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Who knows, maybe one day Novak Djokovic and the people of Australia will stop mid-argument, bottom lips quivering, and just kiss it all out, right there in front of the cameras, while in the background the studio audience gasps and whoops and we cut tantalisingly to the break with a jaunty bass solo.
Perhaps not yet though. Judging by the scattered boos and jeers from the crowd as news filtered through that Djokovic was retiring with injury after the first set of his Australian Open semi-final on Friday , it seems there is still some way to go in that narrative arc.
Either way Djokovic and Australia remains an epic sporting two-hander. Albeit one that is shadowed now by some talk that this might be it, that Djokovic might not return for another instalment in this late-blooming coda to the career of arguably the greatest individual sports person the world has seen.
It was in the end a strangely brittle hour and 20 minutes on court with Alexander Zverev in Melbourne. On Tuesday Djokovic had spoken about feeling the painkillers wear off mid-press conference after the full-body agony of his quarter-final against Carlos Alcaraz. Two days later his first two service games under that hard yellow sun lasted a combined 18 minutes, with four break points to be saved and one pirouetting 27-shot rally of death in the opening game.
Zverev is four inches taller, a decade younger and perfectly chiselled, approaching the net like an iron giant rising up out of the waves. A fully operational Djokovic might have won that first set tie-break. But his entire career supremacy is based on extreme, unanswerable physicality, on pushing himself beyond the normal limits of twang and flex. Djokovic also needs to be able to walk at the end of all this. He knew he was done.
Afterwards it was touching to hear Zverev talking like a dad at a wedding, calling for a little warmth and fellow-feeling for his opponent, and to hear the home crowd offer up affectionate applause in response. Is that really going to be the final story beat here? Is it enough?
For so long Djokovic was the least remarked of the Big Three at the top of men’s tennis, the Other Guy to the more popular, sainted, stylish and, frankly, dull Roger and Rafa. Djokovic has now emerged on the numbers as the greatest of them all. But it was Australia 2022-2025 that gave him a violently engrossing late career arc that is, frankly, beyond the capacity of the other two.
The Covid part was entirely his own fault. There was a maddening arrogance to Djokovic’s attempts to enter Australia in 2022. He was fully demonised for this. We got protests and courtroom scenes. Australian news anchors were hot mic’d calling Djokovic an arsehole and a wanker. The prime minister Scott Morrison waded in, sensing an easy target. Look away from the failed policies. Check out Spinach Boy and his dodgy visa.
This was followed by a white-hot arc of revenge. Political sympathies might have prevented some people from really enjoying this. But it was deliciously realised and objectively very funny. Morrison duly lost his election. Djokovic returned in 2023 and scythed his way through the tournament en route to victory and the captive cheers of the crowd, literally cuffing aside at least one of his most public critics on the court.
And even now this thing keeps claiming victims. Has anyone ever been more wrong than banterous Channel Nine broadcast guy Tony Jones and his mocking chant at the Serbian fans? Novak is a has-been. Er, it would seem not. Novak is overrated. Again probably the opposite. Send him home. You can’t actually do that. Even though he is foreign. I considered it to be humour. Again incorrect, although to be fair this is the first funny thing you’ve said.
The most interesting part of the Channel Nine affair was the way it brought us back to the wider world, to political opportunism, Donald Trump, and the endless barking tribalism that has clung to Djokovic over the past four years, and which is also the biggest bar to appreciating just how great he is.
Did you pay sufficient attention to Trump’s endless executive orders this week? I mean to the fine print about exactly why we need a rule that all apple turnovers must be rectangular, because we have the best apple turnovers, really admirable, the very finest apple turnovers. This is the Trump method. Comment only on issues that exist in those golden overlapping vectors of instantly emotive and totally incidental to the things you’re going to do. Sport is the world’s largest public address system. So Trump often comes wading in here too, from his sub-dom relationship with Gianni Infantino, to Djokovic and Australia via his mouthpiece Elon Musk, who this week condemned Channel Nine news as a “negativity filter”, speaking via a post on his own global negativity filter, also known as X.
This is the key angle on Djokovic right now. Hands off, rabble rousers. Step away. Sport wants its GOAT back. Allow us to consider just his greatness. If only because this is also a very useful exercise in trying to peer through the general veil of bullshit.
And Djokovic is clearly the greatest. There was a lot of numbers talk around the Australian Open about the need to win Grand Slam No 25. Djokovic would have struggled to beat Jannick Sinner in the final, who isn’t 39 years old or falling apart. But it doesn’t really matter. He is already the greatest tennis player, out there operating in absolute defiance of normal physical laws.
And from there he is also arguably the greatest individual sports person, if only because people tend to forget how hard tennis is. Not just for its high speed physics and all-body athleticism, but for the mental aspects. The best bit in Challengers – essentially a film about buttocks with some tennis sprinkled in – is when someone says tennis is about having a relationship, the moments of extreme competition where you come to understand your opponent completely.
This quality was present in Djokovic’s defeat of Alcaraz on Tuesday. Part of his greatness is the ability to learn an opponent mid-match, and only then to work his way up into the Novak Zone, that superhero filter where astonishing timing combines with preternatural agility, where there is suddenly no way of countering this furious, relentlessly fluid substance across the net.
It has been hard to concentrate on this in recent years. Post-Covid Djokovic has entered an awkward space, perceived as some kind of libertarian warlord-highwayman, and hostage to either blanket condemnatory rage or unquestioning hero-worship.
In reality the vaccine refusal wasn’t bound up in any coherent political thought. It was more a personal foible, related to his obsession with intake and purity. Djokovic has never condemned vaccines as an alien paedo-ring conspiracy, or talked about a global witch supremacy intent on chem-trailing the woke virus into your water supply.
He is basically a nerd, a sui generis but also very modern figure, obsessed with diet and wellness. He’s into people in robes talking about energy, goggles that block out the energy from plug sockets, filtering your water through grass-fed stick insect legs. From that peculiar place he has been scooped up by opportunists, hoist as a very blunt figurehead in the wider war between trust, autonomy, freedom-stuff, secret elites and all the other shit on the internet.
It feels politically radical at this stage, a break from the phoney wars, to say can we just appreciate Djokovic for what he is, the greatest at his sport and perhaps at any individual sport. Australia has been the main stage for those fraught final years. Perhaps that round of applause in Melbourne really could be an agreeably human final note.
