Djokovic’s stomach for a fight has pushed him to the top

Niki Pilic’s wife was one of the first to spot something special about Novak Djokovic. The dark haired boy from Belgrade was two months short of his 13th birthday when he turned up at Pilic’s tennis academy in Germany, accompanied by his father and one of his two brothers, ready to demonstrate his gifts to a distinguished coach.  “A friend had told me that he was talented,” Pilic recalled on the phone from Munich on Monday, less than 24 hours after Djokovic had achieved the feat of beating Rafael Nadal in a claycourt final for the second tournament in a row. “We started to play, and after a relatively short period of time I noticed that he had an incredible will.” When they came off the court, Pilic and his wife, the Serbian actress Mija Adamovic, sat down and talked to the boy. “The answers he was  giving surprised us,” Pilic said. “He was talking about some guy who  was beating him back in Serbia. My wife said: ‘Jesus, Niki, he’s talking just like you.’” Pilic, who is now 71, had his own distinguished career on the professional circuit before starting his academy, which has put 40 players into the top 100 in the past 28 years. A tall left-hander, he lost the 1973 French Open final to IlieNastase and later became the first man to captain three nations - Germany, his native Croatia and Serbia to victory in the Davis Cup. The most recent success, last year, came with a Serbia team including Djokovic, the conquerors of France in the final. But it was in the preceding round, against the Czech Republic in front of a fervently patriotic Belgrade crowd, that the young man produced a performance typifying what Pilic sees as his extraordinary mental strength.  “We were 1-2 down and he had to play Tomas Berdych. He had a stomach problem and he couldn’t even warm up. But he went out there in front of 18,000 people, with all that pressure, not feeling good and he won.”  Following his success in the Rome Masters on Sunday, Djokovic has now won 39 singles matches in a row and is closing fast on John McEnroe’s all-time record of 42. There was another sign of that mental strength in Rome, where he left the Foro Italico after midnight on Saturday, following his semi-final defeat of Andy Murray, before returning a few hours later to beat Nadal, the clay-court master, in straight sets.  Ah, Murray. It would be easy to say that Djokovic is everything the Scot his friend and contemporary has yet to prove himself to be, in other words a player who can translate talent into achievement and become a serial winner at the very highest level. Easy, but not without a measure of truth. “Andy Murray is a very good player, no doubt,” Pilic said, “but he’s had a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s tired of tennis. It could be that Nole [Djokovic] also gets tired of tennis. But I don’t think so.”  Perhaps it’s easier to retain your enthusiasm when you’re winning, although there have been times in the past four or five years when Murray, who turned 24 on Sunday and is the elder of the two by seven days, appeared to be on a faster track to the top. But now the Serb has won two of his four grand slam tournament finals, while Murray has reached two and lost both.  More remarkably, Djokovic appears to have ended an entire era, the one dominated by Roger Federer and Nadal, who convinced the world that they were the best tennis players ever born. He has met them both in finals this year, twice apiece, and won every time. If he has done so without sending spectators into the sort of raptures inspired by the Swiss player’s creamy inventiveness or the Spaniard’s jaw-dropping athleticism, then it is probably worth remembering that his idol was Pete Sampras, whose goal was to play winning tennis.  “Nole was always very coachable,” Pilic remembered. But Djokovic also had what it takes in the places that no coach can really reach: in the heart, and in the head.