Link: https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-darkness-that-drives-djokovic/

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 U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized, saying the attack was an accident, and that the CIA, working from outdated maps, had mistaken the building for a Yugoslav military procurement office.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.

He's been through a hell of a lot. Watching him struggle against his uncooperative body this past Open was downright brutal.