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NOVAK DJOKOVIC IS looking for something.
It is Orthodox Easter Sunday in Belgrade. Djokovic is playing the final of the Serbia Open, a crowd of 8,000-plus bellowing behind him. Down one set to Andrey Rublev of Russia, he rallies back in the second to force a tiebreak.
But late in the set, Djokovic begins to wilt. After one point, he slips and falls, lying on his back. He rises slowly, gingerly, the red clay running rivulets down his sweat-soaked shirt. He wipes his eyes, blinking over and over. He wraps his head in a white towel filled with ice.
Djokovic manages to win the tiebreak to even the match, only to take a medical timeout and disappear inside the tennis center’s main building.
The fans murmur as the minutes pass and Djokovic doesn’t reappear. They have come to praise him. They have come to raise him. They have come to see him, their son, regarded by many as the most dominant player of all time. There is no controversy with Djokovic here; there is only the hope — the expectation — that he will soon reenter the world’s collective consciousness for something more valiant than being at the center of perhaps the most famous deportation in tennis history.
The Serbia Open is a small event with a small purse in a relatively small city. And Djokovic has said, very kindly, that Paris — the French Open, which begins Sunday at Roland Garros — is his professional focus. As far as history is concerned, Djokovic’s next chapter will be written there.
But it begins here, in Belgrade, just as his first tennis chapter did. And it isn’t supposed to begin like this.
Inside the locker room, Djokovic is searching. Struggling. Wondering. He doesn’t understand why he can’t play the way he wants. Why he can’t feel the way he wants. He had COVID for a second time in December. Another illness last month. And because of the fallout from the Australian Open and the pandemic restrictions elsewhere, he hasn’t played anything close to a full schedule. A year ago, he arrived at the…
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Source : espn
