When NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on the night of May 7, 1999, I was a teenager whose wall was plastered with posters of the Backstreet Boys and Andre Agassi. The news reached us in China the following morning. U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized, saying the attack was an accident, and that the CIA, working from outdated maps, had mistaken the building for a Yugoslav military procurement office. The Chinese government rejected the explanation: The United States of America does not make stupid mistakes like that. The news was unavoidable for weeks. To this day, I can recall the names and faces of the three journalists who died: Shao Yunhuan, Xu Xinghu, Zhu Ying. Xu and Zhu were a young couple.
A fortnight later, a boy in Belgrade turned 12. It was the 60th day of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, launched to stop Slobodan Milošević’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The boy, his parents and his two younger brothers had been sleeping in his aunt’s bomb shelter. At night, he shivered at the sound of explosions above. During the day, he played tennis. He and his coach held their practices at the sites of the most recent strikes — “figuring,” as he recalled, “that if they bombed one place yesterday, they probably wouldn’t bomb it today.” That’s when he first played probability tennis. They played without nets, on broken concrete. His birthday party was held at his tennis club, near a military school. As his parents sang “Happy Birthday,” he later wrote, “their voices were drowned out by the roar of the bombers flying overhead.”
Novak Djokovic has never muted his love for his country the way athletes from suspect nations are expected to. Of all his sport’s prizes, the one he wanted most was Olympic gold — the one that had escaped him for 16 years, through four summers of heartbreak. When he finally won it in Paris in 2024, at the age of 37, two months after knee surgery, against a player 16 years his junior in Carlos Alcaraz, he sank to his knees on the clay and wept as he had never wept for any of the 24 Grand Slams he had won for himself. He said that, until that day, carrying the Serbian flag into the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Games was “the best feeling that an athlete could have.” He was still wearing the medal days later.
Tennis is a Western sport. “The West” is not a direction or an ethnicity but a club; its members issue the visas, go to war together and host all four Grand Slam tournaments (Wimbledon, the French Open, the U.S. Open and the Australian Open). Tennis is a game of English lawns: Wimbledon dresses its players in white, famously down to their underwear, and instructs its crowds, over the loudspeaker, in the sport’s most dignified imperative: “Quiet, please.” It is a game of French kings: “Deuce” is from “deux”; “love,” by legend, from “l’oeuf” — the egg, the shape of a zero. In tennis, love means nothing.
Between 2005 and 2010, the two best tennis players in the world won 21 of the 24 Grand Slams, and they happened to embody the two ideal types of Western masculinity. Roger Federer was the prince. Swiss, serene, sponsored by banks and watchmakers, he walked onto Centre Court in a cream blazer with a gold monogram and never seemed to sweat. His game was praised in the vocabulary of art criticism: liquid, effortless, sublime. David Foster Wallace called watching him a religious experience. Rafael Nadal was the warrior. Spanish, sleeveless, covered in sweat and clay, he bit his trophies and treated every point like a cavalry charge. He was loved for his ferocity, for the off-court shyness that contradicted it, and even for his quirks. The picking at his shorts before every serve was not vulgarity but ceremony — the warrior and his rite. Rivers of ink have been spilled about the pair: the marble and the clay, the heir and the conqueror, the immaculate and the carnal, the grace from above and the valor from below.
So when a jocular Serb prone to sliding into the splits entered the room and began dethroning the prince and the warrior with a game that appeared neither graceful nor valorous, the club recoiled. The crowds cheered every time his opponents won a point and applauded his faults — a breach of the sport’s oldest etiquette. They booed his celebrations, even a fist pump. And he noticed. He was the party crasher — “the third guy,” as he put it much later. There were now three of them in this rivalry. In Princess Diana’s immortal phrase, it was a bit crowded.
He had tried, at first, to be liked. The young Djokovic did impressions of other players to please the crowd: Maria Sharapova’s demure hair-tuck and Nadal’s solemn rite, including the famed picking at the shorts. His impressions were awfully good. The audience howled and demanded encores; they called him the Djoker. But somewhere along the way he recognized the real register of the applause: He was the jester, who entertains the court but cannot join it. He wanted acceptance; he got laughs.
The locker room, however, was not laughing. Long before he posed a real threat to the genteel sport’s rules-based order, the club had decided that he was a fraud. In his early years, Djokovic kept breaking down mid-match: gasping, collapsing, retiring. Commentators criticized his lack of fitness and what they believed to be a lack of respect for the game. The prince had delivered the verdict earliest of all: “I don’t trust his injuries. … I think he’s a joke when it comes to his injuries.” Andy Roddick, then the top American player, was asked about Djokovic’s ailments and wisecracked a list: “cramp, bird flu, anthrax, SARS, common cough and cold.”
By a lucky accident in 2010, Djokovic learned he was gluten intolerant and changed his diet. The collapses stopped, his fitness surged and within a year he was the best tennis player in the world. In 2011, he finally took Wimbledon and won three of the four majors — a feat he would repeat a decade later. The following January, in Melbourne, he outlasted the warrior himself in the longest Grand Slam final ever played — five hours and 53 minutes. But the medical diagnosis never lifted the moral verdict. Nearly two decades after the prince’s ruling, holding more major titles than any man in the history of the sport, Djokovic was booed off the same Melbourne court for retiring with a torn muscle — and had to post his MRI results to prove it.
When he walked onto the court at the Paris Masters in a Darth Vader mask on Halloween in 2012, the joke was no longer on him. The order of things had been overturned, and he was officially the villain. He had long since retired the crowd-pleasing impressions, replacing them with crowd-provoking retorts. He won the 2015 U.S. Open final in a stadium that cheered his faults. So he talked back, turned to the stands when Federer missed a forehand and shouted “Yes! Yes!” Four years later, on the same court, he told a heckler to “shut the f— up.” In a match against the Dane Holger Rune at Wimbledon in 2024, after two hours of the crowd chanting “Ruuuuuune,” which Djokovic heard as boos, he took the microphone, thanked the respectful, and wished everyone else a “very gooooood night.” In those years, he perfected the trick that would turn hostility into fuel: “When the crowd is chanting ‘Roger,’” he said after lifting the Wimbledon trophy in 2019, “I hear ‘Novak.’”