The moment comes roughly 20 minutes into the thoughtfully done Prime Video documentary, Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, where Djokovic, winner of 24 grand slam titles and owner of the most-ever total weeks atop the ATP rankings (428), gets to the core of what has driven him to tennis royalty.
Djokovic can rightfully claim the title of the greatest male tennis player who has ever lived (“It is as clear as it gets – he is the best of all time,” Andre Agassi says in the doc) but how tennis fans feel about him has always been more complex than the universal love adorned on contemporaries Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
“There is a word in Serbian called inat,” Djokovic explains to the audience. “When people doubt you, when everyone is basically against you, that’s when you use that inat, that force of stubbornness to prove everybody wrong. That inat is actually quite widespread in the mentality of Serbian people.”
Inat would have been a worthy name for this 92-minute revealing exploration of Djokovic from director Jason Hehir, who has chronicled athletic giants including Michael Jordan in the Netflix/ESPN hit The Last Dance and a literal giant (HBO’s André The Giant). Hehir said that a Djokovic documentary project had been in the works since 2017, though it was first brought to him in 2023 when Sadoux Kim, one of the executive producers, took him out to lunch and explained that a film exploration of Djokovic had endured stops and starts for years. Hehir officially took on the project the following year. It debuted Thursday.
“I didn’t have specific interest in Novak as a tennis player but I knew that he had a reputation as an outspoken, often polarizing figure, and the more research I did the it felt like a great opportunity to profile a complex and compelling character,” Hehir said. “What put it over the top was the opportunity to follow a GOAT in real time.”
Hehir said he was interested in telling a story that examined Djokovic at this specific point of his career and the challenges he faced navigating a young family with the selfishness it takes to remain a champion tennis player. (Much of this story will be familiar to hardcore tennis fans; Hehir said the film was made with a global audience in mind and what is revealing is the exploration into Djokovic’s mindset rather than his biography.)
Djokovic’s wife, Jelena, offers the best psychological assessment of what drives her husband, a melange of genius, anger, playfulness and unexpressed emotions that date to his childhood in wartorn Serbia. At one point in the doc, Djokovic recalled tripping on the street in the dead of night as a young boy, unable to get the attention of his family who were running to safety, during the 1999 Nato bombings of Belgrade. Jelena describes tennis as a safe nest for her husband. “That’s the place where he finds love,” she says.
The documentary does not shy away from Djokovic’s deportation from Australia in 2022 prior to the Australian Open when the Australian government revoked his visa on the grounds that a recent Covid diagnosis did not justify an exemption to Australia’s requirement for visitors to be vaccinated.
“I never said I’m against vaccine or pro-vaccine,” Djovikic says in the doc. “The anti-vax movement claimed that I’m their hero. I’ve never associated myself with any anti-vax, pro-vax or anything. I’m pro freedom to choose what you are going to do with the integrity of your body. I missed slams and tournaments. I didn’t play in America for a couple of years because I was not vaccinated. That’s fine. But in Australia, I was allowed. I’m not the scientist, I’m not the one who is setting the rules. I’m not the one that should debate that. I stood up for what I believe in. I stand for protection of my integrity and what I think is best for my body, and that’s it.”
Djovovic is the greatest mover in the history of tennis but he cannot outrun the greatest impediment ahead of him – his age. He competed last week at the Cincinnati Open, his first tournament since Wimbledon, and was bounced in his opening match by Thiago Agustín Tirante of Argentina, the world No 50. Still, Djokovic has reached the semi-finals or better in six of his last seven grand slam tournaments and is ranked world No 5. Last month at Wimbledon he outlasted Felix Auger-Aliassime in a five-set, five-hour quarter-final epic before he was beaten by the eventual winner, Jannik Sinner. It is clear he can gear up for the big tournaments; the week-to-week stuff is much more difficult.
“I know a lot of people are retiring me already, for many years,” Djokovic says in the film. “Why would you want to retire me when I am still playing and competing at the highest level? I’m still top 5, top 10 in the world. Why would I talk about retirement when I am proving to myself that I can still win?”
Hehir said Djokovic initially did not want any mention of retirement in the documentary because he was understandably sick of addressing the subject. But the film-maker pushed Djokovic to see such questions as a compliment.
“I told Novak, “We have to address this but it’s a compliment because people are fascinated by how long you can continue to do this,’” Hehir said. “The irony here is that I think that his career is going to be elongated because of the skepticism surrounding his retirement. That’s one of the things that drives him now. I’m sure with the result in Cincinnati there will be people asking, ‘Is this the beginning of the end?’ Well, they’ve been asking this about Novak for five years. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he made a deep run at the US Open in a few weeks.”