It has been a perplexing, exhausting, ultimately encouraging year to be Novak Djokovic.
There was a racket change along with all the usual time changes; 76 singles victories but no major tournament titles; tactical progress but no ranking progress, at least not yet.
Djokovic, a 22-year-old Serb who is ranked No. 3 in the world, has been showing unmistakable signs of vitality in recent weeks, winning three of his last four tournaments and beating No. 1 Roger Federer and No. 2 Rafael Nadal along the way.
While his rivals seem to be slowing down or breaking down at the end of a memorable tennis season, Djokovic appears to be bearing down. He has one more challenge remaining before he heads off on a short vacation: he will try to defend the title he won last year at the ATP Tour finals in Shanghai.
“Basically, I’m at this stage in the last two months where I feel very comfortable on the court,” Djokovic said in a telephone interview from London, the site this year of the ATP World Tour Finals, which started Sunday. “And I’m very confident as well, and I’m taking this confidence into the finals and just hoping to continue playing the same way, because this is clearly the way I imagine myself playing.”
“Unfortunately for me,” he added, “I’ve been through a period of seven, eight, nine months where I’ve had to learn a lot. There was a lot of mental instability, but still you learn from your mistakes, and I’ve taken it now to this period where I actually feel good and feel happy to play tennis and happy to give my 100 percent on the court.”
At 94 matches and counting, he has played far more than any other leading player this year. Nobody else in the top 10 has even broken the 80-match barrier. And in the past, Djokovic was not exactly an iron man; he has retired from several high-profile matches, most recently from his Australian Open quarterfinal in the heat against Andy Roddick in January.
“Only Novak knows his body and how he’s feeling at the moment,” said Darren Cahill, a coach and television commentator. “You’d think for someone who plays that many matches, he’d be tailing off a bit at the end of the year, but he is playing some of his best tennis at the end of the year and was doing it also last year.
“You’d say in normal circumstances, he’d played three or four too many tournaments, but only he knows. And if he’s handling it well at the moment, it’s a great sign for the work going on off the court.”
Last spring, Djokovic hired the physical trainer Gebhard Phil-Gritsch, an Austrian who once trained Thomas Muster, a former world No. 1. Djokovic has also added a second coach, the cerebral Todd Martin, a former American star, to complement his longtime coach, Marian Vajda. Djokovic has said he considers Vajda, a former Slovakian professional, his “second father.”
It is a sizable brain trust. Federer, in contrast, does not have even one regular coach.
Martin, whose ranking rose as high as No. 4 in 1999, began helping Djokovic in late August, before the United States Open, and has signed on for next season.
“It’s an exciting thing,” Martin said. “I had really launched into designing a charity program at full speed, and I had certainly deemed professional tennis to be at least in good part in my rearview mirror. And to do the amount of traveling that I am and will be doing, it needed to be an attractive opportunity. And to be able to work with somebody who’s got Novak’s potential certainly qualified as attractive.
“We’re still at the initial stages, and you don’t have to look past the last couple weeks to realize what the potential is.”
Djokovic, who struggled briefly after switching rackets in January, said he hired Martin largely to improve his attacking game and net play. But Martin sees his role as broader than that.
“I think this departmental coaching is, in my opinion, not efficient,” he said. “There’s no way you can have an impact in one part of the game without addressing how to get to that part of the game.”
Whatever the division of labor, Djokovic seems increasingly committed to pushing forward. He won the Paris Masters last week, his first victory in a top-tier ATP event this year after losing in four of the Masters series finals. Djokovic was selectively aggressive in a brilliant victory over Nadal in the semifinals. Then, despite losing a lead and momentum, he stuck to his acquired aggressive taste against Gaël Monfils in the final.
In a tie breaker in the decisive third set — when old habits would be most likely to resurface under pressure — Djokovic won three points at the net, two of them after lunging volleys.
“The nice thing I saw over the weekend was a much greater willingness to be aggressive and to control play,” Martin said. “He’s such a great athlete and a tremendous defender that it’s pretty understandable and reasonable for him to rest on his laurels a little bit and to play relatively defensive tennis. But I think as the years go by, it’s going to be more and more important that he takes some initiatives and tries to control play a little bit more. He did that flawlessly against Nadal.”
It is an interesting turnabout, considering that a loss to Nadal altered the course of Djokovic’s season. In the midst of his finest clay-court campaign, Djokovic was locked in an epic with Nadal in the semifinals in Madrid. The match went more than four hours, which is rare for a three-set match, and Djokovic lost despite holding three match points.
At his next tournament, the French Open, he was among the leading contenders, but Djokovic lost in dispiriting fashion to Philipp Kohlschreiber in the third round. “Probably that’s the only match this year that I was quite bad on the day,” Djokovic said.
Cahill noted the significance of that Madrid semifinal, saying: “He’d been in three Masters finals in a row heading into Madrid. He had that incredible match with Nadal, one of the best of the year, not so much from a tennis perspective but from an emotional and spectacle perspective. But it really knocked the wind out of Novak’s sails.”
In retrospect, it did not help Nadal, either. The day after eliminating Djokovic, he lost in the final to Federer and has yet to win another tournament. But Nadal is in London and in the same round-robin group as Djokovic.
“Personally, I think Novak’s rediscovered his love of the game,” Cahill said. “It looked like he was playing with a big burden for a while.”
