Novak Djokovic goes into this year’s Wimbledon hoping to set one tournament record and equal another. If, on 13 July, he wins his eighth title, he’ll not only become the oldest singles champion in the Open era, he’ll also draw level with Roger Federer as the most successful men’s singles player ever. But one mark will always be beyond him. He’ll never be the most loved player the game has seen, not even close. Even now, after 20 years as a professional player and statistics beyond anyone else in history, crowds rarely cheer more for him than for his opponent, whoever that may be.
How do we hate thee, Novak? Let us count the ways. We hate thee for not being Roger Federer, all feline grace and danseur elegance. We hate thee for not having Rafael Nadal’s Tiggerish exuberance and cartoon muscles. We hate thee for recklessly and selfishly refusing to be vaccinated against Covid and thereby becoming a hero to conspiracy theorists worldwide. We hate thee for being Serbian: Balkan aggressors and Srebrenica perpetrators. We hate thee for trying too hard to be liked at the beginning and not seeming to care now whether we like thee or not. Indeed, we hate thee for thriving on our hatred, for using it as fuel towards yet another victory.
But look at all those “we”s in there. Our antipathy says much more about us than about you. For every criticism there’s a rebuttal, equal and opposite. You’re not Federer or Nadal? Well, they may be more outwardly charming, but deep down they were stone cold killers just like you are, and that’s a compliment: no-one gets to the interstellar levels you three have reached without a near-psychotic will to win.
Your determination is astonishing: no battle too lost, no shot too impossible, no bodily contortion too much. There are moments in every top-level match when tennis resembles heavyweight boxing in its demands on stamina, technique and mental strength. No teammates, no breathing space, no hiding place: just two opponents, and the instant when one has the will to do what the other does not. And no-one has ever done that better and more often than you have.
Your insistence on keeping your body and diet as natural as possible is a beacon in an over-medicated world. In 2022, after being refused entry into the Australian Open on the grounds of non-vaccination, you were also prepared to sacrifice the chance of playing Wimbledon or the US Open rather than take the jab, saying: “That’s the price I’m willing to pay. The principles of decision-making on my body are more important than any title or anything else.”
You’re a proud patriot who feels both the pressure and the privilege of being the most globally famous person from a small country, and you grew up in conditions most of us can’t begin to imagine. As a twelve-year-old, you spent 78 straight nights in an air-raid shelter as NATO bombs rained down on Belgrade. “You never forget those experiences,” you’ve said. “Never. They stick in the back of your mind, they are always in your subconscious. How could they be anything else? But you can also use them as a tool to make you believe, to make you stronger.”
You helped found the Professional Tennis Players’ Association (PTPA) to campaign for more equitable prize money, reasonable schedules and better player welfare. And no, this isn’t you ensuring that other multi-millionaires get richer. Tennis is a very steep pyramid when it comes to earnings: anyone in the world’s top 500 is eligible to join the PTPA, and at least half of those make less than £30,000 per year.
You’re also almost unfailingly magnanimous in victory and gracious in defeat: never more so than at Wimbledon twelve years ago, when you were fully aware of what Andy Murray’s victory over you meant, not only to him personally, but to Britain as a whole. “Congratulations to Andy: you absolutely deserved it, you played incredibly,” you said. “I gave it my all. It was an honour, an absolute pleasure, to be in this match.”
At 38, even a man as preternaturally fit and determined as Djokovic can’t have that much longer left at the top. Perhaps in retirement he’ll finally find the love of the people.
In The Dark Knight, the district attorney Harvey Dent says “you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.” In sport, however, the opposite is true. Martina Navratilova – muscular, lesbian, outspoken and unapologetic – was more admired than loved as she racked up nine Wimbledon singles titles in her playing days. Now, however, she’s the doyenne of SW19, appreciated for who she is off the court as much as who she was on it. She hasn’t changed: society has.
John McEnroe, Roy Keane and Duncan Ferguson have all had similar transitions. Absolute menaces in their playing days, they’re now recast as twinkly-eyed elder statesmen, wryly telling war stories of old.
These are binary constructs devoid of complexity
But this isn’t war, of course. It’s sport, whose importance lies in its lack of importance: it can mean everything only because ultimately it means nothing. Sport lives and dies on drama, which in turn lives and dies on conflict, on heroes and villains, us and them, Atticus Finches and Hannibal Lecters, galactic empires and rebel alliances.
These are binary constructs devoid of complexity, and certainly devoid of the complexity that impels men and women to dedicate their lives to disciplines in which unimaginably tiny margins can mean the difference between everlasting glory and a place in the footnotes.
It’s hard to credit at this remove, but 45 years ago the two most famous sportspeople in the country were middle-distance runners. In one corner, blue as his politics, was Sebastian Coe, “the Toff”: Brideshead name and Tory MP-in-waiting vibe, a shyly handsome media darling who was perfect son-in-law material.
In the other corner, red as the Soviet vest he liked to wear, was Steve Ovett, “the Tough”: dismissive of competitors and the press alike, frequently lambasted as boorish and graceless, and apparently uninterested in anything other than winning races with as much contemptuous ease as possible.
To support one over the other was to nail your own personality and worldview to the mast: conformist or outlaw, establishment or opposition, restraint or freedom? The really interesting thing about Coe and Ovett, however, wasn’t the contrast between their respective images: it was the gap between those images and the reality.
Coe was a kid from Sheffield who’d failed his 11-plus, whose father was a factory manager, and who would prove himself as tough as his hometown steel in the way he’d recover from a severe bout of mononucleosis to take a second Olympic gold in 1984. Ovett was an amiable art student from Brighton who was far more sensitive and vulnerable than his exterior suggested. We the public projected a lot onto them, and much of it wasn’t really merited.
Besides, the concept of good and evil in a purely sporting context is facile. Proper heroism comes outside the arena rather than inside it, even though prowess in that arena is what gives sportspeople the clout to make a difference.
Nick Kyrgios, tennis’s perennially wayward talent, has spoken eloquently of his mental health struggles – at one stage he wore a compression sleeve on his arm not for the performance benefits but to hide the scars of self-harm – and has used his experiences to try and help others.
“Anyone who doesn’t say I’m a role model doesn’t know what I go through on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “They don’t have kids messaging them for advice and saying: ‘I’ve had suicidal thoughts and you’re the only reason why I’m trying to find my way.’ I take pride in giving back and when I see kids that aren’t super-high on confidence and are afraid of people speaking negative words at them, that’s when I can help the most, because I’ve gone through it.”
Billie Jean King’s work for gender equality and gay rights has resonance far beyond her twelve Grand Slam singles titles. Siya Kolisi, double Rugby World Cup-winning captain, is a passionate campaigner against sexual violence in South Africa. Sprinter Allyson Felix left Nike after they slashed her sponsorship post-pregnancy and signed with Athleta, an apparel brand focussed on women. “When you speak your truth, on the other side of that fear is freedom,” she said. “You can’t change anything with silence.”
To the Jews of wartime Tuscany, however, Bartali was a lifesaver
Cathy Freeman’s 400m title in the 2000 Sydney Olympics wasn’t special just because she was Australian: it was special because she was Aboriginal, running in spikes coloured black, gold and red like the Aboriginal flag she carried when she won, and her story had deep resonance for a country trying to come to terms with its historical treatment of her people.
Katharine Switzer competed in the 1967 Boston Marathon at a time when women were still banned from doing so because it was widely thought that they weren’t up to it. Despite being assaulted by the race director Jock Temple en route, she finished the race. “I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run 26-plus miles,” she said later. “If I quit, everybody would say it was a publicity stunt. If I quit, it would set women’s sports back, way back, instead of forward. If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win. My fear and humiliation turned to anger.” It took five years before Boston would establish an official women’s race, but it would surely have been much longer had Switzer not done what she did.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos suffered hugely from the backlash against their Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in 1968, but – after long careers in education where they’ve both helped countless young people – they remain unrepentant. “It wasn’t a matter of whether I wanted to do it,” Smith said. “I had to do it. I was standing on the highest platform in the world. How could I not?”
Carlos concurs. “When the time came, when I had my one chance in life, I stood up and said this shit is wrong, it’s got to be corrected.’’
Emil Zátopek, one of the greatest distance runners ever and a man of such a sunny disposition that he made more friends in one race than most of us do in a year, eventually fell foul of the Czechoslovak regime and was given a choice: perform propaganda for us or spend seven years in the uranium mines. Zátopek being Zátopek not only chose the mines without hesitation, he also found the bright side in that decision, saying “the earth is nice not only from above, but from inside too.”
Most of all, there was Gino Bartali. To cycling fans, he was a great who won the Giro d’Italia three times, the Tour de France twice, and had a storied rivalry with his countryman Fausto Coppi. To the Italian public, he was a man of simple faith and good values: Gino The Pious, born and raised a devout Catholic.
To the Jews of wartime Tuscany, however, Bartali was a lifesaver. He took counterfeit identity papers which would grant safe passage, hid them in his handlebars and frame, and couriered them all over northern Italy as he racked up thousands of kilometres on what were ostensibly marathon training rides, all the while knowing that he was carrying his own death warrant if those papers were ever found.
Bartali helped save 800 lives, give or take. But he never spoke about it, and it was decades before his family found out, let alone the public. “Good is something you do, not something you talk about,” he said. “Some medals are pinned not to your jacket, but to your soul.”
If there’s a better definition of the difference between mere sporting achievement and proper heroism, I’ve yet to find it.
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. He has written ‘Open Side’ with Sam Warburton, ‘Rise’ with Siya Kolisi, and ‘Leap Of Faith’ with Frankie Dettori
