Rohit Brijnath: In the winter of his career, Novak Djokovic still wants more

After a lifetime of witnessing it and hearing it, it’s still somewhat bewildering. “More?” we wonder as if their appetite is outlandish. How do these people need more goals, runs, wins, titles, medals? Why take roughed up bodies back into the cauldron of pain? Why risk defeat and a stain on a reputation? Why not retire?

We never say this to adventurers charting rivers or those clawing up mountains. We never say high enough or far enough to them. But we say this to athletes who are explorers too, gleefully and crazily venturing where others don’t dare. Would Michael Phelps ever get to 23 Olympic golds, and LeBron James to 43,440 points, or Katie Ledecky to 14 unbeaten years in the 800m freestyle, unless they were infected by some mix of restless spirit, dissatisfaction, self-doubt, perfectionism, obsession?

“I was always hungry, hungry, and I wanted more,” said Phelps in an interview.

Now that tennis voyager, Novak Djokovic, in his documentary, The Wolf in Winter, is his echo: “I am always looking to be more,” he said. It’s an ache, a trigger, a twisted, fascinating belief that he’s still not good enough (the “No.1 doubter” he calls himself). Which is why he, 39, his face ascetic lean, his body like a boxer who’s gone too many hard rounds, playing an old man’s schedule of 20 matches this year, is still searching his spare frame for one last reservoir of bloody minded beauty to nourish him.

There’s more, he believes.

What Drives Him

If he didn’t think there was, if he didn’t enjoy this almost masochistic search, he’d be done. Anyway Jannik Sinner’s injured, Carlos Alcaraz is recently repaired, and Djokovic bears many resemblances to the rugged beast in the title of his documentary. Wolves—according to the International Wolf Center—have a sense of smell about 100 times greater than humans. And Djokovic, at the US Open, can smell chance.

This year he’s got to the Australian Open final and Wimbledon semi-final and last year he made every major semi-final, as if something primitive awakens in him at a Slam. He enjoys taming young players, even subduing Alcaraz last year in Melbourne, and Sinner this year, and even if age steals things from him every week and he’s got some mysterious health issue, even if you believe he’s some struggling, self-centred figure, why would you not want to watch this professor of shot-making whose every fibre sneers with competitiveness?

Still, just tell him he can’t win the US Open, remind him he hasn’t won a Slam since 2023, and say it loudly because he might hear it and swell with annoyance, as thin-skinned as Michael Jordan used to be, using every casual slight from a stranger as a spark for ignition. Grown men using childish taunts to reach for immortality. What a place sport is.

Defying Age

At one point in the documentary, Andre Agassi, insightful as always and able to untangle Djokovic, says, “I was surprised how dark he needed to feel to get the most out of himself. For Novak to do his job, he needed fear or anger. Because with love or appreciation, he lost his fangs.”

The documentary, 92 minutes, feels too short, too incomplete (though Jelena Djokovic is simply excellent), and also too early, for sometimes you need space to appreciate and uncover athletes, to place them in history, to let time pass so they can emerge from their tunnels and see their combative lives with more clarity.

Jonathan Eig’s book Ali: A Life arrived 36 years after the boxer’s final fight while The Last Dance was spliced together 22 years after Michael Jordan finished with the Bulls. But we’re in the age of immediate show and tell, of Insta reels posted in seconds, of clubs and tournaments stroking players’ egos, of self-funded documentaries about athletes we see every day anyway, their press conferences on YouTube, their shots replayed from multiple angles. Mystery sometimes feels dead.

This documentary doesn’t inform us sufficiently of how Djokovic built his elastic, durable body, how he tactically unlocks rivals, how they viewed playing him (Rafael Nadal has a brief cameo), and yet it captures an essential element of Djokovic. When this man finally gets the statue he deserves in Melbourne, it should be of him scowling, roaring, shirt-tearing, because his life has been an act of defiance.

Djokovic defies a tough childhood, a world of panic, fear and uncertainty, which no passing clips of the 78-day Nato bombing of Belgrade can adequately convey. He defies circumstance, going to Germany when barely a teenager, caught in a foreign land where he can’t speak the language, told by his dad he has to be 100% dedicated. His family is investing in him, he can’t afford to fail, he won’t let himself fail. In a way Federer and Nadal had no chance.

All his life will feel like a resistance movement, defying doubt, health issues, the crowds that spurn him, Federer and Nadal, history, records and also what we think is possible between those rectangular lines. Almost everything he conquers. As Agassi says, “He has a capacity for pain that I think is unmatched”, but also a stubbornness which feels like a religion to him, a need to prove people wrong, and it’s fitting that Djokovic says there is a Serbian word for it. Inat.

And so, why are we surprised that he endures, for he’s trying to defy one last thing. Time. Trying to stretch it, challenge it, subdue it, explore it, knowing he’s going to lose this scrap but unable to stop, hostage to some itch within, imprisoned by his need to be better, to discover what’s left, something, anything.

The winter of the wolf has long come, but he’s always searching for one more season.

Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold.