Long means from Belgrade: Novak Djokovic celebrates his US Open win in 2011. (Getty Pictures)
Compared to what Novak Djokovic survived as a younger man, the strain of a grand slam match would not even begin to check.
Djokovic, now working his approach by way of the bracket on the U.S. Open, not too long ago published “Serve To Win,” a guidebook to bodily and psychological health. And in that guide, he discusses his life as a young man in Belgrade, where he and his family dodged NATO bombing runs. One evening, the family fled their residence during a bombing raid, searching for shelter. Djokovic tripped and fell to the bottom, his family working on forward of him.
“And then it happened,” he wrote. “From behind I heard something tearing open the sky, as if an infinite snow shovel had been scraping ice off the clouds. Still sprawled on the bottom, I turned and appeared back at our dwelling.”
What he saw subsequent would stick with him forever.
“Rising up from over the roof of our building got here the metal grey triangle of an F-117 bomber. I watched in horror as its great steel stomach opened straight above me, and two laser-guided missiles dropped out of it, taking aim at my household, my buddies, my neighborhood—the whole lot I’d ever recognized … I didn’t stop shivering for the remainder of the night time.”
Djokovic’s family survived, and in some strange way the warfare helped sharpen his tennis skills. “I all the time attempt to keep in mind these days in a constructive, in a very vibrant manner,” he told 60 Minutes final 12 months. “We did not must go to highschool and we performed more tennis.”
Djokovic, who was 12 throughout the 1999 bombing marketing campaign, was sufficient of a tennis prodigy that he was capable of leave the former Yugoslavia to hone his expertise. He remains a hero in what is now Serbia, and the story of what he survived makes his success all the extra spectacular.
Novak Djokovic recounts the terror of the worst night of his life during 1999 Yugoslav War bombings
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