By Chris Oddo | Thursday July 19, 2018
Novak Djokovic returned to the Grand Slam winner's circle at Wimbledon, and his victory could be the beginning of another stint at the top of tennis.
Photo Source: Camera Sport
This year at Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic’s title run was a work of nuance that can’t be boiled down. Drop the labels and re-imagine the narrative because Djokovic, at the peak of his powers, is in a class all by himself. Just like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the reigning duopoly of men’s tennis since forever and a day (also known as 2004), Djokovic is a tennis demigod worthy of his very own religious experience.
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He proved that at Wimbledon, surprising us all while not surprising us in the least.
Ask most and they’ll tell you that it is indeed surprising that Djokovic returned to Grand Slam glory at Wimbledon in 2018, so soon after the elbow surgery that put his assault on the record books on hold and not long after he began to find his missing mojo on the red clay of Europe this spring. But it isn’t surprising that Djokovic, once again, is playing like the best player in the world. It wasn’t a question of if—it was a question of when.
When appears to be now, and the reign of Roger and Rafa at the top of the ATP rankings could very well be coming to an end as a result. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Serb supplanted the duopoly (see summer, 2011), and that’s part of what makes Djokovic so legendary.
Djokovic is the ultimate conqueror, the renegade that smashed the tennis establishment and rode the “This is Sparta!” ethos to tennis supremacy. He’s the punk rocker of tennis, a stiff upper-lipped cold-blooded hunter with the brazen intensity of a wolf in a tussle and the courage to rock out with his racquet out. More important, he’s the only player in this era capable of consistently outshining the game’s luminaries (he has winning records against both Federer and Nadal), and he’s done it so often that he’s become a co-luminary and equal—a usurper that proved his worth and became the Czar of the tennis kingdom.
Djokovic has done it in such convincing fashion that the mere mention of his second coming makes Nadal die-hards shiver and Federer die-hards quiver (maybe that explains the unloved label).
13 times a Grand Slam champion and 4 times a Wimbledon champion, Djokovic passed Pete Sampras on the tournament’s all-time win list (He's now 65-10 lifetime at Wimbledon) and scooted by Boris Becker and John McEnroe on the Wimbledon’s all-time title list this year at the Championships. He did it by producing some of the most stunning grass-court tennis that Centre Court has seen in quite some time. The Serb was a menacing marvel at Wimbledon, calmly knifing his way through the trickiest of draws like a sorcerer of the sublime.
If you saw Djokovic, now 31 but freakishly fit as ever, deliver under pressure time and time again against Rafael Nadal in the semifinals you know that it was a layer of poise that laid the bedrock for his success, and paved the way for him to reach the summit at a major for the first time in over two years (since Roland Garros, 2016).
“Obviously it's important, as everybody says, to take in and accept whatever is happening and try to kind of possess the calm mind, because the calm mind in the end wins,” A prescient Djokovic told reporters after the semifinal. “It has been proven many times before at the highest level of sports, in various sports.”
There were so many moments where it appeared that Nadal had finally cracked the Serb’s code in their epic semifinal that lasted two days, five sets and over five hours. Take, for instance, Nadal’s three set points in the third-set tiebreaker or the five break points Nadal couldn’t convert in the decider before Djokovic stole away with the match via a love break in the 18th game of the decider.
There were so many times in this match where Djokovic dipped into what amounted to a seemingly endless reserve of clutchness. With surgical precision we saw Djokovic grab the all-important third-set breaker just before Wimbledon’s 11PM curfew shut the pair down on Friday night.
On the next day, in a fifth set littered with landmines we saw Djokovic calmly navigate the tricky terrain of Nadal’s ballistic game. Tense moments were the Serb’s best moments and he served as well as he ever has under pressure. Djokovic faced two break points at 4-4 in the fifth and another three at 7-7, and he made first serves on all five points. Two were aces, and on the other three points he rallied to perfection after Nadal put the returns in play and proceeded to probe.
Djokovic’s 6-4, 3-6, 7-6(9), 3-6, 10-8 victory over Nadal was a microcosm of his title run, the defining contest that saw him put all his prowess to work over the course of five gritty hours and 15 gritty minutes of heated back-and-forth tennis warfare. It was a contest that probably needs an asterisk when we call it a semifinal because it had all the look and feel of a de facto final. Nothing against eventual runner-up Kevin Anderson, who was brilliant at SW19 in reaching his second Grand Slam final in less than 52 weeks, but the prospect of the 6’8” South African challenging either Nadal or Djokovic in the final after 6:36 of trading bomb serves with John Isner on Friday at Wimbledon was hopeful at best.
It was the realization that we were indeed seeing the Gentlemen’s Singles final play out a few days early at Wimbledon that made Djokovic’s victory over Nadal all the more epic. That and the fact that Nadal and Djokovic’s rivalry, over the course of 12-plus years and 52 battles (Djokovic now leads 27-25), has never been anything but epic.
An aside: Strangely, Djokovic shot a video of himself playing marbles on the locker room floor while waiting for Anderson’s semifinal epic with Isner to end and posted it on Instagram. Perhaps it was based on a premonition that he would soon play a match for all the marbles with his rival.
Whether he meant it that way or not doesn’t matter. What really mattered is what Djokovic took from the locker room to Centre Court—a Rubik’s Cube of tactics, technique and determination that Nadal came close to solving but never did.
No fault of Nadal this was all about Djokovic using all his powers to break through a barrier.
It’s easy to miss out on what makes Djokovic so brilliant and virtually unbeatable when he’s in this type of zone, because one has to observe his footwork and not the flight of the ball to fully comprehend it. There are times when Djokovic plants a foot sideways, the inside of his ankles scraping the grass, to prolong a point eventually won, and there are others when all four of his limbs become contorted in a perfectly timed chaos dance that results in a forehand return down the line hit with just enough zing to keep Nadal off balance and on the defense.
There are myriad unique examples of elevated footwork and timing from Djokovic, they happen with regularity and they are acrobatic dirges that depress and defuse his opponents. During their semifinal that was actually a final, Nadal struck so many balls that would have rendered lesser opposition useless and so often Djokovic handled them with uncanny deftness. At times you’d see the Serb sprinting across the baseline to reach out and poke a flat passing shot on a ball that most would do no more than slice. At others Djokovic would sprint into his backhand corner and smack a flat two-hander, landing with both knees close together and both ankles spread, both arms up above his right shoulder and the racquet pointing straight up.
Nobody ever said he wasn’t a freak of nature, but all too often we forget just how rare and unique Djokovic’s brand of athleticism is.
And on grass, nobody defends better. Watching Djokovic’s last three matches live on Centre Court I couldn’t help be blown away with his movement as well as the way he consistently delivered groundstrokes to within a meter or two of the baseline. How antagonizing a presence he must be, even for a God of tennis.
Let’s just say that he’s part genius, part gymnast and part interpretive dancer. If you want to understand the magic of Djokovic it begins and ends with the body as a vehicle for the racquet—he contorts, connects and recoils like nobody else that the game has ever seen. Not only is it wildly refreshing, this Djokovician style, it must be said that it doesn’t possess any of the machine-like humdrum that so many try to minimize it with. Djokovic’s physicality is far more elaborate and compelling; it’s dimensional, it’s abstract, it brings the tennis canvas to life.
He’s a truly remarkable athlete, one of the rare few who sniff the rarefied air of perfection from time to time, and stay close to it even when not.
For the true connoisseur, there is a lot to contemplate in Djokovic’s game; nuances aplenty, complexity of strokes, subtle yet advanced micro-movements that allow him to be seemingly everywhere at once. There is even more to contemplate in his psychology. How calm he was at Wimbledon at times and how tempestuous he was at others; but never was he out of tune or out of sync with the mission. Djokovic has never had a problem channeling his passion into performance but at times in the past he has been guilty of stepping too far into the fire and letting his focus slip. He’s also experimented at times with his on-court demeanor, particularly in the last two years, and seemed lost. At Wimbledon, against Nadal, there was the natural ease of an athlete who was no longer self-conscious or searching.
He was at home on Wimbledon’s grass, and it showed.
Watch the Serb playing the third-set tiebreaker against Nadal, controlling his emotions after misses and muting his ecstasy after finally taking the set. Watch the fifth set, when the pressure finally gets to be too much, and Djokovic lets out a tortured scream at 6-7, 30-30. It’s an outburst worthy of its own trophy—beyond maniacal and into masochistic—and it somehow serves to calm Djokovic down in a time of need, when the match hangs in the balance and each point represents its own unique heartbreak and jubilation.
“I'm not always calm, I assure you of that,” he would later say when reflecting on the emotions of that contest. “I had bursts of emotions even today and yesterday. When you're playing such a high level, you know, against one of the biggest rivals, probably my biggest rival ever, it's quite intense. There's a lot of emotions in play. A lot is at stake. You feel it. You're going through that.”
Djokovic walked on fire in this match, Nadal’s burning tennis raking him over the coals, but he never yielded. Many a frayed nerve has been severed by this Rafael Nadal, one who was playing brilliantly, with full confidence, and seemed so set on winning Wimbledon in 2018. But Djokovic proved impervious—he bent but didn’t break—not this time, and maybe not for a while.
This year at Wimbledon, the Roger and Rafa show played second fiddle to the Novak Djokovic Experience. Searching for what had been lost, the Serb may have stumbled upon what is new and improved. It’d be easy to call it a fluke or a one-off if we didn’t know how capable Djokovic is at getting hot and staying hot. If we didn’t realize how this might not be a case of the old Djokovic being back, it may be a case of a new, evolved Djokovic arriving at the scene with a brand new bag of tricks.
A father of two, Djokovic said he spent time visualizing himself winning the title with his three and a half year old son Stefan in the crowd. When he turned to look on Sunday after he’d won, there was Stefan, laughing in his mother’s arms and pointing at his father with the trophy.
It was a moment that the Serb said he’ll keep in his heart forever. With everything on the line everything fell into place for Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon. Tennis had its script flipped by a Djokovic vision quest once again—not the first time and probably not the last.