Culture
Novak Djokovic needs new tennis quests. Can the U.S. Open provide them?
Follow live coverage of the 2024 U.S. Open
NEW YORK — What motivates Novak Djokovic now that he has nothing left to fight for?
The 24-time Grand Slam champion finally won his coveted Olympic gold medal in Paris this month. In so doing, he essentially completed tennis, sweeping up the only coveted title in the sport that had eluded him. Djokovic has other targets, like the 25th Grand Slam title that would take him clear of Australia’s Margaret Court, but the Olympic gold was the true white whale for a player who has accumulated trophies like interest.
Not so much recently. He arrived in New York without his name already engraved on one of the three majors for the first time in 14 years.
The most interesting part is that he has been here before.
In 2016, in Paris, Djokovic finally won the French Open. In so doing, he completed the career Grand Slam, and became the second male player in the Open Era, after Rod Laver, to hold all four Grand Slam titles at the same time.
Novak Djokovic’s 2016 French Open title put him out ahead of his contemporaries. (Philippe Lopez / AFP via Getty Images)
It felt like he would carry on dominating tennis forever. Instead, he bombed out of Wimbledon against Sam Querrey, and then didn’t win a major for another two years in a period that took in elbow surgery and some hugely uncharacteristic upsets, the mother of all comedowns.
“I wasn’t mentally in the right place,” he said later.
In 2024, the early signs are that he is working to avoid a repeat. Djokovic was asked about his motivation ahead of the tournament starting, and he spoke of his rivalries with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, his advocacy work with the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) and his belief in his competitiveness.
There is little to be gleaned from a 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 first-round cruise against the overmatched Radu Albot, but Djokovic — and the rest of the tennis world — might learn more from what awaits him Wednesday. He faces compatriot Laslo Djere, in a repeat of their fourth-round meeting in 2023. Djokovic trailed two sets to love, eventually coming through in five on the way to the title.
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Djokovic is in a curious position. He is coming off what he calls the “greatest achievement” of his career, but his season as a whole is more trough than peak. Despite beating Alcaraz to win that Olympic gold, Djokovic has lost to the Spaniard in consecutive Wimbledon finals. Sinner overwhelmed him at the Australian Open, an event where he had previously seemed invincible. The rivalries that motivate him are, as of recently, not going to plan.
Novak Djokovic’s struggles date back to the clay-court swing. (Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images)
This could help Djokovic. He finally has two younger rivals who are at his level, and he will be desperate to reassert himself at the top of the sport, vanquishing them like he has done so many players in the last 10 years. He may be the U.S. Open champion, but here in New York, it’s reigning French Open and Wimbledon champion Alcaraz who has the biggest target on his back. It’s Sinner, not Djokovic, who is world No. 1.
Djokovic likes nothing more than proving a point, and silencing those who have written him off. This is not like June 2016, when it almost looked too easy for Djokovic to dominate tennis, as he turned the “Big Four” to the “Big One.”
Just over eight years ago, there wasn’t even a suggestion that Djokovic’s motivation would wane. In retrospect, it might seem obvious that achieving the tennis Holy Grail could occasion a lull, but at the time it wasn’t on the forecast.
Looking back at his pre-Wimbledon press conferences, Djokovic wasn’t asked about whether he’d struggle for new targets. Only when he suffered that seismic shock of a defeat to American Sam Querrey did the topic emerge.
Novak Djokovic’s defeat to American Sam Querrey at Wimbledon is one of the biggest shocks in recent tournament history. (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s an amazing feeling to be able to hold four Grand Slams at the same time,” Djokovic said that summer. “Coming into Wimbledon, I knew that mentally it’s not going to be easy to kind of re-motivate myself.”
Djokovic has since spoken of suffering an existential crisis in that period.
“I was going through a period where I was really looking for myself off the court,” he later reflected. During the defeat to Querrey, there were a couple of rain delays, and Djokovic recalls asking his team to leave him alone in a room during one of the interruptions.
“I just looked at the wall and I was dull. Literally, no drive inside of me,” he said.
In a 2018 interview, he added that the injuries he suffered in the middle of the previous year happened when he was “experiencing some emotional imbalance.” He parted ways with Boris Becker at the end of 2016, and had broken up his team during the 2017 clay-court season in a bid to recover his drive to win matches. Djokovic even considered retirement, as his motivation completely disappeared.
He has since been able to reframe this difficult period as a valuable learning experience. He even said he was “super glad” to have been through it. If ever there was a time when that experience would come in useful, it would be now.
At 37, and still only a couple of months on from knee surgery, physical rather than mental challenges may present the firmest obstacles to Djokovic’s quest for renewed dominance. “I don’t have any limitations in my mind,” he said at Wimbledon. “I still want to keep going and play as long as I feel like I can play on this high level.”
At the homecoming celebration in Belgrade that followed the Olympics, Djokovic hinted that he had nothing left to win. “I feel fulfilled, complete, let’s celebrate!” he said. In the next breath, he was opening up the possibility of playing into his 40s, and defending his title at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
There are some factors in his favor. His kids are now at an age where they can watch their father in action, which seems to act as an additional inspiration, Djokovic weeping in their arms in Paris and developing a new and knowing violin celebration for his daughter.
The Olympic gold was an occasion to celebrate for the entire family. (Amin Mohammad Jamali / Getty Images)
Most of all, he has the sport. One of the great things about being a tennis player is that even when you’ve won it all, there are always new challenges to overcome. New shots to develop, new tactics to try.
Against Albot on Monday, Djokovic certainly looked motivated as he performed some of his party tricks in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Breaking serve having been 40-0 down. Hitting the forehand harder than seemingly any point in his career. Sealing the second set with a second-serve ace. Why not? A second-round match against Djere on Wednesday may not be quite the Olympic gold-medal match, but give Djokovic a court, an opponent and a crowd and he’ll still find a point to prove.
(Top photo: Erick W. Rasco / Sports Illustrated via 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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