“I don’t want to wrestle with him,” Djokovic joked after beating Berrettini, his 25-year-old opponent, who is 6 feet 5 inches and more than 200 pounds.Īnd yet, Djokovic has left all of them not just defeated but also beaten, physically and mentally. Several of them are bigger than he is, and seemingly far stronger. It’s a good thing, because he needed to Friday night against Alexander Zverev, outlasting the German star with the cannon serve, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2, in one of the classic marathon battles of his career, a fight every bit worthy of the journey to the edge of tennis immortality.įor nearly two weeks, Djokovic, the 34-year-old Serbian, has faced opponents who are younger, some by more than a decade. Thursday, fittingly using a boxing expression after his 3 hour 27 minute duel with Matteo Berrettini of Italy in the quarterfinals. “I can go the distance,” he said as the clock ticked close to 1:30 a.m. It is combat, a street brawl in which there is only one survivor. For Djokovic, tennis is not art, or ballet, and it is certainly not a game. Then there is Djokovic, the player who stands one match away from pulling off the most hallowed achievement in the game - winning all four Grand Slams in the same calendar year. 2 in the world rankings, tennis is a chess match, requiring the ability to think several shots ahead, to control the center of the court as though it is the center of a chess board, to make the quick moves needed to shift from defense to offense in an instant.

Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece, the world’s third-ranked player, talks about tennis as a form of self-expression.

To so many tennis players, their game exists as a kind of art. This, invariably, is Novak Djokovic, late in the evening, often well past midnight, when another day of work is finally done, when the arena has emptied and he sits in front of a microphone, his piercing eyes an odd combination of glazed and steely, and he tries to put into words what he has just endured.

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