{"id":771475,"date":"2026-06-30T17:16:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T17:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/771475\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T17:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T17:16:13","slug":"novak-djokovic-reflects-on-two-decades-of-tennis-triumphs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/771475\/","title":{"rendered":"Novak Djokovi\u0107 Reflects on Two Decades of Tennis Triumphs"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are very few places in the world of tennis where you can press your fingerprints on a Grand Slam trophy. Above us loomed New York City\u2019s Arthur Ashe Stadium \u2014 the largest stage the sport has ever built, a 23,000-seat coliseum where matches thunder like theater or war. And yet, in the quiet corridors beneath it, where the players and the media converge, after his US Open triumphs, Novak Djokovi\u0107 would ritually pass his championship crown into the hands of a small circle of Serbian tennis writers, myself among them. He offered the silver prize around like it was a family relic; we circled it with cameras, smudging its surface with our awe. That was Djokovi\u0107\u2019s gift\u2014not just the wins, but the luminous intimacy of letting us hold those wins, as though greatness were something that could be shared.<\/p>\n

The first time I met Novak Djokovi\u0107, it felt more like a play than a story. This was 2003, his first US Open as a junior, my first as a writer\u2014long before he became the sport\u2019s winningest player. By the time I walked up after his quick loss, his tennis bag was unmoored, his emotions unready, lamenting in half-whispers that his backhand wasn\u2019t working. As dusk was settling over the court, boundaries between personal and professional dimmed as quickly as the light. \u201cYou\u2019ll get it back,\u201d I said, pirouetting a backhand for him \u2014 advice as earnest as it was misplaced: \u201cYou have to follow through more with your body.\u201d When we spoke at his next US Open, it was no longer just him and me, but a press room lit with reporters, bright lights, and microphones.<\/p>\n

I would frequently help the stenographers correct their transcripts after Djokovi\u0107 had been interviewed. It\u2019s not so much his language\u2014Djokovi\u0107 can, quite remarkably, converse well in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish\u2014but the unfamiliar Serbian cultural footprints. The very challenge they had is what makes the interviews with Djokovi\u0107 looser, stranger, mercurial in my notes: when the interview shifts to Serbian. With the score, strategy and statistics having been spent in English, talking in Serbian would offer a shortcut, a code for the shadows and margins of tennis life, questions of rhythm and ritual, the unseen machinery that keeps a player\u2019s mind intact.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in my garage in East Dallas, I still have the boxes from the chocolates Novak handed the Serbian press after winning the trophy in 2018. The media room, usually a space of formal theater, loosened that evening into something closer to a shared table. I remembered his last title celebration when this same media room briefly shed its armor, so this time I came prepared. I snuck in a bottle of Serbian plum brandy\u2014our national drink, the taste of history and survival\u2014a quiet offering for the winner, his team, all of us. I later wondered what the watchful stenographers in the corner made of it.<\/p>\n

\"Image\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n

Djokovic with tennis reporters in 2015.<\/p>\n

\"Image\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n

After Djokovic\u2019s first US Open win in 2011.<\/p>\n

\"Image\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n

Djokovic and reporters in 2015.<\/p>\n

\"Image\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n

A view from the 2018 US Open press box.<\/p>\n

\"currentImage.alt\"\/ <\/p>\n

When Djokovi\u0107 practices back home in Serbia\u2019s capital, Belgrade, it is sometimes at the clay courts right across the street from my apartment, the very place where I had fallen in love with tennis as a kid. It was a somewhat subconscious enchantment, lulled to sleep by the metronomic pulse of bouncing balls, my childhood bedtime tethered to the court\u2019s towering nightlights. I thought of those sounds again here at the US Open, when I watched a blind spectator carefully make her way down to a seat in the lower tier of Arthur Ashe Stadium \u2014 stepping directly into my story for that day. I shared this with Djokovi\u0107 and asked him about experiencing tennis by sound alone. We talked about hidden frequencies in our game, the distinct sounds tennis gifts us \u2014 how the one-handed backhand can sound like a champagne cork popping, especially when played here, in the sport\u2019s largest amphitheater.<\/p>\n

It is Djokovi\u0107\u2019s rare ability to make space for themes like these, to invite us into a dialogue not just about shattering tennis records but about the textures of the game. His words on those subtler topics \u2014 carried in my notes, my recordings, my memory \u2014 felt like proof that they belonged in our sport. As if Djokovi\u0107 were waving me through a hidden gate, I followed tennis toward the places where quieter stories lived: the off-limits seats just behind the umpire\u2019s chair, the photographer\u2019s pit cut into the baseline, the players\u2019 lounge where Djokovi\u0107 played chess, or the small, unadorned office where millions in prize money were dispensed without fanfare.<\/p>\n

World-class athletes alter everything around them. His matches bend my behavior, changing not only how I write about tennis but how I watch and feel it.\u00a0 For decades I\u2019ve held to a secret pact with Djokovi\u0107: no bathroom breaks, no distractions, no food runs \u2014 rooted to my stadium seat until his match was finished. The one selfie I have with Novak was after he beat Juan Martin Del Potro for the 2018 championship. The picture is hurried and blurry, our enthusiasm crowding the frame from all sides, shaking the camera. The trophy didn\u2019t make it into this shot, but it remained the quiet reason it existed at all. After two decades of conversations, Djokovi\u0107 leaves me with the same trace \u2014 stories and rituals set in motion by his gravity, whether or not he is in the room.<\/p>\n

Author \"Nikola<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are very few places in the world of tennis where you can press your fingerprints on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":771476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-771475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}