Culture
The real Novak Djokovic tries to stand up in front of Serena Williams in Miami
MIAMI — After two decades of professional tennis, 99 career singles titles and 24 Grand Slam triumphs, Novak Djokovic has become a mystery — to tennis fans and to himself. Both parties are trying to answer the same question, from match to match and tournament to tournament, as his career moves towards an as-yet unknown end.
Who is the greatest player of the modern era at this moment?
Is he the player who faded two weeks ago against Botic van de Zandschulp, in his opening match at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif.? Or is he the player who has plowed through his first three opponents in at the Miami Open the past five days, including Lorenzo Musetti, the world No. 16 from Italy?
Is he the player whose return of serve, one of the greatest in the sport’s history, has been a shadow of its usual self? Or is he the player who broke Musetti five times Tuesday night on his way to a 6-2, 6-2 win?
Is he the player ramping up his schedule as he approaches his 38th birthday, because it’s his last spin around the tennis globe? Or is he the player he described to the Miami crowd when he told them, “You’re going to be seeing me a few more years.”
When it comes to the subject of Novak Djokovic, Djokovic is like everyone else: always searching for the signal in the noise, searching for the data about himself and his tennis that will allow him to separate what matters from what does not. At this moment, there is both too much and not enough data to figure out who and what the Djokovic of 2025 is. All these years later, but just 14 matches into this season, he has become the sport’s international man of mystery — definitively not what he once was, and searching for the answer of what he will be.
“I do hope and wish for Novak that you saw tonight, and then at the same time, I worked hard not to have the Novak that was playing in Indian Wells,” Djokovic said in the mixed zone with reporters when his match with Musetti was over. “The continuity or consistency of the level of tennis nowadays for me is more challenging than it was years ago or 10 years ago, five years ago, and I know that.
“That’s definitely not due to lack of hours spent on the practice court and in the gym because I still keep the dedication. It’s there, but it’s just makes it a bit more challenging for me to maintain the level.”
Djokovic is living through a common misconception about what happens to elite athletes declining from their peaks. The apexes stay sharp and accessible in fleeting moments, even when they need them most: Djokovic found his on his otherworldly run to the gold medal at last year’s Paris Olympic Games. It’s the stability that erodes, the repetitions that are necessary to maintain their excellence.
Djokovic’s biggest triumph this year came at the Australian Open, where he beat Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals after a series of wins that had included serious dips in his level, during which young and inexperienced opponents found ways to hurt him but could not finish him off.
Stunning as it was, the victory was also one of the strangest tennis matches in memory. Djokovic suffered a muscle tear in the first set, but somehow managed to win in four, thanks to a heady cocktail of painkillers, adrenalin and an inexplicable Alcaraz breakdown. The Spaniard succumbed to the stress of playing Djokovic, of thinking about his opponent’s tennis and his physical condition more than he was thinking of his own.
Three days later, Djokovic had to retire from his semifinal against Alexander Zverev at the end of the first set because of his muscle injury. When he arrived in Florida, he had not won a match since beating Alcaraz on that January night in Melbourne.
In Miami, he has wins against Rinky Hijikata, a 24-year-old Australian who has played 13 Grand Slam matches, just over half the number of Grand Slam titles that Djokovic has won. He then beat Camilo Ugo Carabelli, a 25-year-old Argentine who has never won a Grand Slam match.
Both matches opened with a blowout set and ended with Djokovic winning a tiebreak. It’s one of the most familiar patterns in Djokovic matches over the years, just inverted: the tight set to loosen everything up before the acceleration to victory swapped for a fast start and then an ebbing end.
Djokovic has eased through his opening matches at the Miami Open. (Geoff Burke / Imagn Images)
Then came Musetti. On paper, he looked like a legitimate threat. On the court, Djokovic picked up his head and saw Serena Williams sitting in the stands. He looked at his box and saw Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro, the retired Grand Slam champions. One his coach; the other his good friend. All those big names made him a little starstruck and nervous about playing well, especially in front of Williams, the greatest female player of all time.
Musetti’s elegant all-court game suits grass, clay and slow hard courts, but he remains reasonably lost on fast ones. Against the best hard-court player in the history of the sport, he broke serve in the first game and surged to the illusion of a 2-0 lead built on making the match physical. Djokovic decided he wasn’t going to play a match like that and won the next nine games to seize control. Musetti showed about as much resistance as a swinging door.
On Wednesday night, Djokovic will face Sebastian Korda, the young and talented American of a thousand renaissances, seemingly always on the cusp of announcing himself. Korda, 24, is still trying to find his way after a couple of years of wrist injuries; he received treatment on his wrist during his round-of-16 win over Gael Monfils on Tuesday.
Djokovic won their only previous meeting, in Adelaide, Australia, two years ago. He might get some more data about their matchup and about himself Wednesday, but it’s not clear how fit Korda will be to give him what he needs. Djokovic at least has no doubts about his wants: to keep playing at the highest level in an era when even the youngest players approach the game with a level of professionalism unheard of when he was starting out.
“Fitness and recovery and just overall approach to the work, from both physical and mental side has improved so much,” he said in Miami.
“Nowadays, pretty much every player in the top 30 in the world has a full team of three and four people around them that takes care of them, their body and everything, so that that reflects on the court. That’s why the careers are extended now.”
When he embarked on his professional career, players started counting their days when they hit 30, he said. Now it’s more like 35, maybe more.
“Of course I’m in that group. I’m not going to get younger, but I still feel good about my body and about my tennis.”
That may be the data point that matters more than all the others.
(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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