GQ: Novak Djokovic Conquered Tennis. What’s Next?
On this morning in Montenegro, awash in abundant sunlight sparkling off of the Bay of Kotor, Novak Djokovic wears a white Lacoste T-shirt, blue shorts, rubber sandals, and Moscot glasses with a blue tint. He is, at 37, perhaps at his most relaxed. Nothing left to gain and nothing left to lose. The confidence he projects is new and kind of terrifying—at peace with the inevitable ending and yet with at least one more season of Slams in the tank. He carries toward our table a Wimbledon bag: canvas, leather, Wimbledon purple and Wimbledon green. “I love it,” he says. “They know what they’re doing.”
Djokovic spends three minutes, which feel like 30, catechizing a waiter in Serbian about the specific ingredients of every dish on the breakfast menu. I have seen this before, in another setting before the US Open in New York, and I take the meticulousness to be in no way performative. “When it comes to food,” he says, “I’m quite religious. I like things to be clean and freshly prepared. I don’t like to be very—what do you call it?—explorer-like. Especially during a tournament.” (When he’s not competing, he says, ice cream is his vice. Ice cream and wine.)
Though he is still technically a resident of Monaco, and has homes all over the world, Djokovic has in recent years spent considerably more time in his home country of Serbia—and here in Montenegro, which was formerly one country with Serbia and where he used to vacation with his family as a kid. He seems exceptionally comfortable today. But there is mortal incidence in the air. Nearby, a small bird is unconscious. Djokovic noticed it while walking my way. The perfect cloudless sky, welcome to most humans, can be fatal to birds, when it reflects an illusion of transparency in a wall of glass. They’ve been dropping like flies, someone says. It’s ominous. But Djokovic and his two young children are on the case. They move the bird into a box and take it inside for sugar water, rest, and resuscitation.
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