Novak Đoković o karijeri, motivaciji, očekivanjima - Intervju

Dear viewers, good evening. It's a great honor for me that for the first time in my career, which is the biggest or the best in that sport, which has been going on for 17 years, since the first won Grand Slam in Australia against Joao Wilfredo Conga until today, Novak Djokovic, the best tennis player in the world of all time, will speak a little longer for some Montenegrin media. It is an additional pleasure for me that he will speak in the camera and microphone of the public media service of Montenegro, in the heart of Montenegro, in 1-4 Nahie, in Ljesanska, in Bridzima, in Vili Oblom. We are talking to Novak Djokovic. Novak, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you here in 1-4 Montenegrin Nahie and to have the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you very much, thank you for the invitation. It is a pleasure for me that I will have the opportunity to talk to you and, as you announced for the first time, I have a longer interview with the public media service of Montenegro. First of all, let me ask you what is the state of your injury because you had to give up the match after the first lost set against Sasha Zverev? Thank you for the question. The injury is almost 100% healed. I have a green light from the medical team to be able to train, to be able to prepare. The next tournament is in Doha, Qatar, and it starts in 8 days. So I have enough time to prepare and I am looking forward to new challenges. I think I started the year well. Of course, there is a pity in that semi-final match that I had to give up after the first set against Aleksandar Zverev. By the way, at the Grand Slam, where I recorded my best results historically in my career. But okay, what is there. I hope the injury will not bother me because I played my best match since the Olympic final last year against Valkar in the quarter-final for the Australian Open. I finished the match with the quality of tennis that gave me strength and encouraged me for some new part. When you mentioned Kalas, two of your best matches were against Valkalaz, who is one of the two champions of the New Wave. Did Novak Djokovic, let's put it sarcastically, hurt Melbourne too much? Well, yes. You know what? In our sport, it is very important to quickly recover from defeat and to continue. Otherwise, you will remain, so to speak, stuck in space and time. You just don't have the luxury to think too much and to regret what you missed. You have to turn a new leaf. The good thing about tennis is that you have a lot of tournaments. Every week or every two or three weeks, there is a new challenge, a new big tournament where you can prove yourself and others again. This is my phase of my career, the final one, which lasts, I don't know how long it will last. There is no end in sight. I try to enjoy the court as much as possible. Of course, I am very proud of what I have achieved and all the achievements in my career so far. Everything I do now is a kind of bonus, so to speak. But for me, this is an incentive and a challenge to prove myself and others that I can still compete at the highest level and that I can be a competitor for the biggest titles. You mentioned Alcaraz. We have Alcaraz and Siner who are among the best tennis players today, tennis players who are very young, who are perfect, who are hungry, who are eager for victory, for proof. For me, this is a new challenge. After all these years of professional tennis, I have to find a new challenge to encourage myself and push myself to get up in the morning and say to myself that I want to train more than I have trained so far to be able to beat such young guys at big tournaments. So the fire in me is still burning. No matter what happens, I will continue to play tennis. You have broken all possible records. Now you are in a situation to break your own record. You have won 24 Grand Slams and 99 tournaments in total. As you said, you are in a phase of your career when it is perhaps a little inappropriate to make a long-term plan. Yes. But I am interested, and I assume the rest of the audience and everyone else, where does Novak Djokovic see his chance to possibly attack the 25th Grand Slam title or the 100th tournament? In my opinion, in the last few years, you have been the easiest to get to the Bimbo finals. Yes. And he is perhaps the least demanded. Before I answer that question, I would like to focus on the philosophy of approach. Because different phases of my career required a slightly different approach. Now, in this phase, I am somewhere between the feeling that I really want to enjoy the fruits of my work and everything I have achieved. And to relieve myself of the enormous pressure and expectations that I feel from myself and, of course, from everyone else who expects me to win in 99% of matches. Which is a privilege to some, of course. But after years and years of feeling these pressures, eventually you get tired of the material. And this is reflected in injuries, lack of motivation, and so on. So, I am somewhere between the aspect where I feel well-trained to be in that mental state. I constantly strive to win titles and that everything except titles is a failure for me. And this is a mentality that has certainly helped me, but also in some phases of my life, that is, my career, it has discouraged me. So, I try to find some balance in everything where it is absolutely undoubtable that I still strive to win titles and I hope that that Grand Slam will come. Whether Roland Garros, Wimbledon or US Open. You mentioned that I, chronologically speaking, played the best on Wimbledon, the most constant, so I came to the final in the last ten years. And I think that maybe in the last 4-5 years I played better on Roland Garros and on Sljaca than it was in the first 10-15 years of my career, which is a bit of a paradox. But these are the cases when it comes to Grand Slams and now that title may come, maybe already in Doha, we don't know. I hope and at every tournament I always approach with that desire and that tendency, but also with a reminder that in my 38th year, after all these successes, I try to relax a bit and enjoy it all. We often hear that from athletes, enjoy the moment, be in the moment. That is, as I would say, much easier to say than to achieve on the court, because when you are an individual athlete, you cannot rely on someone, you cannot ask for a replacement, you cannot go on a break, on the bench for a few minutes and then come back. Because if something starts downhill, you lost the match and you left the tournament. It is simply such a format that it is quite harsh and because of that you cannot allow yourself that luxury to relax, figuratively speaking, not only on the court, but also off the court. I somehow grew up with people, especially my parents, people who are really experts in sports and in life, who taught me great wisdom and knowledge and who trained me to be so disciplined and that I actually do not know to do things 99%, only 100% when it comes to tennis and constantly looking for some new ways to innovate my game, to improve, to perfect, because that is the only way. Simply, if I stay where I was and try to maintain some so-called stagnation or status quo, it just means regression, because everyone else improves and moves on. So that's a little wider answer, but basically, I approach every tournament with optimism and, of course, big goals. Well, I think that the mentality is above all a kind of binding thread between us, champions of various sports, because, of course, every sport has its own uniqueness, its own specificity and, of course, it has in that biomechanical sense comparable, as I would say, things and movements, but every sport is unique for itself. But when it comes to mentality, I can really see that we have a lot of things that bind us and that are similar. By chance, I know Cristiano Ronaldo and Lebron James better than maybe a little Messi, because I met him, so I could be sure that through those conversations and the way they work, because I had some joint trainings, we actually have a similar approach in our trainings. So that even when no one is watching and things are being done behind the scenes, without a camera and an audience, then the training is equally intense, if not even more intense than when you are in front of the public. So that is something that is really impressive with all the names you mentioned, I admire them all, I respect them all and that perseverance is something that motivates me with them. I believe it is the opposite because with Federer and Nadal, with my two biggest historical rivals, it was that case where we just pulled each other. And because of them I became the tennis player I am today and I have been my whole career. Because of the rivalry with them, because they defeated me in the World Cup.