Novak Djokovic also plays big at the Nitto ATP finals. Before the duel against Alexander Zverev it is clear: The “Djoker” is back with old dominance.
It was at the end of last week when Marijan Vajda sat in the lobby of the London players’ hotel “Marriott” and found a much-used but nevertheless true word for the last few months. “The old and new coach of Novak Djokovic said it was all “unbelievable”. And then he said that he sometimes wakes up in the morning and feels “like in a fairy tale”: “What we have experienced is a miracle. A great miracle.”
Vajda, the inconspicuous Slovak, is a central figure in this sensational story. And sensation is not too small a description for the resurrection from ruins that Vajdas employer Djokovic has laid down in this tennis season. Seven months ago, Djokovic was at the end of his hopes after losing to Frenchman Benoit Paire at the Masters tournament in Miami.
There wasn’t much missing, he admitted it later, and he would have withdrawn in the long crisis from the beloved, now somehow hated tennis world.
But now, for the glittering final tournament in men’s tennis, at the ATP Finals in London, he is suddenly the “capitano” of the tennis world again. The old, new number one, who will face Alexander Zverev in the second preliminary round match on Wednesday. The all-rounder, the man no one can ignore when it comes to the most tempting bonuses in tennis.
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It’s as if time had just made a leap, as if the dark episode in Djokovic’s career was just nothing to me, nothing to you erased. That phase, in which Djokovic had also sorted out faithful, year-long companions like Vajda, cold, in a “shock therapy”, as he said at that time.
But exactly those allies from the originally successful, welded together Team Nole have led the 31-year-old Belgrader back to the right path.
Djokovic freed himself from the influence of dubious prophets like the Spanish guru Pepe Imaz and found his way back to those qualities that had already made him strong on his previous ascents: Irresistible fitness, consuming ambition – and cool nerves in the all-decisive matches. “This tennis family that works around him is very important to him,” says Vajda, the coach.
Djokovic and his crew had to overcome the last tricky hurdle in this comeback story after the French Open. Djokovic lost a memorable five-set battle against the Italian Marco Cecchinato in the quarter-finals, and afterwards he was deeply frustrated.
“I honestly don’t know what to do next,” he said after the game. But five weeks later he suddenly became King of Wimbledon, with a naturalness that amazed the army of tennis experts and probably most of his colleagues. “Even some failures at that time couldn’t really get me away from my goal. I knew it was going forward,” says Djokovic today, “the self-confidence was just back.”
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Since the title coup of Wimbledon, Djokovic, who had spread fear and terror in the scene before his crisis – in the attitude of the untouchable, has also returned. Djokovic recently won almost everything that is important and desirable in tennis. At the ATP competition in Canada this summer he became the champion of all Masters, the first player ever to win all top competitions below the Grand Slam level.
He later took the crown at the US Open, winning the Masters in Paris against Roger Federer in the fiercely contested final. “It seems at the moment he’s unstoppable,” says Zverev, the next opponent, “but nobody’s unbeatable.”
Djokovic’s dominance also has another aspect. Because the next tennis generation, including Zverev, could actually have profited from the fact that Federer is gradually experiencing difficulties in the late autumn of his career. That other stars like Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka wrestle with injury problems and in some cases did not take part in the game at all for months.
But now Djokovic is sitting on the summit again, in all its splendour and glory. And it doesn’t look as if he could lose the desire and mood for his profession so quickly: “I’m sure,” says the joker, “that I have many very good years ahead of me.