NOVAX’S EXCELLENT COVID ADVENTURE

NOVAK Djokovic tells an interesting story about NATO’s bombing of Belgrade during the spring of 1999.

He was 11, the eldest of three boys, and on that first night the Djokovic apartment shook, everything went dark. His mum fell and hit her head against a radiator, his dad told him to check if his brothers were OK.

Soon they left the apartment and through the city’s darkness made the short journey to the building where his aunt lived. It had a basement shelter and there they would spend 78 consecutive nights. Every evening at 8.30, the sirens sounded. Soon the bombs fell. At first it was terrifying.

“Somewhere during the course of the bombings,” Djokovic wrote in his book Serve To Win, “something changed in me, in my family, in my people. We decided to stop being afraid. After so much death ... we simply stopped hiding.”

The background and the mentality that came from that experience are part of the reason Djokovic has been my favourite of the three greatest players of this, and perhaps any, tennis generation. There are other reasons for the affinity. In the company of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Djokovic has seemed the outsider.

He got to the summit a few years after the others. There was the sense that Federer and Nadal considered two company but three a crowd. For a time, Djokovic was the Serbian underdog. That suited him.

From all of his victories, perhaps Wimbledon 2019 was the greatest so far. He and Federer slugged it out for almost five hours. Brutal. Brilliant.

It is the same single-mindedness, fearlessness and stubbornness that has landed Djokovic in an unwanted room at the Park Hotel in Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. He was against mandatory vaccination from the beginning and because he spoke publicly about his reticence to be vaccinated, he was seen as an advocate for the anti-vaccination lobby.

This is unfair because his position is more nuanced.

“My issue with vaccines is if someone is forcing me to put something in my body. That I don’t want. For me that’s unacceptable. I am not against vaccination of any kind, because who am I to speak about vaccines when there are people that have been in the field of medicine and saving lives around the world?” he said before the 2020 US Open. Many will feel zero sympathy for Djokovic. I get that.

Who knows what will happen on Monday when an Australian court considers his appeal against the decision not to accept his exemption?

He claims his exemption, based on him having tested positive for Covid-19 in the previous six months, was approved by medical officials from both Tennis Australia and the Victoria government.

There is, though, a photograph of him with school kids at an awards ceremony, allegedly the day after he says he tested positive for the virus. That photo, if taken on December 16, will not be easily explained. I don’t expect to him to be in the draw for this year’s Australian Open and, without him, it will be a lesser tournament.

What has taken Djokovic to the brink of history has also stopped him from having his shot at it, at least in Australia this year.

One day, for sure, he will get there.