The Sporting Statesman Read online

  For my daughter Tamara, who must have felt she was sharing her dad with some Serbian sportsman for a good 15 months of her life.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE – AN ETHNIC MIX

  CHAPTER TWO – WHO ARE THE SERBS?

  CHAPTER THREE – NOLE AND JECA

  CHAPTER FOUR – THE EMERGENCE OF SERBIA FROM THE YUGOSLAV WARS

  CHAPTER FIVE – TOUGHENED BY NATO’S BOMBS

  CHAPTER SIX – FATHERS AND SONS

  CHAPTER SEVEN – THE MANIA BEGINS

  CHAPTER EIGHT – MODERN-DAY SERBIA

  CHAPTER NINE – IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH

  CHAPTER TEN – THE CHAMPION MUST COME FROM WITHIN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – THE ROLE OF SPORT IN SERBIA

  CHAPTER TWELVE – ‘THIS IS WHAT I’M BORN FOR’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – A ‘GIVING’ PERSON

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Plates

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Vukovar, Srebrenica, Mostar, Banja Luka. Smallish towns in what was once Yugoslavia, which became nightly recurring names on international television news bulletins in the 1990s. Equally recurring names were those of Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, Alja Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic – the leading protagonists from that same conflict, the four wars that characterised the break-up of Yugoslavia. The reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War based on economic interdependence was supposed to prevent future wars in Europe. But 46 years after the end of the war and 34 years after the founding of what is today the European Union, neighbour turned against neighbour in the most appalling bloodbath, which a United Nations tribunal said included genocide. All on European soil.

  It’s tempting to see wars as neat packages of time – like the world stopped between 1914 and 1918, and stopped again from 1939 to 1945. It’s never like that. Life goes on, despite the fears and privations of war. People learn to survive, they educate their kids, and some of those kids can still learn to dance, or play a musical instrument or a sport the way they would have done during peacetime.

  As such, it should surprise no one that out of the wreckage of war-torn Yugoslavia should come some gifted athletes. But that six world-class tennis players should come from Serbia, a country of just 7.1 million inhabitants, 88,000 square kilometres and no real tennis tradition, is something remarkable. And we are talking about six. Novak Djokovic, Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Jankovic and Nenad Zimonjic were all world-ranked No. 1 in the space of a few years: the first three in singles, Zimonjic in men’s doubles. Add to that Janko Tipsarevic, who reached eighth and spent two years in the top 10, and Viktor Troicki, who was once ranked 12th, and it is a remarkable generation, almost on a par with the Swedes, who defied their miniscule population to produce a phenomenal crop of tennis players that dominated team tennis and many of the major titles from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s.

  Of these six Serbs, Djokovic is by far the most successful. Ivanovic’s achievement of winning the 1998 French Open and reaching the top of the women’s rankings should not be underestimated but she held the top spot for only a few weeks and has never looked even close to winning a second major since. She is a charming and stunningly good-looking ambassador for her country but her results limit how effective she can be. Jankovic is one of only three women players to have topped the rankings without having won a Grand Slam singles title – her achievement speaks for her phenomenal consistency in 2008–9, but she too has looked a long way from taking herself off that list in the intervening years.

  By contrast, Djokovic has notched up six Grand Slam titles and needs only the French Open to complete a career Grand Slam. More importantly, he has shown he is the equal of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in having the charisma and gravitas to represent his sport, and has set an example by his dignified and gracious behaviour. And that is of massive importance to his country. His career is moderately well documented and his natural charisma is enhanced by one or two of his sideshows – his impersonations of fellow professionals, his habit of calling the trainer during matches (now largely extinct) and his voluble father. But no one has yet set it against the background of his country’s emergence from the horrors of the 1990s bloodshed. This book is an attempt to do that.

  It would be tempting – though not entirely true – to say the seed for this book was sown in September 2010.

  I was in Belgrade for the first time, covering the Davis Cup semi-final between Serbia and the Czech Republic. I arrived on the Wednesday evening, and when I hooked up with the people I was working with, found that they’d arranged to eat at Novak’s, one of the two restaurants in Belgrade owned by Novak Djokovic. How appropriate – my first ever meal in Belgrade at the restaurant of the man who was putting Serbia on the map! And just one block from the Beogradska Arena, the 17,000-seater indoor stadium that had become the spiritual home of Serbian tennis.

  The following morning I had to interview Djokovic for television, and while we were waiting for the cameraman to get set up, I told him that I’d eaten at his restaurant the night before. He asked me what I thought of it. I hesitated, trying to think of the politest way to say that the food was very good (it was) but it was rather a long time coming (I’ve since learned that you do wait a long time for your food in Serbian restaurants and Novak’s isn’t particularly slow). But I never got to say that because Djokovic interjected with ‘Don’t tell me – it was too smoky, wasn’t it?’ I had to admit it was, to which he added, ‘Yes, we’re getting there but it’s slow and we’ve a long way to go.’

  What struck me about his response was that it encapsulated the dual role Djokovic plays. He’s totally comfortable outside Serbia, fully integrated into the western European and North American culture where smoking in public places is now unacceptable (normally banned), where all good restaurants offer healthy options and where patriotism is welcomed but nationalism is viewed with suspicion, especially when it gets vociferous. Yet he’s also totally comfortable in his own country, even though he acts with a slightly different register – he’s a bit more jingoistic, happy to join in with Serbian songs and cultural rituals, even a bit of blatant nationalism. That, at least, is my impression. He himself denies it, saying he always acts the same: ‘I always try to be respectful and kind to everyone no matter what country they come from, or where I am on the map. That applies to my compatriots, too.’ That may indeed be his intention, though I stand by my sense that there are subtle changes he makes when he’s in his homeland.

  That brief exchange wasn’t the genesis of this book but it played an important role when John Blake Publishing came to me in 2012 and asked if I would write a biography of Djokovic. My first step was to approach Djokovic’s agent and see if an authorised biography or ghosted autobiography might be on the cards. I was told that neither was an option, as Djokovic wants to write his own book when his playing career ends. That left me with the option of an independent biography of Djokovic, or nothing. As I had written Roger Federer’s biography on that basis and updated it several times, I had no particular desire to write another straight tennis biography, so I told Blake I wasn’t up for the Djokovic book.

  Blake’s staff came back saying they were particularly keen to have a book about Djokovic, so would I reconsider? I thought about it and kept being struck by my realisation about how Djokovic spans these two cultures: the Serbian and the international. I’ve also been struck by how little the western world understands about Serbia, so I went back to Blake and offered them a book that was a mixture of Djokovic’s own story and Serbia’s story. Th
ey jumped at the suggestion and this is that book.

  For a book like this to work, the author needs a bit of good fortune and I had two distinct strokes of luck.

  The first came when I got an email from Chris Bowers. If this sounds like a bad case of talking to myself, it isn’t. I have a namesake who used to work at the BBC at the same time as I did and he contacted me confessing to a 20-year guilty conscience about having accepted a dinner date from a female admirer who, it transpired, had heard my voice on the radio, not his. I found that touching – and, no doubt, a little flattering – but more significant was his email address. I recognised that he worked for the British foreign ministry and, through him, I was able to re-establish contact with a colleague of his and an old tennis-playing friend of mine, Mike Davenport. And Mike just happened to be the newly minted British ambassador to Belgrade, who subsequently proved of immense help to me in researching this book. I therefore gladly accept Chris’s confession.

  The second came when the most important interview for this book not only materialised but provided me with one of the most uplifting moments of my journalistic career.

  I had identified early in my preparation that the most important person I needed to talk to was Jelena Gencic, the woman who taught Novak to play tennis. In March 2013 I went to Belgrade on a bit of a flyer – I had a trip planned for the following month but wanted to make sure I actually had some interviews arranged, so decided it would be best to make an exploratory advance trip. It was on that exploratory trip that Gencic was not only available but gave me two and a half hours of her time in her favourite watering hole, the Café Ozon in the Dedinje suburb of Belgrade. The question about Desert Island Discs (see page 41) came fairly early,

  and when she listed ‘Mahler’s Adagio’, I interrupted her and said, ‘Do you mean the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony?’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Ah, you know it,’ she said and from then on the connection between us was a wonderful one. As I left the café, I felt moved to hug her, even though I’d known her for barely two hours.

  The following day I was mulling over what she’d told me and was beginning to see the chapter ‘Nole and Jeca’ that appears in this book. It all seemed too good to be true. Gencic had reminded me of my own grandmother, a great story teller but something of a Märchentante, a German word for a teller of stories that often improve with the telling. So I asked my contact who had introduced me to Gencic whether I could trust what Jelena had told me. She seemed puzzled at my question. I explained that it seemed almost like a fairy tale – the cultured woman from the affluent Yugoslav intelligentsia finding she had a total meeting of minds with this boy from a moderately simple family, and taught him a lot more than just forehands and backhands – and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t all a massive tale told to impress the journalist from abroad. My contact, who knew Gencic fairly well, assured me that she was not the kind of woman to embellish stories, at least not more than in a very minor way, and she always stuck to what she believed was the truth.

  When I went back to Belgrade the following month, Jelena and her sister welcomed me to their home. I wish I had enjoyed the Turkish coffee they gave me – I confess I found it utterly disgusting but I very much appreciated the hospitality. I admired her trophies, asked her a few more questions and checked a few details from my interview a few weeks earlier. As I left, she promised to check anything else I wasn’t sure about if I’d just email it to her. I never saw her again.

  Jelena Gencic died on 1 June 2013. Unbeknown to me, she had been fighting breast cancer for some time, but it wasn’t that that killed her. Most people close to her knew she had breast cancer and she had largely beaten it. But few knew that she also had liver cancer, and that finished her. I saw her five weeks before she died. She was spending 7–10 hours a day on the tennis court, not running around but doing lots of coaching. She looked like she could have planned her 90th birthday party but at 76 her life came to an abrupt end.

  I was told about her death by text message. I was at Roland Garros and the message came with the strict instruction that I was to say nothing to anyone close to Djokovic until he had gone on court for his third-round match against Grigor Dimitrov. That was wise advice, for when Djokovic came off court, he was given the news, burst into tears and promptly cancelled all media obligations because he was so upset. After his fourth-round win, he was happy to talk about her and his 10-minute English press conference was almost exclusively about Gencic. I remember that Saturday night for the strange emotion of grieving for someone I’d met just twice and hardly knew but who I felt I knew very well. I was also the last journalist to do a formal interview with her, so was consumed by the uncomfortable mix of relief and elation of having got her to talk before she left us, and terrible sadness that she should die with so much vitality apparently still left in her.

  As such, in the months since her death I have mulled over whether I have become too emotional in the section about her. And whether I have afforded her an importance in the Djokovic story that goes beyond what she warrants. I don’t think I have. Djokovic himself talks about destiny, and while he’s likely to have made it to the top in tennis even without Gencic’s input, I remain convinced that he would not be the person he is today without her influence and his route to the top would not have been as painless. After all, he does have a number of health issues that he has had to overcome through a lot of trial and error – would he have been open to the holistic approach of an Igor Cetojevic (see pages 174–6) if he had not been exposed to Gencic’s open-mindedness at an early age? And would he, without Gencic, have developed the sense of statesmanship that allows him to straddle the two worlds of his fiercely patriotic Serbia and a global community that has grown to like him but still mistrusts the country he hails from? It would be wrong to overplay Gencic’s role in Djokovic’s tennis development – she never travelled with him and he did have four years in his early adulthood when he wasn’t even in contact with her – but I am convinced she deserves a chapter of her own.

  A classic question people ask when they see a biography is whether it is ‘authorised’ or not. I dislike the term ‘authorised’, as it implies something official, with the content controlled by the subject. I have no desire to write a book about Novak Djokovic that is controlled by him – he is intelligent enough to write his own book if he wishes, in which he can say what he likes (as he is highly likely to do at some stage). That will have validity as his take on his career with the inside story on certain events, but it will only be his side of the story. This book has many people’s input on his life and career (so far).

  This, therefore, is an independent biography, both of Djokovic and of Serbia. It is my take on him and his country. People can disagree with what I say and some of it is opinion rather than peer-reviewed research. In terms of his own approach to it, because he wants to write his own book when he retires, he wasn’t keen for his closest family to talk to me – something I have respected. Those who are part of his team are bound by a confidentiality agreement but many people who are close to him have been willing to talk to me, for which I sincerely thank them. And Djokovic himself has helped me by answering a number of questions I put to him about his role as a sporting statesman.

  It’s important to make this clear because Djokovic is a superstar. ‘Do you realise just how much the country stops when he plays?’ asked Guy De Launey, the BBC’s Belgrade correspondent, when I met him to get his views for some of the chapters on Serbia. And Djokovic’s friend Dusan Vemic says, ‘If Novak is playing some big matches during the Grand Slam season, the streets are empty. Everyone is at home cheering for him.’ He has therefore attained the status of something approaching a secular saint in Serbia, much of it deserved, but it is still important to look at him dispassionately. This is why I have been critical of him at certain points in this book – not out of malice but simply because he is a human being made of flesh and blood, and in our celebrity-dominated era, it’s important to be able to see that even the pe
ople we most admire are packages of good and not-so-good attributes.

  A word about accents. A number of accents are used in central and eastern European orthography, many of them reflecting the transfer of Slav names from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet. I had to make a decision whether to use accents or not and, realistically, it was all or nothing. My instinct as someone who has learned three languages beyond my mother tongue was to put the accents in, but in the end, I opted not to. The main reason for this is that the name ‘Djokovic’ is a westernisation of how his name is written at home. The Roman alphabet version is ‘Ðoković’, with the j added in typefaces where the line through the D is not available (like the way an e is added in German when the Umlaut is not available, so ‘Schüttler’ becomes ‘Schuettler’, ‘Görges’ becomes ‘Goerges’, etc.). Given that Novak is known across the English-speaking world as ‘Djokovic’, it would have gone against the grain to call him ‘Ðjoković’ throughout this book and the logical extension was to exclude all accents. I beg forgiveness from fellow-linguists who feel that judgement was wrong.

  And while we’re on the name, let me try and lay to rest the indefatigable question of how you pronounce the first vowel in ‘Djokovic’. The Americans have pushed the line that it should be pronounced as in the word ‘joke’, while the rest of the world has tended to say ‘jock’. The idea of ‘joke’ comes from a belief that the best thing you can do is to copy the way the person says his own name. Indeed, this continued even into the 2013 Australian Open when Jim Courier used a question in a post-match on-court interview to try and get Djokovic to give him the definitive pronunciation of the troublesome vowel.

  The sentiment of asking the person concerned how he (or she) pronounces their name is a nice one but it misses a very simple relevant fact: how they pronounce other words with the same vowel. If you listen to the way Djokovic says words like ‘on’ and ‘over’, it’s clear his (and other Serbs’) pronunciation of his surname is the same vowel as ‘on’, not ‘over’. That means the pronunciation based on ‘jock’ is the correct one and ought to come as a relief to the entire English-speaking world, as the strictly accurate pronunciation is more like ‘or’ (so ‘Djorkovic’) than ‘jock’ or ‘joke’. Where the Americans can claim some justification is that the vowel sound in ‘Novak’ is pretty much the same as in ‘Djokovic’, so really the English-speaking world should be saying ‘Novak’ as in ‘of’ and ‘Djokovic’ as in ‘jock’. But no doubt the debate will rage as long as he’s playing, so radio and television pronunciation units can continue to justify their existence.