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Playing his first match after firing his whole coaching staff, Novak Djokovic struggled. Today, in the second round of the Madrid Open, he squared up against world No. 76 Nicolas Almagro—a player he had defeated in all four previous matches, losing only one set in a tiebreak—and teetered on the brink of loss, but came…
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Novak Djokovic’s odd year continues. After parting ways with head coach Boris Becker in December and struggling in the first quarter of 2017, he dismissed the rest of his coaching staff today, some of whom have been in his camp for over a decade: coach Marian Vajda, fitness coach Gebhard Phil Gritsch, and…
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This time last year, Novak Djokovic was about to complete his fourth consecutive Grand Slam win—as dominant a run as the tour has ever seen. But this year, since the first week of January, he has yet to get further than the quarterfinals of any tournament at all.
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If you make a living standing outside and hurling an small yellow sphere up above your head so you can hit it down, sometimes an enormous yellow sphere is right behind it, and you just have to find a way to cope. Novak Djokovic, squinting and awash in light, couldn’t, as he lost to David Goffin 6-2, 3-6, 7-5.
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Taking the full view of 2017—the year of his supposed decline—it would have been perfectly on-brand for Novak Djokovic to lose his first match on clay. When Gilles Simon took the second set here at Monte Carlo, that outcome seemed plausible. When Simon, hitting some astonishingly clean groundstrokes, managed to break…
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INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Forget any bluster about age, resilience, rehabilitation: The story here is that Roger Federer may have solved Rafael Nadal. It’s never too late to iron out your flaws, especially if you have only one to speak of.
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INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Juan Martin del Potro is a teddy bear with a heavy brow and a shotgun forehand, and when he gets mad in public, apparently, he hugs whoever happens to be around. Because he is a professional tennis player that person is usually a line judge. That’s what he did in a fit of rage three years ago, and…
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Today, out in the Coachella Valley, the Indian Wells Masters will begin. It’s the highest-profile tennis tournament in the world after the four Grand Slams, dropping a fat bounty of 1000 ranking points on its winners. Everyone in the tennis universe should be excited, except for Serena Williams and all her fans, after…
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Bless Nick Kyrgios for doing so much without ever really seeming to care. I’m not referring to those especially dumb, fringe cases—the forehands sliced for no reason, or the shameless tweeners during high-tension rallies—although he does plenty of that. I just mean just the way he hits the average ball.
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The last time these two matched up, last August at the Rio Olympics, they delivered the best tennis storyline of 2016: Juan Martin del Potro, rising from the dead after two years of surgeries to both wrists, upsets a Novak Djokovic who’d then had a vice grip on the No. 1 spot for two whole years. This time around, the…
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Novak Djokovic is often likened to a machine, and his wins share that metallic flavor: suddenly the teeth of the cogs are all lined up, they’ve been set in motion, and what once felt like a tennis match becomes a grind towards an inexorable conclusion.
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In today’s Beyond the Baseline podcast, tennis legend Martina Navratilova talks to SI’s Jon Wertheim about an issue that’d been haunting me lately: is Novak Djokovic looking a bit skeletal? He’s still winning, sure; last week in Doha he wrung the title away from Andy Murray in a gutsy three-set final, avenging his…
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