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The Sporting Statesman Novak Djokovic and the Rise of Serbia
By Chris Bowers John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Chris Bowers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-609-8
CHAPTER 1
AN ETHNIC MIX
The philosopher and travel writer Hermann Keyserling once wrote, 'I am not a Dane, not a German, not a Swede, not a Russian nor an Estonian, so what am I? – a little of all these.' Thus, in an era where transport allows for inter-nation marriages as a matter of course, no one should be too surprised to find that Serbia's leading global flag-carrier, Novak Djokovic, should be a real ethnic mix. At least he was born in Serbia – unlike India's spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in South Africa, or America's most patriotic Davis Cup player John McEnroe, who was born in Germany. But from his ethnic heritage you could argue he was part-Montenegrin and part-Croat.
Does this matter? Hardly at all. As Djokovic's close friend Ivan Ljubicic says, 'You can be patriotic without being nationalistic.' And Ljubicic should know – born in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka to a Bosnian Muslim mother and a Croatian Catholic father, he barely passed through Croatia en route to the relative safety of Italy during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, yet became Croatia's national hero when he steered the still-young republic to the Davis Cup title in 2005 with a record-breaking 11 straight wins in live matches. In the Balkans there are thousands of people who are the products of inter-nation marriages. In fact, having links to Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Croatia probably broadens Djokovic's Balkan fan base.
In exploring Djokovic's ethnic heritage, it's important not to dilute the fact that he is a Serb. He was born in Serbia to two parents born in Serbia, and his paternal ancestors are ethnic Serbs from Montenegro (almost half the population of Montenegro declare themselves to be ethnic Serbs). Given that his paternal grandfather was born in Serbia, he is at least a third-generation Serb. As such, he is more Serbian than Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi are American, more Serbian than Mark Philippoussis is Australian, arguably even more Serbian than Roger Federer is Swiss. But his ethnic heritage is still interesting.
Tracing the Djokovic family tree back, the records are sketchy but the first obvious ancestor is Djoko Damjanovic, who appears to have established the Djokovic surname around 1730. The suffix '-vic' means 'son of', like '-son' in England, 'Mc/Mac' in Scotland, "O' in Ireland, etc. So Djoko Damjanovic's children had the surname Djokovic, after which the same surname was passed through male descendants. Damjanovic set up home in Jasenovo Polje, a village whose name means 'ash fields' near the Montenegrin town of Niksic. In 1928 the head of the family, Nedeljko Djokovic, moved east from Montenegro to a village called Vocnjak in Metohija, part of the province of Kosovo, which at that time was part of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia. In 1951 Nedeljko's son Vladimir, Novak's grandfather, moved to Mitrovica, the main ethnic Serbian town in Kosovo. In 1961 his son Srdjan was born and in 1964 he had a second son, Goran.
There had been one Novak Djokovic in the family. He grew up in Jasenovo Polje before emigrating to Chicago in 1905 but returned to fight for his country. Apparently, when filling in his immigration form as his ship docked in the USA, under 'Nationality (country of which citizen or subject)' he wrote 'Montenegro' and under 'Race of people' 'Montenegrin'. Montenegro at that time was already recognised as a sovereign state, having come to a form of independence in 1878 under the same settlement that saw Serbia become independent from the Ottoman Empire.
In 1986 Srdjan married Dijana Zagar. She was born in Belgrade in January 1964, the daughter of two military personnel. Her father Zdenko was a high-ranking officer in the Yugoslav National Army and a pharmacist, who became purchasing manager for a military hospital. Her mother Elizabeta was a major in the army and a chief medical officer in the military hospital (Dijana's sister is a pharmacist as well). They were originally from Vinkovci, a town in the eastern part of Croatia near the Serbian border, and they moved to Belgrade before Dijana's birth when Zdenko was transferred by the army to the military hospital in what was then the Yugoslav capital. Not surprisingly, Djokovic has lots of relatives in and around Vinkovci.
Very little is known about either family. The few interviews that Srdjan gives are generally about his son or Serbian tennis politics, while Dijana gives virtually no interviews. The Serbian tennis writer Vojin Velickovic says, 'Because Srdjan is so volatile, we never asked him too much because we didn't want to go too far, and I don't need that kind of information for my tennis reports.' Some reports say Srdjan was at one stage a footballer on the books of Mitrovica's main club FC Trepca, while the fact that he and Dijana gave skiing lessons leads to the assumption that they were gifted skiers. 'Maybe Srdjan was a football player,' Velickovic says, 'but no one remembers. If he did play, it would be at a very low level. We assume he was a good skier but that's also a grey area.'
Dijana's family is known to have a fair bit of volleyball talent but she didn't play much. Velickovic adds, 'A friend of hers told me she was a very gifted gymnast. Obviously Novak is very flexible, so when I spoke to him once, I told him that I'd heard he'd inherited his genes from his mother, not his father, because he was so flexible. And he joked, "Yes, I'm a champion because of my mother, not my father." But she never wanted to give an interview to the media, maybe because she doesn't want to be in the spotlight.'
One person who got some insight into the Djokovic family home was Djokovic's first coach, Jelena Gencic. She got to know the family when Novak was five, which was about the time his paternal grandmother died. She recalled, 'Srdjan's father Vladimir, known as Grandfather Vlado, was a very good man. He was a man of great warmth who made you feel nice. His wife died the year I started working with Novak, so I didn't know her but everyone says she was an excellent woman, such a humanitarian, so unbelievable – maybe Novak has his humanity from her? It was a very patriarchal family. The grandfather was the patriarch. We couldn't start eating until the patriarch had sat down and started to eat. And we couldn't get up until he had given his approval. So Novak had a very good family education. The family wasn't primitive but only ever had just enough.'
On 22 May 1987 Srdjan and Dijana celebrated the birth of their first son, Novak, in Belgrade. It was just four days after Srdjan's 26th birthday. At that stage they were restaurateurs in Belgrade. Two years later, with the political and economic situation in Yugoslavia starting to look very precarious, they and Srdjan's brother Goran opened up a second restaurant, a pizzeria which also sold pancakes, and a boutique in Kopaonik, a mountain resort on the boundary where Kosovo started, about 50km (as the crow flies) from Mitrovica. They didn't spend all year there – only the peak skiing season in winter and the hiking season in summer. In winter they had the punishing regime of giving skiing lessons by day and working in the restaurant at night. The rest of the time they lived in Belgrade.
In August 1991 Marko Djokovic was born, and a third son, Djordje, was born in July 1995. Once Novak began going to school, it meant that during the skiing and hiking seasons he often had to stay in the Belgrade flat of the newly widowed Grandfather Vlado, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch. He was later to seek refuge from the 1999 Nato bombing of Belgrade in the basement store of that flat. When Vlado died in April 2012 during the Monte Carlo Masters, the media remarked that Djokovic didn't seem quite the same and in fact did very well to reach the final where he lost to Rafael Nadal. The death of a grandparent affects everyone differently but this was no ordinary grandparent – Vlado was a parental substitute who was a massive figure in Djokovic's life.
This dual existence of the urban landscape of Belgrade and the rural, mountainous landscape of Kopaonik not only shaped Djokovic but gave him a heightened sense of his own country. Asked for this book where he feels the soul of Serbia is, he replied, 'It's very difficult to answer that question. My country has a very rich history, centuries long. Each stone, mountain, city, village has some powerful story to it, that I am very proud of. That's why we Serbs have very strong sense of belongingness, because of our history. Everybody has heard of Belgrade, but my country has so many beautiful cities and villages that people should come and see. So many legends they can hear about my people, kings and queens ... I honestly think that the soul of my country lies within villages in the south. Kosovo is a cradle of Serbian history. It has over 2,000 monasteries and churches that symbolise our culture and the beginnings of the Serbian Orthodox religion. Belgrade is a modern metropolis, it can give you everything, but the true Serbia is in the south. I remember myself as a kid spending a lot of time on Kopaonik and admiring every time the view of Serbia I had from this beautiful and powerful mountain.'
Like any boy of five, young Novak enjoyed kicking a football and was taught to ski from a very early age. There was no history of tennis in the family – Srjdan and Dijana could probably have told you very little about it when one day their elder son caught sight of tennis on the television. It ignited a spark in him that led him, a few weeks later, to approach the woman who would set him on the road to being the best in the world.
CHAPTER 2
WHO ARE THE SERBS?
To all but the keenest historians or current-affairs aficionados, the term 'Serbia' probably doesn't mean a great deal – in fact, to many, the first image the term conjures up is probably that of Novak Djokovic, even to those who don't call themselves tennis fans. Some who have vague recollections of their history lessons at school may remember that Serbia had something to do with the outbreak of the First World War, and those watching the news in the 1990s will have heard the name Serbia on many occasions, often in connection with the word 'atrocities'. But even those who were regular news followers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s can be forgiven for not knowing where or what Serbia was.
The reason for this is that, while the Serbs have existed in the south-eastern corner of Europe known as the Balkans since the sixth century, for most of that time they have not been a country in their own right. In fact, Serbia on its own has only been a sovereign state three times: from 1166 to 1459, from 1878 to 1918 and from 2006 to the present. The Serbs, therefore, are by no means a new people but they are a new country, hence the scope for a dominant world sportsman to become a statesman and standard-bearer for his country. (Technically, the term 'Serb' denotes an ethnic Serb, while a 'Serbian' is a citizen of Serbia, so the difference can be important.)
The Serbs are one of the Slav peoples. Because the Slavs are the fourth biggest ethno-linguistic grouping in the world, it's hard to give a precise definition of Slavs but they are an Indo-European race who are generally divided into three groups: the eastern Slavs populating today's Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, plus parts of central Asia and Siberia; the central Slavs populating countries and areas such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Silesia; and the southern Slavs, of which the Serbs are the biggest group, along with the Croats, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and Macedonians (but not Slovenes or Albanians). The southern Slavs are largely Christian, though with various differences. For example, the Serbs are largely Orthodox Christian, while the Croats are Roman Catholic.
For much of the 14th century Serbia was the most powerful state in the Balkans, but it was defeated in the battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, marking the end of its pre-eminence. After the battle of Smederovo in 1459, the independent kingdom of Serbia was subsumed into the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish empire ruled from the ancient city of Constantinople (now Istanbul). The 1389 defeat in Kosovo became a scar on Serbian national consciousness, which lingered into the 20th century, as the province of Kosovo became of psychological importance to Serbia, even though by the late 20th century it was populated largely by ethnic Albanians. It has some relevance to the Djokovic story: Djokovic's father and grandfather were from Kosovo, the ski resort of Kopaonik where Novak first learned to play tennis is right on the border between the undisputed Serbian territory and Kosovo, and Djokovic had to shelter from the 1999 Nato bombing raids on Belgrade that resulted from the ethnic Serb-Albanian conflict in Kosovo.
Until 1918 most of the southern Slav peoples were under the control of larger empires, generally either the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But long before the First World War those empires were decaying. The Ottomans' heyday had been in the 16th and 17th centuries; by 1850 the empire was becoming harder to hold together, while Austria-Hungary was ruled by the Habsburg royal family of Vienna, who were increasingly fighting domestic battles closer to home as nationalist fervour grew in states that are today's Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Some suggestions had been mooted in the middle of the 19th century that the southern Slavs might join forces in a united country but the largest of them also had their eye on becoming nation states of their own. Serbia and Montenegro were the first of them to break free from Ottoman control, becoming countries in their own right in 1878 following the Russo-Turkish war. Russia's foreign policy at that time was geared towards trying to get access to the Mediterranean Sea and, to this end, it developed friendly relations with Serbia, a fellow Slav nation. Out of that grew Serbia's military and diplomatic alliance with Russia, which played a part in the outbreak of the First World War. The traditional interpretation has been that, when a Serb radical, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in June 1914, it triggered the diplomatic tit-for-tat and mobilisation of forces that led to the outbreak of war five weeks later: Austria declared war on Serbia to avenge the killing, Russia was compelled to come to Serbia's aid, Germany came to Austria's aid and the whole thing became the world's first global conflict. Recently it has been suggested that this is too simple – that Germany was dead-set on going to war and was looking for an excuse to declare war on Serbia. Whatever the ultimate motivation, by the summer of 1914 Europe was like a tinder-dry forest just waiting for a spark to set the whole continent alight, and the Sarajevo assassination was the spark that started what became known as 'the Great War'.
With the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires effectively crushed during the war, 1918 was the obvious time for new nations to emerge in south-eastern Europe. But the legacy of being ruled by a large empire, allied to fears that Italy might try to sweep up a lot of territory along the Adriatic coast, led to the formation of a country made up initially of several southern Slav peoples. It was called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes but it also included Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia-Slavonia, a semi-autonomous region of Hungary, and Dalmatia (Monica Seles, Yugoslavia's most successful tennis player, was ethnically a Hungarian who came from Novi Sad in the Serbian province of Vojvodina). The new kingdom was proclaimed in December 1918 and ruled by the Serbian royal family, initially under King Peter I. For many Serbs, the kingdom was a continuation of the Serbian sovereignty that had existed since 1878, and certainly it amounted to a form of self-determination compared with being under Turkish or Austrian rule. But it's perhaps easier for the Serbs to feel this way, as they were the dominant nation in the new kingdom, whereas Croats, Slovenes and other nations find it harder to see this as full independence, at least compared to the independence and sovereignty they have enjoyed since the early 1990s.
Religiously, the Serbs are Orthodox Christian while the Croats are Roman Catholic, but the Serb language is very close to Croatian (almost as close as British English and American English are to each other), and Macedonian and Slovenian are also related to Serbian and Croatian. Given that there had been lots of migration and intermarriage among the southern Slav peoples, the new kingdom ought to have worked. After all, in 1871 22 German-speaking kingdoms, principalities and duchies had come together to form a new country called Germany, and while it had led itself – and the world – into a disastrous war, it had worked as a country and was still intact. The ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences between the Serbs and Croats are not as pronounced as those between the Prussians and Bavarians, so the new southern Slav country had every chance of succeeding.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sporting Statesman Novak Djokovic and the Rise of Serbia by Chris Bowers. Copyright © 2015 Chris Bowers. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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