🎾 Novak Djokovic And The Rise Of Sebia The Sporting Statesman¶
Giới Thiệu¶
Novak Djokovic And The Rise Of Sebia The Sporting Statesman — tài liệu 271 trang từ thư viện sách tennis.
Chủ đề chính: Novak Djokovic
Tóm tắt nội dung (trích từ tài liệu gốc): 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 1. Title Page 2. Dedication 3. INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4. CHAPTER ONE � AN ETHNIC MIX 5. CHAPTER TWO � WHO ARE THE SERBS? 6. CHAPTER THREE � NOLE AND JECA 7. CHAPTER FOUR � THE EMERGENCE OF SERBIA FROM THE YUGOSLAV WARS 8. CHAPTER FIVE � TOUGHENED BY NATO'S BOMBS 9. CHAPTER SIX � FATHERS AND SONS 10. CHAPTER SEVEN � THE MANIA BEGINS 11. CHAPTER EIGHT � MODERN-DAY SERBIA 12. CHAPTER NINE � IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 13. CHAPTER TEN � THE CHAMPION MUS
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Nội Dung Gốc (Tiếng Anh)¶
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
1. Title Page
2. Dedication
3. INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
4. CHAPTER ONE � AN ETHNIC MIX
5. CHAPTER TWO � WHO ARE THE SERBS?
6. CHAPTER THREE � NOLE AND JECA
7. CHAPTER FOUR � THE EMERGENCE OF SERBIA FROM THE
YUGOSLAV WARS
8. CHAPTER FIVE � TOUGHENED BY NATO'S BOMBS
9. CHAPTER SIX � FATHERS AND SONS
10. CHAPTER SEVEN � THE MANIA BEGINS
11. CHAPTER EIGHT � MODERN-DAY SERBIA
12. CHAPTER NINE � IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH
13. CHAPTER TEN � THE CHAMPION MUST COME FROM WITHIN
14. CHAPTER ELEVEN � THE ROLE OF SPORT IN SERBIA
15. CHAPTER TWELVE � `THIS IS WHAT I'M BORN FOR'
16. CHAPTER THIRTEEN � A `GIVING' PERSON
17. BIBLIOGRAPHY
18. INDEX
19. About the Author
20. Plates
21. 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 semifinal
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. They 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 Caf� 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 caf�, 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 M�rchentante, 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 people 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 `�okovi', 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 `Sch�ttler' becomes
`Schuettler', `G�rges' 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 `�jokovi' 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.
Finally, I couldn't have produced this book without the help of lots of
people. I list them here in alphabetical order with more thanks than I can
convey and a fear that I have left one or two out: Edoardo Artaldi, Simon
Cambers, Igor Cetojevic, Estelle Couderc, Michael Davenport, Guy De
Launey, Jelena Gencic, Mitzi Ingram-Evans, Goran Ivanisevic, Ana
Ivanovic, Momir Jelovac, Cathy Jenkins, Jonathan Jobson, Ladislav Kis,
Angela Lavinski, David Law, Ivan Ljubicic, Stevan Lukic, Janice
McKinlay, Neda Miletic, Helen McCarthy, Joanna Mather, Peter Miles,
Stuart Miller, Zoran Milosavljevic, Ana Mitric, Vladimir Novak, Bogdan
Obradovic, Dejan Petrovic, Riccardo Piatti, Nikki Pilic, Monica Seles, Greg
Sharko, Cedomir Soskic, Toplica Spasojevic, Vojin Velickovic, Gavin
Versi, Nebojsa Viskovic and Jonathan Wilson. And a massive nod to Toby
Buchan, my editor at John Blake Publishing, with whom I feel I have had a
very productive meeting of minds.
CHRIS BOWERS, March 2014
CHAPTER ONE
AN ETHNIC MIX
The philosopher and travel writer Hermann Keyserling once wrote, `I am
not a Dane, not a German, not a Swede, not a Russian nor an Estonian, so
what am I? � a little of all these.' Thus, in an era where transport allows for
internation marriages as a matter of course, no one should be too surprised
to find that Serbia's leading global flag-carrier, Novak Djokovic, should be
a real ethnic mix. At least he was born in Serbia � unlike India's spiritual
leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in South Africa, or America's most
patriotic Davis Cup player John McEnroe, who was born in Germany. But
from his ethnic heritage you could argue he was half-Montenegrin and half-
Croat.
Does this matter? Hardly at all. As Djokovic's close friend Ivan Ljubicic
says, `You can be patriotic without being nationalistic.' And Ljubicic
should know � born in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka to a Bosnian
Muslim mother and a Croatian Catholic father, he barely passed through
Croatia en route to the relative safety of Italy during the Yugoslav wars of
the 1990s, yet became Croatia's national hero when he steered the still-
young republic to the Davis Cup title in 2005 with a record-breaking 11
straight wins in live matches. In the Balkans there are thousands of people
who are the products of internation marriages. In fact, having links to
Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Croatia probably broadens Djokovic's
Balkan fan base.
Tracing the Djokovic family tree back, the records are sketchy but the
first obvious ancestor is Djoko Damjanovic, who appears to have
established the Djokovic surname around 1730. The suffix `-vic' means
`son of', like `-son' in England, `Mc/Mac' in Scotland, `'O' in Ireland, etc.
So Djoko Damjanovic's children had the surname Djokovic, after which the
same surname was passed through male descendants. Damjanovic set up
home in Jasenovo Polje, a village whose name means `ash fields' near the
Montenegrin town of Niksic. In 1928 the head of the family, Nedeljko
Djokovic, moved east from Montenegro to a village called Vocnjak in
Metohija, part of the province of Kosovo, which at that time was part of the
Yugoslav republic of Serbia. In 1951 Nedeljko's son Vladimir, Novak's
grandfather, moved to Mitrovica, the main ethnic Serbian town in Kosovo.
In 1961 his son Srdjan was born and in 1964 he had a second son, Goran.
There had been one Novak Djokovic in the family. He grew up in
Jasenovo Polje before emigrating to Chicago in 1905 but returned to fight
for his country. Apparently, when filling in his immigration form as his ship
docked in the USA, under `Nationality (country of which citizen or
subject)' he wrote `Montenegro' and under `Race of people' `Montenegrin'.
Montenegro at that time was already recognised as a sovereign state, having
come to a form of independence in 1878 under the same settlement that saw
Serbia become independent from the Ottoman Empire.
In 1986 Srdjan married Dijana Zagar. She was born in Belgrade in
January 1964, the daughter of two military personnel. Her father Zdenka
was a high-ranking officer in the Yugoslav National Army and a
pharmacist, who became purchasing manager for a military hospital. Her
mother Elizabete was a major in the army and a chief medical officer in the
military hospital (Dijana's sister is a pharmacist as well). They were
originally from Vinkovici, a town in the eastern part of Croatia near the
Serbian border, and they moved to Belgrade before Dijana's birth when
Zdenka was transferred by the army to the military hospital in what was
then the Yugoslav capital. Not surprisingly, Djokovic has lots of relatives in
and around Vinkovici.
Very little is known about either family. The few interviews that Srdjan
gives are generally about his son or Serbian tennis politics, while Dijana
gives virtually no interviews. The Serbian tennis writer Vojin Velickovic
says, `Because Srdjan is so volatile, we never asked him too much because
we didn't want to go too far, and I don't need that kind of information for
my tennis reports.' Some reports say Srdjan was at one stage a footballer on
the books of Mitrovica's main club FC Trepca, while the fact that he and
Dijana gave skiing lessons leads to the assumption that they were gifted
skiers. `Maybe Srdjan was a football player,' Velickovic says, `but no one
remembers. If he did play, it would be at a very low level. We assume he
was a good skier but that's also a grey area.'
Dijana's family is known to have a fair bit of volleyball talent but she
didn't play much. Velickovic adds, `A friend of hers told me she was a very
gifted gymnast. Obviously Novak is very flexible, so when I spoke to him
once, I told him that I'd heard he'd inherited his genes from his mother, not
his father, because he was so flexible. And he joked, "Yes, I'm a champion
because of my mother, not my father." But she never wanted to give an
interview to the media, maybe because she doesn't want to be in the
spotlight.'
One person who got some insight into the Djokovic family home was
Djokovic's first coach, Jelena Gencic. She got to know the family when
Novak was five, which was about the time his paternal grandmother died.
She recalled, `Srdjan's father Vladimir, known as Grandfather Vlada, was a
very good man. He was a man of great warmth who made you feel nice. His
wife died the year I started working with Novak, so I didn't know her but
everyone says she was an excellent woman, such a humanitarian, so
unbelievable � maybe Novak has his humanity from her? It was a very
patriarchal family. The grandfather was the patriarch. We couldn't start
eating until the patriarch had sat down and started to eat. And we couldn't
get up until he had given his approval. So Novak had a very good family
education. The family wasn't primitive but only ever had just enough.'
On 22 May 1987 Srdjan and Dijana celebrated the birth of their first son,
Novak, in Belgrade. It was just four days after Srdjan's 26th birthday. At
that stage they were restaurateurs in Belgrade. Two years later, with the
political and economic situation in Yugoslavia starting to look very
precarious, they and Srdjan's brother Goran opened up a second restaurant,
a pizzeria which also sold pancakes, and a boutique in Kopaonik, a
mountain resort on the boundary where Kosovo started, about 50km (as the
crow flies) from Mitrovica. They didn't spend all year there � only the peak
skiing season in winter and the hiking season in summer. In winter they had
the punishing regime of giving skiing lessons by day and working in the
restaurant at night. The rest of the time they lived in Belgrade.
In August 1991 Marko Djokovic was born, and a third son, Djordje, was
born in July 1995. Once Novak began going to school, it meant that during
the skiing and hiking seasons he often had to stay in the Belgrade flat of the
newly widowed Grandfather Vlada, sometimes for several weeks at a
stretch. He was later to seek refuge from the 1999 Nato bombing of
Belgrade in the basement store of that flat. When Vlada died in April 2012
during the Monte Carlo Masters, the media remarked that Djokovic didn't
seem quite the same and in fact did very well to reach the final where he
lost to Rafael Nadal. The death of a grandparent affects everyone
differently but this was no ordinary grandparent � Vlada was a parental
substitute who was a massive figure in Djokovic's life.
This dual existence of the urban landscape of Belgrade and the rural,
mountainous landscape of Kopaonik not only shaped Djokovic but gave
him a heightened sense of his own country. Asked for this book where he
feels the soul of Serbia is, he replied, `It's very difficult to answer that
question. My country has a very rich history, centuries long. Each stone,
mountain, city, village has some powerful story to it, that I am very proud
of. That's why we Serbs have very strong sense of belongingness, because
of our history. Everybody has heard of Belgrade, but my country has so
many beautiful cities and villages that people should come and see. So
many legends they can hear about my people, kings and queens... I
honestly think that the soul of my country lies within villages in the south.
Kosovo is a cradle of Serbian history. It has over 2,000 monasteries and
churches that symbolise our culture and the beginnings of the Serbian
Orthodox religion. Belgrade is a modern metropolis, it can give you
everything, but the true Serbia is in the south. I remember myself as a kid
spending a lot of time on Kopaonik and admiring every time the view of
Serbia I had from this beautiful and powerful mountain.'
Like any boy of five, young Novak enjoyed kicking a football and was
taught to ski from a very early age. There was no history of tennis in the
family � Srjdan and Dijana could probably have told you very little about it
when one day their elder son caught sight of tennis on the television. It
ignited a spark in him that led him, a few weeks later, to approach the
woman who would set him on the road to being the best in the world.
CHAPTER TWO
WHO ARE THE SERBS?
To all but the keenest historians or current-affairs aficionados, the term
`Serbia' probably doesn't mean a great deal � in fact, to many, the first
image the term conjures up is probably that of Novak Djokovic, even to
those who don't call themselves tennis fans. Some who have vague
recollections of their history lessons at school may remember that Serbia
had something to do with the outbreak of the First World War, and those
watching the news in the 1990s will have heard the name Serbia on many
occasions, often in connection with the word `atrocities'. But even those
who were regular news followers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s can be
forgiven for not knowing where or what Serbia was.
The reason for this is that, while the Serbs have existed in the south-
eastern corner of Europe known as the Balkans since the sixth century, for
most of that time they have not been a country in their own right. In fact,
Serbia on its own has only been a sovereign state three times: from 1166 to
1459, from 1878 to 1918 and from 2006 to the present. The Serbs,
therefore, are by no means a new people but they are a new country, hence
the scope for a dominant world sportsman to become a statesman and
standard-bearer for his country. (Technically, the term `Serb' denotes an
ethnic Serb, while a `Serbian' is a citizen of Serbia, so the difference can be
important.)
The Serbs are one of the Slav peoples. Because the Slavs are the fourth
biggest ethno-linguistic grouping in the world, it's hard to give a precise
definition of Slavs but they are an Indo-European race who are generally
divided into three groups: the eastern Slavs populating today's Russia,
Ukraine and Belarus, plus parts of central Asia and Siberia; the central
Slavs populating countries and areas such as Poland, the Czech Republic,
Slovakia and Silesia; and the southern Slavs, of which the Serbs are the
biggest group, along with the Croats, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and
Macedonians (but not Slovenes or Albanians). The southern Slavs are
largely Christian, though with various differences. For example, the Serbs
are largely Orthodox Christian, while the Croats are Roman Catholic.
For much of the 14th century Serbia was the most powerful state in the
Balkans, but it was defeated in the battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, marking
the end of its preeminence. After the battle of Smederovo in 1459, the
independent kingdom of Serbia was subsumed into the Ottoman Empire,
the Turkish empire ruled from the ancient city of Constantinople (now
Istanbul). The 1389 defeat in Kosovo became a scar on Serbian national
consciousness, which lingered into the 20th century, as the province of
Kosovo became of psychological importance to Serbia, even though by the
late 20th century it was populated largely by ethnic Albanians. It has some
relevance to the Djokovic story: Djokovic's father and grandfather were
from Kosovo, the ski resort of Kopaonik where Novak first learned to play
tennis is right on the border between the undisputed Serbian territory and
Kosovo, and Djokovic had to shelter from the 1999 Nato bombing raids on
Belgrade that resulted from the ethnic Serb-Albanian conflict in Kosovo.
Until 1918 most of the southern Slav peoples were under the control of
larger empires, generally either the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. But long before the First World War those empires were
decaying. The Ottomans' heyday had been in the 16th and 17th centuries;
by 1850 the empire was becoming harder to hold together, while Austria-
Hungary was ruled by the Habsburg royal family of Vienna, who were
increasingly fighting domestic battles closer to home as nationalist fervour
grew in states that are today's Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Some suggestions had been mooted in the middle of the 19th century that
the southern Slavs might join forces in a united country but the largest of
them also had their eye on becoming nation states of their own. Serbia and
Montenegro were the first of them to break free from Ottoman control,
becoming countries in their own right in 1878 following the Russo-Turkish
war. Russia's foreign policy at that time was geared towards trying to get
access to the Mediterranean Sea and, to this end, it developed friendly
relations with Serbia, a fellow Slav nation. Out of that grew Serbia's
military and diplomatic alliance with Russia, which played a part in the
outbreak of the First World War. The traditional interpretation has been
that, when a Serb radical, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead the heir to the Austro-
Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in June 1914, it
triggered the diplomatic tit-for-tat and mobilisation of forces that led to the
outbreak of war five weeks later: Austria declared war on Serbia to avenge
the killing, Russia was compelled to come to Serbia's aid, Germany came
to Austria's aid and the whole thing became the world's first global
conflict. Recently it has been suggested that this is too simple � that
Germany was dead-set on going to war and was looking for an excuse to
declare war on Serbia. Whatever the ultimate motivation, by the summer of
1914 Europe was like a tinder-dry forest just waiting for a spark to set the
whole continent alight, and the Sarajevo assassination was the spark that
started what became known as `the Great War'.
With the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires effectively crushed
during the war, 1918 was the obvious time for new nations to emerge in
south-eastern Europe. But the legacy of being ruled by a large empire,
allied to fears that Italy might try to sweep up a lot of territory along the
Adriatic coast, led to the formation of a country made up initially of several
southern Slav peoples. It was called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes but it also included Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia-
Slavonia, a semi-autonomous region of Hungary, and Dalmatia (Monica
Seles, Yugoslavia's most successful tennis player, was ethnically a
Hungarian who came from Novi Sad in the Serbian province of Vojvodina).
The new kingdom was proclaimed in December 1918 and ruled by the
Serbian royal family, initially under King Peter I. For many Serbs, the
kingdom was a continuation of the Serbian sovereignty that had existed
since 1878, and certainly it amounted to a form of self-determination
compared with being under Turkish or Austrian rule. But it's perhaps easier
for the Serbs to feel this way, as they were the dominant nation in the new
kingdom, whereas Croats, Slovenes and other nations find it harder to see
this as full independence, at least compared to the independence and
sovereignty they have enjoyed since the early 1990s.
Religiously, the Serbs are Orthodox Christian while the Croats are
Roman Catholic, but the Serb language is very close to Croatian (almost as
close as British English and American English are to each other), and
Macedonian and Slovenian are also related to Serbian and Croatian. Given
that there had been lots of migration and intermarriage among the southern
Slav peoples, the new kingdom ought to have worked. After all, in 1871 22
German-speaking kingdoms, principalities and duchies had come together
to form a new country called Germany, and while it had led itself � and the
world � into a disastrous war, it had worked as a country and was still
intact. The ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences between the Serbs and
Croats are not as pronounced as those between the Prussians and Bavarians,
so the new southern Slav country had every chance of succeeding.
Or so went the theory. In practice, the nationalism that had been growing
for the previous 70 years continued, only now it was directed against the
new kingdom based in Belgrade, rather than against the archaic rulers in
Constantinople or Vienna. The first result was a strengthening of state
powers in 1929, making the kingdom effectively a dictatorship. The
outward sign of that was a change of name � as the kingdom was an
alliance of southern Slav peoples, it adopted the name Yugoslavia, from the
Slav words `jugo' (of the south) and `slavija' (Slavs).
Yugoslavia survived the assassination of its tennis-loving king,
Alexander I, in 1934 � he was shot dead by a Macedonian working with
Croatian separatists � but it didn't survive the outbreak of the Second
World War. In 1941 it was taken over by the Axis powers (Germany and
Italy), who set up a particularly nasty Croatian-led fascist government, the
Ustase. The Ustase set about liquidating Jews and gipsies, and relegating
Serbs to somewhere well below the status of second-class citizens.
It was, in effect, ethnic cleansing, a term that only came into widespread
use in the 1990s. When people talk about the Yugoslav civil war, they
generally refer to the battles of the 1990s that led to the break-up of
Yugoslavia and the establishment of new sovereign states, but the period
1941�45 saw an equally brutal civil war which left unresolved many of the
resentments that flared up again in the 1990s. The Ustase's brutality (even
some members of the Nazi high command in Berlin felt their acolytes in
Zagreb were going too far) led to resistance from the Cetniks, a pro-
monarchist Serbian movement, and from the Partisans, a communist
movement led by a former Russian revolutionary, Josip Broz Tito. So while
the Second World War raged to the north, the Ustase, Cetniks and Partisans
fought out the bloody civil war for the remains of Yugoslavia.
In short, Tito and his Partisans won that civil war and set up a new
Yugoslav republic taking in six federated states: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. The Yugoslav capital
was the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Tito's pitch was a communist one (in the
sense of a state-controlled economy working in the interests of the working
class), with the slogan `brotherhood and unity'. He also had immense
personal charisma, plus a transnational profile based on having a Croatian
father, a Slovenian mother, and operating from Serbia's principal city.
Having gained material support from the Allied powers (Great Britain, the
USA and the USSR), he was seen by many of his compatriots as the man
who had liberated Yugoslavia, so he was a popular leader after 1945.
Tito ruled Yugoslavia for the next 35 years. Originally a supporter of
Stalin's communist state in Russia, he broke from Moscow in 1948,
---
[Cuối tài liệu]
At UN headquarters in New York with Vuk Jeremic (centre), President of the UN General Assembly,
and Jacques Rogge (left), outgoing President of the International Olympic Committee, August 2013.
(� Niu Xiaolei/Landov/PA Images)
Djokovic's first-ever main draw match at a Grand Slam ended in defeat to his idol
Marat Safin at the Australian Open, January 2005.
(� AFP/Getty Images)
Posing in Melbourne with the Australian Open trophy after his first major title, January
2008.
(� Getty Images)
Cradling the Wimbledon men's singles trophy after his victory over Rafael Nadal, July
2011.
(� Getty Images)
The sporting statesman � Novak Djokovic at UN headquarters in New York, with
Jelena Ristic, August 2013.
(� Dennis Van Tine/ABACA USA/Empics Entertainment)
Djokovic lets out the animal within after beating Rafael Nadal in the longest final in
Grand Slam history at the Australian Open, January 2012.
(Getty Images)
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