Great Magazine Reads: GQ gives us 7 more reasons why Novak Djokovic sucks
Tennis legend and highly unlikeable 37-year-older Novak Djokovic is the cover feature of the February issue of GQ. I read it with the mindset of looking for additional reasons (the list is already long) not to like the alleged GOAT.
Somehow (and I know Djokovic does do a lot of good things with his non-tennis time), he doesn’t come off as that terrible of a person in the article. But that is partly because GQ’s journalism in this case isn’t really all that illuminating or great (the only reason my headline says “Great Magazine Reads” is because that’s the name of this series here at PCLB).
It seems GQ could have done a much better job rooting out the nasty Novak, but here’s all we get:
The article begins at a resturant in Montenegro with Djokovic spending three minutes asking the waiter “about the specific ingredients of every dish on the breakfast menu.”
As he begins plummeting lower and lower in the world rankings, he hopes to take advantage of tennis’s “arcane rankings system.” Because he’s nearing the end of his career and will play fewer tournaments in order to focus on only the most major ones, up-and-coming stars will get stuck facing “a ludicrously low-seeded Djokovic.” This could help him walk through the early rounds with even more ease in 2025, but at the same time, he could lose to—in turn being embarrased by—some unknowns.
He is still reeling in many circles for being seen as, in January 2022, “putting himself above the law or trying to skirt the requirements of” the Australian Open and Australia itself when he came up with some hokey story about being exempted from needing a Covid vaccination in order to play in that month’s tournament. (Probably his best chance to win a major in 2025 was the Australian, which he has won 10 times and where he just bowed out in the semifinals with a hamstring injury.) In the article, he gives completely unconvincing reasons to claim he wasn’t trying to seek privilege and says the Australian politicians just couldn’t stand him being there.
He continues on today with his Aaron Rogers-like talking point: “I’m not pro-vaccine. I’m not antivax. I am pro-freedom to choose what I should be taking for my body.”
He gives a scoop to GQ that he was poisoned while stuck in a holding pen for unvaccinated travelers during that 2022 Australian nightmare: “I was fed with some food that poisoned me. I had a really high level of heavy metal,” Djokovic claims.
After that, he still didn’t feel he needed a Covid vaccination because “I’m a healthy individual, I take care of my body, and I’m a professional athlete. I’m not a threat to anybody.” Those are ripe words from a guy who hosted a tennis tournament in the heart of the Covid pandemic that was cancelled because many of the players gave each other the contagious disease while hugging, playing basketball, and dancing at parties with their shirts off.
One of Djokovic’s hobbies is Balkan history, and he aligns much of his thinking with that of a Bosnian businessman and author who “has stirred considerable controversy for decades for his unorthodox historical claims.” The tennis player does much to spread what appears to be misinformation in the somewhat noble attempt to bring together a reunified Yugoslavia.
The best I can say about Djokovic is that, because of him, the mighty threesome of Djoko, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal had itself a villain to cheer against. And he is gracious in talking about the two others, even if he doesn’t believe Nadal when he says he wasn’t trying to intimidate the others by sprinting in the locker rooms and blasting the music in his headphones before matches. But Djokovic says he would someday like to sit down and talk on a deeper level with Nadal and Federer about what annoyed them about him.
I imagine that would be a very long conversation indeed.