The three-time winner of the All England Club wants to repeat his Wimbledon tradition once more.
In 2011, 2014 and 2015, the “Djoker” won on Church Road – and always sweetened his triumph with a very special dessert: after his successful finals, Djokovic picked a piece of grass from the world’s most famous Centre Court – and ate it. “When I first did it, it was the best dessert I ever tried,” he said after his first-round win over tennis’s Sandgren.
The thought had already occurred to him as a child. “I’ve always dreamed of winning Wimbledon. When I was seven, eight years old, I made little Wimbledon trophies, lifted them in front of a mirror and imagined I was Wimbledon champion.” Standing there and dreaming of winning one day, he said to himself: “Then I must eat grass.”
The chances that the former world number one will be allowed to try the 2018 turf in just under a week and a half are not so bad: Djokovic has almost made a 13-4 record under the radar over the past few weeks. In Rome, after a strong performance against Rafael Nadal, he lost only in the semi-finals, in Paris against Marco Cecchinato in the quarter-finals, in Queen’s against Marin Cilic, last year’s Wimbledon finalist, against whom he even had a match point. Result: According to Roger Federer, Djokovic has the best chances of winning a tournament in Wimbledon.
Djokovic will meet Horacio Zeballos today; if he wins, he could wait for Kyle Edmund and take on Alexander Zverev or Nick Kyrgios in a possible quarter-final…
Eating grass means for him that he made it to the final and won there, Djokovic philosophized, who, in a positive sense, soon wants to bite the dust again. “I hope to have this experience again before my career is over.”