Novak Djokovic never goes unnoticed. Neither inside the courts nor before the microphones. While playing the Masters 1000 in Rome (this Tuesday he will face Cameron Norrie for the round of 16), the 35-year-old Serbian gave an interview to the newspaper Corriere della Sera in which he deepened his relationship with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the other members of the big three that dominated tennis in recent decades. The World No. 1 explained how he used the rivalry for fuel, but at the same time revealed why it became “impossible” for him to be friends with his admired rivals.
“We have never been friends. Between rivals you cannot. With Nadal at the beginning we even went to dinner together. But even with him, friendship is impossible. In the last fifteen years I have seen them more than my mother, ”he joked to qualify his sentence. Between them there were many times differences due to the leadership of the ATP, although they have also known how to join forces in Team Europe of the Laver Cup, as happened in 2022, in the edition in which the Swiss hung up the racket.
“Thanks to Nadal and Federer I grew up and became who I am. This will unite us forever; therefore I feel gratitude towards them ”, he was able to highlight as to how he bids to be the best tennis player of the moment. And he even gave examples of how the competition stoked the fire inside him. For example, the Wimbledon final against the 2019 Basel native, in which the public was against him.
“The audience was chanting ‘Roger, Roger,’ and within me the chants became ‘Novak, Novak.’ That final was one of the matches of life ”, he evoked. In Australia 2023, Nole achieved his 22nd Grand Slam, the same amount as Nadal (who is currently fighting injuries to return to the circuit) and two more than Roger. “In most tournaments, when I played against Federer and against Nadal, the crowd was against me. I told myself: ‘You have to develop the strength inside your head, otherwise you will never win.’ But it is not an easy thing to transform the opposite support into energy. It doesn’t always work. As Michael Jordan said: ‘I failed, I failed, I failed; and I won ‘”, he confessed the formula that led him to success, which he will try to continue paying for in the current season, in which his main adversary has been the Spanish Carlos Alcaraz, who in Rome surprisingly stumbled in two sets against the Hungarian Fabián Marozsán.
Keep reading:
