novak Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
What's Wrong With Novak Djokovic?
This time last year, Novak Djokovic was about to complete his fourth consecutive Grand Slam win—as dominant a run as the tour has ever seen. But this year, since the first week of January, he has yet to get further than the quarterfinals of any tournament at all....
The Sun Set On Novak Djokovic
If you make a living standing outside and hurling a small yellow sphere up above your head so you can hit it down, sometimes an enormous yellow sphere is right behind it, and you just have to find a way to cope. Novak Djokovic, squinting and awash in light, couldn’t, as he lost to David Goffin 6-2, ...
Novak Djokovic Is Breakable
Taking the full view of 2017—the year of his supposed decline—it would have been perfectly on brand for Novak Djokovic to lose his first match on clay. When Gilles Simon took the second set here at Monte Carlo, that outcome seemed plausible. When Simon, hitting some astonishingly clean groundstrokes...
Don't Call This Vintage Federer, He's Got A Brand-New Weapon
INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Forget any bluster about age, resilience, rehabilitation: The story here is that Roger Federer may have solved Rafael Nadal. It’s never too late to iron out your flaws, especially if you have only one to speak of....
The Quarter Of Death Is Shaping Up At Indian Wells
INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Juan Martin del Potro is a teddy bear with a heavy brow and a shotgun forehand, and when he gets mad in public, apparently, he hugs whoever happens to be around. Because he is a professional tennis player that person is usually a line judge. That’s what he did in a fit of rage t...
The Best (Of Who's Left) At Indian Wells
INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—When you touch down in the desert in the middle of March, they pretty much know why you’re there. They plant a big-ass screen right at the arrivals gate and the tennis players loom nearly life-sized. That’s how it was possible to know, within 15 minutes of landing, that Andy Mur...
The Indian Wells Men's Draw Is One Big Clusterfuck
Today, out in the Coachella Valley, the Indian Wells Masters will begin. It’s the highest-profile tennis tournament in the world after the four Grand Slams, dropping a fat bounty of 1000 ranking points on its winners. Everyone in the tennis universe should be excited, except for Serena Williams and ...
When Nick Kyrgios Gives A Shit, He's The Future Of Tennis
Bless Nick Kyrgios for doing so much without ever really seeming to care. I’m not referring to those especially dumb, fringe cases—the forehands sliced for no reason, or the shameless tweeners during high-tension rallies—although he does plenty of that. I just mean just the way he hits the average ...
Novak Djokovic Gets The Best Of Juan Martin Del Potro, Who's Still Missing Something
The last time these two matched up, last August at the Rio Olympics, they delivered the best tennis storyline of 2016: Juan Martin del Potro, rising from the dead after two years of surgeries to both wrists, upsets a Novak Djokovic who’d then had a vice grip on the No. 1 spot for two whole years. Th...
Denis Istomin, The Bespectacled Wildcard, Dismantled Novak Djokovic
Novak Djokovic is often likened to a machine, and his wins share that metallic flavor: suddenly the teeth of the cogs are all lined up, they’ve been set in motion, and what once felt like a tennis match becomes a grind towards an inexorable conclusion. ...
What Does Novak Djokovic's Body Mean For His Career?<em></em>
In today’s Beyond the Baseline podcast, tennis legend Martina Navratilova talks to SI’s Jon Wertheim about an issue that’d been haunting me lately: is Novak Djokovic looking a bit skeletal? He’s still winning, sure; last week in Doha he wrung the title away from Andy Murray in a gutsy three-set fina...
Novak Djokovic Parts Ways With Coach Boris Becker
Novak Djokovic, who had what you could call an “off-year,” if only by his obscenely high standards, split up today with coach and six-time Grand Slam winner Boris Becker. In the three years that he worked with the German, Djokovic tightened his chokehold on the entire men’s field, only slackening hi...
The Four Best Men's Tennis Players Will Sort Out Where They Sit On The Food Chain
Novak Djokovic, who’s been blessed with some well-timed cakewalks lately, rounded up and slapped a group full of youngsters right in their apple cheeks. Meanwhile Andy Murray hacked his way through a death group, culminating in today’s dismissal of Stan Wawrinka (and a very respectable Stan, too) in...
Kindly Bozo Gets Fed To Novak Djokovic
Nobody really wants to stand across the court from Novak Djokovic right now, least of all a hobbled Gael Monfils. So when Monfils withdrew from the ATP World Tour Finals, citing a rib injury, I figured he was politely sparing Djokovic the hour or so it would’ve taken to thrash him. But it turned out...
Novak Djokovic Survives Milos Raonic As He Pursues Top Ranking
The ATP World Tour Finals reward close attention because nearly every match is quality: the top eight players in the world do a little round robin, then a little elimination, with year-end rankings at stake. So far, no one in that elite field has beaten Novak Djokovic, who withstood Milos Raonic’s a...
Novak Djokovic Visits The Bomb-Ravaged Tennis Club From His Childhood
Novak Djokovic livestreamed a visit Monday to some childhood tennis courts that were struck by the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in what was then Yugoslavia. Hiking through Kopaonik, Serbia, the No. 1 player pointed out three former clay courts, now overrun by vegetation, only a fence and net post rem...
Stan Wawrinka Says He Had An Anxiety Attack Before The U.S. Open Final
To watch Stan Wawrinka dispatch Novak Djokovic in the U.S. Open final last month was to see the physical toll the sport can take. Both men looked dazed and drenched in the heat of late-summer New York City, and Djokovic cramped severely and took an injury timeout for a blistered, bloodied toe. But t...
Stan Wawrinka Wore Out Novak Djokovic In The Best Point Of The U.S. Open
The men’s final contained the single most entertaining point of the U.S. Open—the only point Stan Wawrinka won in the first set tiebreak against Novak Djokovic, before taking the next three sets and the trophy....