Djokovic: Bad Attitude Opens Doors and Chastens Others in Button-Down Open
But research shows that smacking errant balls can hurts players as much as officials
Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic (right) tries to comfort USTA line judge he hit accidentally after smacking a ball during a tight fourth-round match.
Something about New York City tends to bring out the best or the worst in everyone. The crowds. The congestion. The noise… yep, the noise.
Although without the former two and lots of the latter (screeching trains and planes were audible on ESPN) something in ATP No. 1 Novak Djokovic cracked on Sunday when in a fourth round match against ATP No. 27 Pablo Carreno Busta, Djokovic hit a ball supposedly against a covered wall, but instead struck a line judge in the throat, a potentially life-threatening injury. Djokovic immediately apologized and the line judge was ok, but everything changed when ten minutes later, he was ejected from the tournament.
As he should have been. It was his second episode of “ball abuse” (a term that sounds humorous to many junior players, but is a real thing) in the match and proof of escalating anger. When any player or official agrees to step on a tennis court in New York for the Open, they pledge to follow the USTA’s Code of Conduct, the ITF Code of Conduct and additionally, the Grand Slam Code of Conduct.
Those are a lot of rules for a small group of people, but they have been devised and revised and revised again for one end: to keep everyone safe. Also, in the real world, they prevent lawsuits. But there is another reason that few people, except maybe coach and ESPN commentator Darren Cahill, have reported in the past week. These regulations on behavior actually help players play better.
The mangled remains of Roger Federer’s smashed racket at the 2009 Miami Masters tournament, while losing to Novak Djokovic. It was the first time in almost eight years, but he threw mangled remains at his stool, and was slapped with a code violation.
In a January 2017 study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics and cited by the National Institutes of Health, researchers found that “a component of mental toughness that is particularly relevant in sports, especially tennis, is the control of thoughts and feelings.” In the study “Mental Toughness in Talented Youth Tennis Players: A Comparison Between on-Court Observations and a Self-Reported Measure”, scientists identified four components of mental toughness: commitment, challenge, confidence and control. In addition, athletes with high levels of emotional control are “able to keep anxieties in check and are less likely to reveal their emotional state to other people” — a key correlate of mental toughness… and edge.
Other tennis pundits have chimed in, too. In an essay for ADDvantage, the United States’ Pro Tennis Association’s magazine, sports psychologist Gregory Prudhomme, cites another recent study correlating high levels of sportsmanship (athlete behavior) with high winning percentages among NCAA Division I tennis players. Prudhomme suggested that more work needed to be done in the field, but added that the possibility for a performance benefit for possessing high levels of sportsmanship would provide extremely valuable implications for professional sports.
“Most importantly,” he wrote, “ if a positive relationship were discovered between sportsmanship and performance, then athletes, coaches and parents would promote good behavior,” as not only the moral thing to do, but as an incentive to win.
WTA No. 8, Serena Williams, argues with chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, during her 2018 U.S. Open Final match against Naomi Osaka, who is known throughout the profession for her low-key attitude and sportsmanship.
Naomi Osaka often does a fist pump during her 2018 U.S. Open Final.
Can all this bad behavior among the adolescents of tennis, including Daniil Medvedev, Nick Kyrgios and Simona Halep, be controlled or even channeled? Djokovic has had his mental battles on court before. “I had this upward kind of spiral and trajectory in my tennis career, in my life, and everything was great,” he has said of his two years off the ATP circuit for elbow and hip injuries, “And then, all of a sudden, I had this period of two-and-half, three years, where I didn’t win a Slam. I was managing to be three/four in the world, but I just struggled a lot.
“And, for me, being No 3 in the world wasn’t enough. I just was not satisfied with that. And I would always go back, and say, ‘Okay, wait, when I was seven, eight years old, my dream and my life goal was always to be No. 1 and win Wimbledon. That’s it. And I need to achieve that, no matter what’”.
The “no matter what” is the problem, according to Cahill, who famously left WTA No. 2 Simona Halep’s side for a year after her on-court behavior. “Shock therapy,” Cahill told the New Yorker in May 2019, before he took Halep back. “It wasn’t just the result of one match. It was the result of a year.” If she believed he was the best coach for her, he told her, then she had to acknowledge that she needed help. Halep got it and returned to capture Wimbledon and the WTA No. 2 spot in 2019.
WTA No. 2, Simona Halep, sitting with coach Darren Cahill, in 2018, before his year-long breakup with her.
Is this Novak Djokovic’s “shock therapy”? Will he pull back from the brink? Three days ago, Djokovic went on Twitter defend the line judge from his trolling fans, saying that she did nothing wrong. He added, “From these moments, we grow stronger and we rise above. Sharing love with everyone. Europe here I come.”
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