, how to queue for bread at five in the morning,<\/p>\n
Serbia. War. Poverty. Twenty-four Grand Slams. None of it was inevitable. All of it was earned.<\/p>\n
On the night of March 24, 1999, eleven-year-old Novak Djokovic was alone in the dark streets of Belgrade when a steel-grey triangle of an F-117 bomber appeared over the roof of his building. He had been running toward his grandfather’s apartment, his parents just ahead carrying his younger brothers, when he fell flat on his face on the pavement. The bomber dropped two laser-guided missiles directly overhead and struck a hospital a few streets away. The whole city glowed, <\/span>he would write later<\/span><\/a>, like a ripe tangerine.<\/span><\/p>\n That night was the first of seventy-eight consecutive nights of NATO air strikes on the Serbian capital. Novak Djokovic would remember the sandy, dusty, metallic smell of the air for the rest of his life. <\/span>He has said that even today, loud sounds fill him with fear.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n He was also already, at eleven years old, taking tennis seriously in a country that was falling apart around him.<\/span><\/p>\n The Djokovic family lived in an apartment building in the Banjica neighbourhood of Belgrade that had no shelter. Every night of the bombing campaign, Novak and whoever was with him made their way on foot through darkened streets to his grandfather’s building, which had a basement reinforced by two thick steel doors. The biographer Mark Hodgkinson, who later visited that basement for research, <\/span>described it as very dark, very cold, quite an eerie place<\/span><\/a>. It is essentially unchanged from what it was in 1999, which means it is unchanged from the place where a child spent night after night listening to his city being destroyed overhead.<\/span><\/p>\n On the first night the bombs fell, Djokovic’s mother Dijana was knocked unconscious when the blast threw her head against a radiator. His father, Srdjan, steadied her while Novak, the oldest child, went looking for his brothers in the dark apartment. He found them. That image, a boy of eleven taking responsibility for his family’s safety in a pitch-black room while the windows shook, is the one that explains more about Novak Djokovic than any match statistic ever could.<\/span><\/p>\n What makes the story stranger and more revealing is what Djokovic was doing during the days between those nights. His coach at the time, Jelena Gencic, a former Yugoslav tennis champion who had also coached Monica Seles in her youth, kept him training through the entire campaign. She chose practice locations based on where the bombs had fallen most recently, calculating that NATO planes were unlikely to target the same site twice. Djokovic practiced for up to five hours a day. At one point, he celebrated his twelfth birthday at a tennis club, and while the people around him were singing, a plane flew over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He wrote in his autobiography that after a certain point, the family simply decided to stop being afraid. <\/span><\/a>“After so much death, so much destruction, we simply stopped hiding. Once you realize you are truly powerless, a certain sense of freedom takes over.”<\/span><\/p>\n That sentence, from a man who has been described ten thousand times as mentally the strongest player in the history of the sport, deserves reading twice. The mental fortress that his opponents have spent careers trying to breach was constructed, at least partly, in a cold basement in Belgrade while bombs fell outside. He was not born indifferent to fear. He chose, at twelve years old, to keep playing tennis while the windows rattled, and that choice became a habit, and the habit became a career.<\/span><\/p>\n His family queued at five in the morning to buy bread. He has spoken about standing in those lines with his grandfather as a normal childhood memory, the same way other children remember school trips or summer holidays. Serbia, under sanctions, was a country where ordinary things required extraordinary effort. Novak Djokovic did not grow up poor in the way the word is sometimes used casually. He grew up in a country that had been impoverished by war and international sanctions, which is a different kind of scarcity, because it is collective and visible and inescapable, and because everyone around you is in the same position and nobody is coming to help.<\/span><\/p>\n He has said, “I used that anger in a way that fuels me to be successful in tennis.”<\/span><\/a> He has also said that those scars are still present in everybody from Serbia who lived through it. The anger was real, the fuel was real, and the scarring was real, and all three became part of the same person.<\/span><\/p>\n When Djokovic was fifteen, he qualified for the Junior US Open. He was the top-ranked under-sixteen player in Europe. The Tennis Federation of Serbia did not have the money to send him. His family did not have the money to send him. The ticket and the trip cost five thousand dollars, which was a sum the Djokovics simply did not possess.<\/span><\/p>\n Srdjan Djokovic went to borrow it. He could not go to a bank. In Serbia of the late 1990s, banks did not extend credit to families without collateral, and the family had nothing of that kind to offer. So Srdjan went to the people who lent money under those circumstances. The interest rate, he was told, was fifteen percent. But because you are in a rush, it is twenty-five. Srdjan accepted the terms.<\/span><\/p>\n The debt was eventually repaid. The road to repayment was not straightforward. Djokovic has described car chases through Belgrade, shootings in the capital, and men coming to collect it. His father navigated it. He kept the worst of it from his son for years, not wanting Novak to carry the weight of knowing what the trip to America had actually cost.<\/span><\/p>\n When Djokovic eventually learned the full story, he said that no amount of money could ever repay his father for what he went through. <\/span>“There are so many stories that cannot be told publicly,” he has said.<\/span><\/a> “Car chases and other things while trying to get by. And then this story that I didn’t know at the time remained hidden.”<\/span><\/p>\n The boy who arrived in America to play junior tennis did not know any of this. He knew that he was the best under-sixteen player in Europe, what a bomb shelter smelled like, and how to queue for bread at five in the morning and how to keep practicing while planes flew overhead. He had grown up in a family that reorganised itself entirely around his talent, at considerable personal cost and genuine danger, because they believed in what he could become.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Story Behind the Player: Novak Djokovic<\/h2>\n
The Basement and the Court<\/b><\/h3>\n
The Price of a Ticket to America<\/b><\/h3>\n