ATP: Novak Djokovic remains a mystery: “Don’t want to be a follower”

After his last gigs the question arises: Will Novak Djokovic make his comeback – or has he already done the best?

When Novak Djokovic was asked for his match analysis after his disturbing opening out in Miami, he didn’t talk at all for long. It was hardly possible to cover up the desolation and dreariness of this Centre Court guest performance, that galloping 6-3 and 6-4 defeat to the bizarre Frenchman Benoit Paire: “I’ll try anything, but it doesn’t help anything. That’s the situation,” said the man who dominated men’s tennis two years ago. And then the 30-year-old said something that none of the eyewitnesses in Crandon Park on Key Biscayne Island had missed: “I don’t feel very good when I play tennis like this”.

Djokovic’s appearance: A single puzzle. Also because it was not really clear why Djokovic had stood on the Centre Court for this game. A week earlier, at the Masters in Indian Wells, he had already lost and seemed overwhelmed, not yet completely restored after his most recent elbow operation. Back then, in the California desert, after the knockout against Taro Daniels from Japan, he also said quite relentlessly that he felt “as if it was the first match I ever played in professional tennis. But the former master strategist did not draw the necessary consequence of simply giving himself more time for his comeback and to forego further tournament participations for the time being.

Now, above all, an overwhelming impression of great helplessness remains, after three matches lost in a row, the first frustrating triple since 2007. Not only the whole tennis world – fans, experts, media, colleagues – can hardly explain what really happened to Djokovic, what has become of him. And Djokovic himself, one and a half years after the start of his complex crisis, he seems particularly consternated – a crisis that began exactly at the moment when he had managed the most difficult and perhaps most brilliant victory of his career. The starting point of his problems was probably the question: What can come now,” says Boris Becker, who was still Djokovic’s trainer in spring 2016. Becker, a man who knows one or two things about the motivation of a top athlete, was the first to suspect the threatening hardships for the Serbian. Less training effort, less ambition at the tournament appearances, quite simply no longer the hunger for the next best victory – Becker threw down a few months after the Paris mission, he had finally also achieved enough, he had been the coach Djokovics in his outstanding time in professional tennis.

Today, around the first major US tournaments of the 2018 season, Becker’s findings from the separation phase have not changed much. Because when people talk about Djokovic, the twelve-time Grand Slam winner, it’s not just about the question of physical wear and tear, about healing his elbow complaints. But also about the question whether Djokovic can once again mobilize the inner drive that once made him the series winner on the Centre Courts in the tennis touring circus. This consuming urge also included a perfectionism that was unprecedented in the highly professionalised society of professional players – like no other, the Serbian subordinated every aspect of his life to success. The Austrian fitness and nutrition pope Gebhard Gritsch, part of the Djokovic team, once said half seriously, half amused, that it was “madness what we do there”, probably also meant that Djokovic even let diet cooks fly in to certain tournaments.

Becker, Gritsch, as well as others from the former Djokovic camp, later observed with skepticism and concern how Djokovic tried to overcome the vacuum after the ultimate Paris coup. The crisis-ridden tennis king wanted to set off to “new horizons” alongside a man who his followers like to call a motivation or meditation guru – what is meant is the Spaniard Pepe Imaz, an earlier moderately successful professional player who later dedicated himself to a somewhat confused philosophy of peace and love. Imaz first took a brother Djokovic for himself, then the superstar himself also came under the influence of the self-taught preacher. Becker was not the only one who felt that the whole thing was charlatanism, but he left with the slogan that “everything has its time”.

The question is and remains: Did Djokovic already have his time? Time as number one, as a permanent Grand Slam winner? As the man who is the measure of all things in professional tennis? After all, in the euphoria over the sprightly Senior Roger Federer, it has just been forgotten that two or three seasons ago that Djokovic once held all four Grand Slam titles in his possession – a feat that no one else in the modern age of this sport had succeeded in doing before. Djokovic’s crash, the mental collapse, the physical suffering, also made the rapid Federer renaissance and Nadal’s strong comeback in the last season possible. And Djokovi’s continuing problems, which even Andre Agassi, a neutrainer like him, could not solve so far, at least supported the old Titans to first place, first Nadal, then Federer made it.

The current series has started with further question marks for Djokovic, who lost to South Korean Hyeon Chung in the round of 16 at the Australian Open before the opening bankruptcies in Indian Wells and Miami. In between was the minor operation on the elbow in Muttenz, Switzerland. Djokovic said in Miami that for the first time in many months he had been able to train painlessly, he hadn’t had to constantly listen to himself during the exercise program to see if “everything is really okay physically” The defeat after these hopeful words was all the more painful, it once again increased the pressure on the former frontman. Because the question also arises how long Djokovic can withstand this mediocrity, these constant disappointments – with all the hard training work he invests. One thing Djokovic has also stressed often enough: “I can’t and don’t want to be a follower”, which is what he is at the moment.