Novak Djokovic: Making the Rough Places Plain

NOVAK DJOKOVIC: MAKING THE ROUGH PLACES PLAIN

By Matt Zemek

Copyright 2017 by Matt Zemek

Smashwords Edition

Cover image Copyright 2013 by Yann Caradec, via Flickr by user NemesisIII at Wikimedia Commons

Image used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PART I: THE INTERSECTION OF EVERYTHING

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

– The book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 4

*

Athletes aren’t gods. Coaches aren’t messiahs. Yet, human beings do remarkable things within the theater of competition – why else would we care? More precisely, why would we subject ourselves to the pain of defeat if the hope of sweet victory, of a cathartic release, didn’t exist just around the bend the next day (or week, or major tournament)?

The extraordinary feats of elite athletes don’t eliminate the grim or distressing realities of life in a difficult world and a complicated culture, but they certainly make them easier to bear. If you believe in a God or higher power, you know The Divine doesn’t care who wins or loses sporting events; so many other elements of this life are far more important. Yet, if a higher meaning can be attached to games with sticks and balls and white lines, it is simply that the weight of everything which oppresses or worries us at night becomes less substantial.

That is a grace, a needed interruption, a source of balance and uplift.

If one wants to derive even deeper meaning from sports, the particulars of competition – beyond the simple reality of enjoying an escape from life’s troubles – can provide more layers of enrichment.

Appreciating effort, determination, poise, resilience, sportsmanship, adaptability, and other qualities we all have to call upon to some degree to live our lives well, can come from many sources, but sports might be the most common one for many of us. Sports offer a generally safe and non-threatening space in which human beings feel pressure. The intensity of a moment is real and profound, but the stakes of sporting events aren’t life and death; they’re money, rankings points, measurements of a legacy, and degrees of fame. Sports enable us to learn something about others; in turn, they offer the possibility that we can learn something about ourselves… and without severe consequences if our team or athlete loses.

With these first several paragraphs serving as a prelude, the world of the 21st century might not have a finer holistic example of a sportsman than Novak Djokovic.

*

Is Novak Djokovic a better sportsman than Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal? Is he a better tennis player than Federer or Nadal? I’m not going to offer an answer, partly because the terrain of the debate is so worn and familiar, partly because the purpose of this essay is not to resolve those questions, and partly because this story is not a finished symphony – several years remain before a full account will be rendered.

However, while not trying to offer a verdict on some very familiar tennis debates, fresh insights can – and should – still inform such discussions. More particularly, new observations (or perhaps, old observations made in a new way or from an original vantage point) can enable us to rethink the familiar sports arguments of our time. The best male tennis player is but one of many examples.

Before attempting to offer some new insights, however, one basic point needs to be nailed down: Though Novak Djokovic probably does come across as a third wheel relative to Federer and Nadal, in terms of how he is viewed by a considerable percentage of tennis fans, he is far more than that. He shouldn’t be pigeonholed, confined to a label which reflects a narrow and linear view of the tennis world. To think that (at the time this essay was written on my computer) the GOAT debate is as simple as 18 versus 14 versus 12 does a disservice to Djokovic. Moreover, it does a disservice to his two great rivals. Every story has a context, and Djokovic’s story is far too powerful to be reduced to one numerical comparison.

Here’s an explanation of why Djokovic doesn’t deserve the third wheel label, and much (if not all) of what it implies:

In this larger theater of contentious debate, one should not have to say that Djokovic is clearly the best in order to give him due credit. Federer and Nadal have made their own compelling statements over time. However, the point to emphasize here is that Djokovic unquestionably belongs on the same basic plane in the same conversations. He’s not the option 3 to Federer’s 1-A and Nadal’s 1-B as a tennis player or as a sportsman. It’s better and healthier for everyone to think of The Big Three as a trio of giants, three athletes who have all become towering and iconic in their own ways. Sorting through bests and various comparisons is a matter of degrees and measures, often guided by tastes and preferences as well as empirical facts.

One of the great difficulties of modern life – at least as it relates to making informed judgments about human endeavors, in sports or in much more critical aspects of society such as politics, economics and culture – is the task of processing information. So much of it is available, from so many sources and outlets. Citizens in first-world countries – with unfettered access to copious quantities of information – can pick and choose from so many outlets and publications. Accordingly, we are in a position where flat facts – meaning raw numerical data points – are (and can always be) presented in a given context.

The reality that information always carries a context is irrefutable and, moreover, necessary to the human species’ ability to understand situations and concepts. The what of a fact, of a piece of information, is enhanced in relationship to the how and why and who attached to it. Facts are free-floating realities when divorced from those other questions. Making the connection between a fact and its context is a good thing.

The tricky part: Everyone has an opinion (including journalists – the idea that journalists are bias-free creatures is a ship which sailed a long time ago). Because everyone has an opinion, everyone will try to find the particular context which makes facts more agreeable to his or her worldview. This is dangerous in politics, but it happens all the time.

In sports, the consequences of manipulating facts – as shown above – are not as serious as they are in real-world matters, but the distorting effect remains in evidence.

When any group of tennis fans gathers (online or in person) to discuss the best male player of all time, every fan of a particular player will be independent-minded and exacting in the process of choosing or modifying the contexts surrounding various essential facts of the past 12 years.

My first and most central point of emphasis: Novak Djokovic has lifted himself to levels of stature and achievement which ought to give him fundamentally equal standing with Federer and Nadal. Best of arguments are granular, and should certainly not be handed down in the way a poker player puts down a winning hand. Trump card arguments are perceptions each fan base will tout, but in a world of context, the feats of each member of the Big 3 – very much including Djokovic – become so much more substantial… and compelling on a scale equal to each other. This is a trinity more than a divided hierarchy.

To Djokovic fans, the points made above are obvious and – I would guess – first became obvious a few years ago, in 2015, when Djokovic first earned the right to be viewed as a historical equal of his peers. (The first half of 2016 cemented this notion, just in case anyone held lingering doubts.) However, Nadal and (especially) Federer fans might still claim there is obvious daylight between Nole and the other two men who have commanded the stage in tennis during this Golden Era of the sport’s existence.

Given the depth, breadth and intensity of media coverage accorded to Federer and Nadal (especially Federer), the tennis media (writ large) often leads news consumers and casual fans to think that Djokovic really is a third wheel, a clear option 3 who resides several thousand feet beneath the summit Federer and Nadal have climbed. Sadly – I don’t use that word lightly, either – I fear that for the majority of people who are casual tennis fans (people who will tune in for the four majors or whenever a big match occurs, but rarely otherwise), Djokovic remains this distant third figure.

That’s quite unfortunate, and I reject that idea/image/characterization in the strongest possible terms.

People are free to say that Player A is slightly better than B and C, but the more wide-ranging and sweeping idea that Players A and B inhabit their own universe, while C exists in a much less substantial realm, is profoundly unfair when C has produced titanic achievements worthy of the same elevated plane.

Novak Djokovic is not some oh-by-the-way, he’s really good too player, dismissively slotted into that C silo. He is one of the three unfathomably legendary icons of his time, a man equally if not more responsible for making this era what it was and is… and could yet become.

That is a central point of this essay. Sorting through differences among Djokovic, Federer and Nadal is a matter of making very fine and granular distinctions, not dividing among wide gulfs in accomplishment. The contexts one uses to amplify (or diminish) facts in a Big Three discussion can illuminate certain realities, but they cannot be used to deprive Djokovic of his fundamental place in history, a place he has earned and which future generations need to be sure he receives.

With that point having been established, let’s now try to dive into an exploration of exactly why Novak Djokovic can rightly be seen as the best sportsman in the Golden Era of men’s tennis.

*

Having said that sports aren’t life and death, it is important for me – much as it is important for anyone who taps at a keyboard to write about sports for a living – to not go too far down the road of comparing sports to war. Sure, when an injured athlete performs above and beyond the call and somehow wins against the run of play, it is reasonable to say the athlete in question was courageous, at least to a certain extent. Nevertheless, sports courage and human courage are two very different things, and it’s generally advisable to not bring the words sports and courage together too often, certainly not with a level of fervor which suggests that the person behind the athlete is courageous in the realms of life, death, love, and service to humanity.

Plenty of great athletes – and politicians, and artists – have been terrible (or at least unpleasant) human beings. That’s not a law or a governing reality, merely a reflection of the need to not instinctively link the quality of a person with the quality of his or her skills as a public figure or performer.

What’s said