MELBOURNE – It has been a long time since tennis has seen a controversy with as little substance as the one Novak Djokovic generated on Australia’s Channel 9. Tony Jones, the presenter, was neither funny nor clever, but neither was his an assault on the Serbian homeland, or even on the player.
With almost any other player, Jones’s would have been a silly, unimportant thing to do. But not with Djokovic, shrewd as anyone on the tour and a man convinced that the devil is in the details. The Serb does not improvise even when he seems to improvise, and that is no small matter when you are facing the most successful tennis player of all time and, why not, the future president of his country.
It was Djokovic who took it upon himself to give Jones’ words a dimension they do not have, aware that tennis, a sport with a strong tendency towards political correctness, is not football, basketball or boxing. In any of those three sports, they would laugh at what they would see as the Serb’s thin skin and an overly concessive, form-bound environment.
Again: Jones wanted to be funny without the skills to be funny, but what he said, in the context of the failed joke, is no more than that, to be taken as a joke.
Should a journalist make such jokes? No, but it might also be worth thinking about what is required of journalists on television, a hint? Be relaxed, don’t be so serious, talk like normal people, empathise with the audience, entertain people, stay away from dry topics. Jones followed that self-destructive script and launched into a mini-duel of sloganeering with Serbian fans.
Djokovic, an extraordinary sportsman, a likeable, intelligent man who almost always achieves a great emotional connection with his interlocutor, is a master of mind games, a player who knows how to get into his opponent’s mind during matches… and before.
In the case of the match against Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open, the mind game comes before the match. Djokovic will step on the Rod Laver Arena on Tuesday night as the victim, as the assaulted, as the man who must be protected, because any phrase or gesture that is interpreted (that he interprets) as aggression would already be intolerable. Or is there an anti-Djokovic campaign?
There isn’t, but if there is, there is already an antidote: Djokovic will face Alcaraz surfing a wave of self-generated sympathy, precisely in a country where there are many who do not forgive him for what happened in the middle of the pandemic, in January 2022, precisely in a stadium with a large Serbian presence. It all adds up to what really matters: advancing to the semi-finals to keep alive the dream of Grand Slam title number 25.