Novak Djokovic and the weird thing about rooting for greatness

I don’t fully like Novak Djokovic. I want to be upfront about that.

And I also cannot stop watching him. I have watched more Djokovic matches than I’ve watched matches from players I actually love — players I’ve actively rooted for, players whose faces I’ve put on a t-shirt in my mind. And yet. Novak. Every time.

There’s something happening there that I think is worth pulling apart, because it’s not really about tennis.

Why is Djokovic so hard to root for?

It’s not one thing — that’s what makes it complicated. If it were one thing, you could dismiss it and move on. But it’s a whole collection of things that add up to a vague discomfort you can’t quite name at a dinner party.

There was the COVID visa situation in Australia. There were the weird comments about water and energy and intentions. There’s the way he celebrates — that chest-thump, that roar — which on another player might read as passion but on him sometimes reads as something else. Something I don’t have a clean word for.

And here’s where I have to be honest with myself — and fair to him — because some of what makes Djokovic hard to embrace is just that he had the bad luck of being great at the same time as Roger Federer. Federer, who moved like poetry being read aloud. Who made it look like something that wasn’t even sport, it was closer to art. Djokovic won more. But Federer felt more. And that’s not Djokovic’s fault, but we handed him the bill for it anyway.

Is it fair to hold greatness to a different standard?

Most of us never examine this, but we absolutely do hold greatness to a different standard. We demand more from the best — more grace, more likability, more performance of humility. And when they don’t deliver it exactly the way we want, we call it arrogance.

Djokovic has said, out loud, that he believes he’s the greatest of all time. And he has the numbers to back it up — 24 Grand Slam singles titles, more than anyone in the history of men’s tennis. When he says it, people cringe. When someone else says it about him, people nod reluctantly.

We have this unspoken rule that greatness should be a little bit shy about itself. Djokovic missed that memo. Whether that’s a cultural thing, a personality thing, or just the fact that he grew up in a country literally being bombed while he practiced tennis — which he has talked about, and which would change anyone — I genuinely don’t know. But I think it matters that I don’t know. It means I’m filling in blanks I don’t have the information to fill.

The steel-man case for Djokovic being the most impressive athlete of his generation

Here’s what I think people who dislike him get wrong — and I include myself in this, because I’ve gotten it wrong too. They confuse uncomfortable to watch with not worth watching.

Djokovic’s mental game is almost inhuman. He has come back from match points, from sets down, from moments that should have broken a person — and he hasn’t just survived those moments, he’s won them. He went to the Australian Open in 2023 with a hamstring injury and won the whole thing. His physicality, his flexibility, his ability to retrieve balls that have no business being retrieved — it is genuinely unlike anything else in the sport.

And the people who love him love him fiercely. His Serbian fans in the stands are some of the most alive crowds in tennis. There is something he gives them — some sense of national pride, of being seen, of the kid from Belgrade making the whole world watch — that is real and meaningful and worth respecting even if you’re not in that crowd.

I keep that in mind. It makes sense because the experience of watching Djokovic is not the same experience for everyone, and my version of it isn’t the correct one.

Why do we keep watching people we don’t fully root for?

This is the question I actually want to sit with, because I think it’s the most honest thing about sports fandom and we never say it out loud.

We watch because greatness is magnetic even when it’s uncomfortable. Because there’s a part of the brain that recognizes excellence separate from whether it likes the person demonstrating it. You know that feeling where you’re watching someone do something you’ve never seen done before and your stomach drops a little — not from joy exactly, but from something closer to awe? That’s not loyalty. That’s just being a witness to something rare.

Djokovic gives me that feeling on a tennis court and I resent it slightly and I also wouldn’t trade it.

The alternative — only watching people we’ve pre-approved emotionally — would make sports smaller. It would make us smaller. Part of what sports does, when it’s working, is force you into contact with something you didn’t choose. You can’t curate it. You just have to sit with the complexity of a person you don’t fully understand doing something you can’t fully explain.

So what does rooting for greatness actually mean?

I think I’ve been asking the wrong question for years. “Do I root for Djokovic” is not actually the interesting question. The interesting question is what it means to witness greatness — and whether witnessing counts as a kind of rooting, even when it’s reluctant.

I watch every Djokovic final. I hold my breath at the same moments. I feel something when he wins, even when it’s not uncomplicated happiness. That’s not nothing.

Maybe rooting for someone doesn’t have to mean you want them at your dinner table. Maybe it just means you show up. You pay attention. You let it matter.

By that definition — and I say this with full awareness of how annoyed it would make me to admit it to someone in person — I’ve been rooting for Novak Djokovic for years.

Sports doesn’t owe us likable heroes. That’s a story we made up because it’s more comfortable than the alternative, which is that greatness and goodness are completely separate categories that occasionally overlap.

Djokovic is one of the greatest to ever play the game. Full stop. What I feel about him personally is my problem to sort out, not his.

And he’ll be back on a court soon, doing something no one else can do, and I’ll be watching. Same as always.

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