Resurgent Novak eyes No 1 spot
UPWARD SURGE Serb on course to becoming first player to move to top from No 22 rank
Ranked No. 22 in June, Novak Djokovic has an excellent chance to be back at No. 1 by November.
No man has made it to the top from so far back in the same season since the ATP rankings began in 1973, and Djokovic has put himself on the brink by recovering his precision, his swagger and his longtime coach and mentor Marian Vajda.
Djokovic was an unforced-error machine as recently as March, losing in his opening round in Indian Wells, California, and in Miami.
But he is an unstoppable force now. After rehiring Vajda in April and bouncing back from a demoralising quarter-final defeat at the French Open to outsider Marco Cecchinato, Djokovic has triumphed at Wimbledon, the Cincinnati Masters, the U.S. Open and the Shanghai Masters.
He has steadied his baseline game, shored up his serve and won 18 consecutive official singles matches and 27 of his past 28.
He has won 26 straight official sets, with only two of those requiring a tie-breaker.
He is well within reach of the top ranking again at this week’s Paris Masters. Rafael Nadal, who is in Paris and expected to return to action, still holds the top spot by little over 200 points. He has not played since retiring against Juan Martín del Potro in the semi-finals of US Open.
One thousand points will go to the champion in Paris, and Djokovic does not have a single point to defend for the rest of the season, which, if he stays healthy, will also include the World Tour Finals in London in mid-November.
Unless Nadal returns in very rare form indoors in what has traditionally been his weakest phase of the season, Djokovic will be the year-end No. 1, just as he was in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015.
“It’s amazing in two ways,” said Paul Annacone, former coach of Roger Federer and Pete Sampras.
“It’s amazing to be that good and let it drop, and amazing to come back in the way that Novak has come back.”
Djokovic is 31, which was once twilight time for tennis stars, but no longer:
Seven of this week’s Top 10 are in their 30s. Sampras was 31 when he emerged from a funk to win his 14th and final Grand Slam singles title at the 2002 U.S. Open. He never played another official match, announcing his retirement the next year.
Before winning the 2002 Open, Sampras experienced one of the most humiliating setbacks of his career, falling to George Bastl in the second round of Wimbledon.
“I always felt and still feel that you can’t take away greatness,” Annacone said. “In other words, you’re not all of a sudden not great anymore. But what happens, I’ve seen, is that you can’t sustain it for long periods of time, so when I talked to Pete after he lost to George Bastl, I knew he could win another major. That’s what he wanted, not No. 1 but another major.”
But, he added, “that was one major. What Novak has done by winning two majors and dominating the second half of the year has been another level in terms of consistency.”
Djokovic had no wins over Top 10 players in the first five months of 2018. He has nine since June, defeating Federer, Nadal, Del Potro and Alexander Zverev, and beating Kevin Anderson twice.
“The key to everything has been Novak bringing back his old team, including Marian,” said Brad Stine, Anderson’s coach.
Luckily for Djokovic, Vajda, whom he had fired in May 2017, was still available. Vajda said he had rejected offers to coach other players and to become Slovakia’s Davis Cup captain.
“I had the feeling that I am still empty and I have no energy to start really working,” Vajda said. “I didn’t feel it somehow that I really have to go back to tennis, so I was still postponing, postponing, postponing.”
But in late March, Vajda said he finally began to feel that it was time.
“The next day he called me,” Vajda said of Djokovic. “It was amazing. I couldn’t believe it.”