fiancée goes much more thoroughly into it – she gets really deep, lets her emotions go. I find it a bit more difficult to do that. But we agree that it is important to have that for our kids, to see what their parents went through before they were born…"

There was a time when paternity threatened the beginning of the end of a top-ranked player's ambitions (when John McEnroe's then-wife, Tatum O'Neal, told him she was pregnant with their second child, she recalls him saying: "There goes 1987"). Djokovic, characteristically, sees it as a positive motivation."I certainly want to play long enough to have my future baby watching and supporting me in grand slam tournaments," he says. "It is a new dimension of life for me and my fiancée; I have incredible feelings of joy just watching her stomach grow and feeling the kicks of our child. We can't wait."

In this, as many other things, Djokovic has a role model in Federer, who ushered in the profoundly gracious era in which he plays, and who has pretty successfully combined fatherhood of twins with continued on-court success. I wonder if Djokovic ever feels frustrated to find himself playing at the same time as two or three of the greatest players ever to pick up a racket. He suggests, rather, that it is a privilege, and an ongoing opportunity to find out just how good he can be.

"My concentration goes entirely on my own game," he says, without hesitation, of his rivals. "I know that if I am at the top of my game I can beat anyone on any surface.

"But of course we share a locker room and you watch what they do, and there are a lot of mind games really, of course. We have respect for each other, obviously, but you want to improve yourself."

If it ended now, I ask, if he chose to walk away as Bjorn Borg once did, at about his age, would he feel he had achieved enough?

"To be honest, yes," he says. "I try not to have any regrets. Having said that, I would like to win the French title at least once before the end of my career. And I still have the self-belief and confidence that it will go on for many years yet."

Those years begin, once more, tomorrow in London SW19.

Novak Djokovic is a global ambassador for uniqlo.com