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What could any coach possibly tell Djokovic at this point?
· Posted by Scoop Malinowski in Bios
By Scoop Malinowski
Novak Djokovic has won 24 Grand Slams, sent Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to retirement and won hundreds of millions of dollars for how accurately he can hit a tennis ball.
What could any tennis player or coach possibly tell Novak Djokovic to help him win one more Grand Slam in Paris or Wimbledon or New York.
It’s a question most people would say, “Nothing. He already knows everything about tennis. He conquered the sport.”
But that’s incorrect. Djokovic can still improve at age 37, about to turn 38. There actually are some small things and details that he doesn’t know or has forgotten.
Valuable tennis advice can come from the most unlikely source. In the book Inside Tennis by Peter Bodo, there is an anecdote which reveals a shocking, unbelievable example of this. The long forgotten American player Jeff Borowiak was losing his match at Wimbledon in the late 1970s but his ears managed to hear the advice given to him from … a ballboy.
Borowiak revealed, “One of the ballboys kept telling me to be more aggressive, go to the net more. It sounded like a good idea so that’s what I did. I was talking to him through the whole match. He was from the States.”
The power of words is immeasurable. The great boxer Mike Tyson said one sentence from the former champion boxer Emile Griffith restored his confidence after his first pro loss to Buster Douglas.
“Mr. Griffith was working with some fighters at the gym I was training at. One day he said something that just rocked me to my bones and made me finally forget about my loss to Douglas. I was talking to him about the Douglas fight. Yeah, I didn’t do too well, huh? Is what I said to him. Mr. Griffith said, ‘I know the great Mike Tyson is not going to let something like this discourage him.’ Oh man. Those few words completely changed my opinion of myself and my comeback. Isn’t that crazy? Just hearing those words made me forget about the loss and think I was champion again. Once he said that, I was back.”
So maybe it’s possible there is a word combination or sentence that can re-ignite Novak Djokovic to regain his world’s greatest tennis form again.
It could also be a change of routine. Last year I coached Stefan Kozlov at Sarasota Open Challenger and Tallahasee Challenger. He went 4-1 in Sarasota, going from qualies to a QF loss to Tennys Sandgren 16 46. The next week in Tallahassee, Stefan beat a Korean player named Gerard Campana Lee in three sets, to set up a second round rematch vs Sandgren, a player he had lost to three times in a row in ATP.
The day before the match I thought hard and got an idea. I told Stefan, “I have an idea on how to beat Sandgren. He’s a player who only shows negative emotion on court. He can get into a self-deprecating mood and antagonize himself. We need to exploit that. And a way to do it is to be ready for the fight from the very first ball. Let’s hit on court for an hour, play some tiebreakers and then go straight to the match court, so you are really ready for battle. Instead of hit, sit for an hour and then go on court.”
At first he didn’t like the idea, as it’s “a sign of weakness” and something he said he “never did it in my career.” But changes aren’t always bad and sometimes needed. So he ended up doing it my way… and won the first set 62. Lost a fierce marathon second set 67 and then won the third set 61. This is less than a week after losing to Sandgren 16 46. He then won the QF 62 62 vs Oliver Crawford before losing in the SF to Mitchell Krueger in three sets.
So tiny revisions and alteration to the normal routine can also turn a losing result into a victorious one. And this can also apply to the greatest player we ever saw Novak Djokovic.
Asics · Head · Lacoste · Mike Tyson · Novak Djokovic · Roland Garros · Stefan Kozlov · Tennys Sandgren
