In any outdoor market running through an urban downtown, there is inevitably a T-shirt vendor. And at the entrance to Kalemegdan Park, at the base of a pedestrian promenade in Belgrade, the T-shirt guy offers two main choices. One is a shirt adorned with an image of Novak Djokovic, face contorted in intensity, as he is, no doubt, about to win one tennis title or another. The other option features Nikola … no, not Jokić, but Tesla, the Serbian American inventor and engineer, best known for pioneering alternating current in the late 1800s. Such is the status conferred on Djokovic in his homeland.
Djokovic’s level of esteem is not much different in the tennis sector. Except that here, he stands alone. He isn’t just a generational figure; he’s a transformational one, who, not unlike Tesla—also, by the way, tall, lanky and sometimes overshadowed by a rival—is a technician and a futurist, constantly pushing the parameters of possibility.
Fresh off a year in which he, yet again, won three of the four tennis majors, Djokovic began 2024 by winning five matches at the Australian Open, an event he has won 10 times before. Though he was uncharacteristically flat in a semifinal defeat to 22-year-old Italian Jannik Sinner, Djokovic remains—a few months from turning thirty-frickin’-seven years old—the world’s No. 1 ranked player.
