The camera found Rafael Nadal first. He was doing the thing he has done before matches for twenty years: bouncing on the balls of his feet, sprinting in the tight hallway, adjusting everything that can be adjusted, taking up as much room in his opponent’s head as the rules allow. A legendary master hopping around like Mario after eating the star.
Then it cut to Novak Djokovic, who was on the ground wrestling with his daughter.
I was watching the Paris Olympics with my family. I had paid almost no attention to tennis in my life. I’d read Andre Agassi’s Open and Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, which is like having read two books about the ocean and never having been in it. But we watched tennis that summer, all the way through to Djokovic winning gold, and I got hooked, and the thing that hooked me was that cut. The most volatile man in the sport, the one who breaks rackets and argues with stadiums, flat on his back letting a small child climb on him.
There’s a Serbian word I learned recently: inat.
The dictionary gives you spite, or stubborn defiance. That’s thin. It means going out of your way to do something you wouldn’t otherwise care about doing, at real cost to yourself, purely to prove that you can, and the trigger is usually that someone was condescending about it first.
The condescension is the weighty part. Inat is a specific answer to a specific person who looked at you a specific way.
In 2008, Andy Roddick stood on a court at the US Open with a microphone and made fun of Djokovic’s injuries. Djokovic was twenty-one and had a reputation for pulling up hurt. Roddick ran the list for the crowd: both ankles, a back, a hip, a cramp, bird flu, anthrax, SARS, the common cough and cold.
New York laughed.
Two days later Djokovic beat him in the quarterfinal, 6-2, 6-3, 3-6, 7-6. Then he took the microphone himself, in front of the same crowd, and would not let it go. Andy was saying I have sixteen injuries in the last match. Obviously I don’t, right? And then, into the boos that were already starting: They’re already against me because they think I’m faking everything, so it’s all right.
They booed him off the court.
That is inat with nothing on it: raw, correct, and expensive. He was right. Roddick had been condescending. Djokovic answered him on the court, which is the only place the answer counts, and then spent the win buying an argument with twenty thousand people.
The price of running on this stuff at twenty-one, before you have learned to aim it, is a room full of people who now dislike you.
Three years later, same tournament, same building, same disposition in the stands. Semifinal, Djokovic against Roger Federer, and the crowd wanted Federer the way crowds always want Federer.
Djokovic lost the first two sets. He won the next two. In the fifth, Federer served at 5-3, 40-15 — two match points, one swing from the end of it.
Federer hit a slice serve wide to the forehand. Djokovic, who had no business doing anything with it except getting it back, hit a cross-court return winner.
Go watch the clip. What people remember is the shot. What I keep going back to is the two seconds after it, when he turns and opens his arms to a stadium that has spent two hours pulling against him.
He saved the second match point. He did not lose another game, and took the set 7-5.
Same engine as 2008. Three years of learning where to point it.
The difference between the two nights is not the feeling. It is the two seconds after the feeling, and where the ball goes.
I had it filed as a story about a young hothead who grew up. That’s the shape the material wants. Volatile kid, arguments with crowds, then two decades of visible work on the mental game until the temper is metabolized into something useful.
Except that in the 2023 Wimbledon final, in the fifth set, thirty-six years old, holding more majors than any man who has ever played, Novak Djokovic failed to break Carlos Alcaraz, lost his own serve, and swung his racket into the net post hard enough that they fined him eight thousand dollars.
There is no redemption arc. The afterburner was still lighting at the summit, against the young man who had arrived to take his place.
And notice who is missing from that scene. In 2008 there was a man with a name who had said a specific thing on a specific night. In 2011 there was a crowd, which is not a person and cannot really be answered, though he answered it anyway. By 2023 there was nobody at all. Alcaraz had not mocked him. Alcaraz was simply better on the day, and being succeeded is not condescension.
The seat had been getting refilled for fifteen years, and by the end it did not need an occupant.
Which is where I had the machinery wrong.
There is only one tank. Inat is not a dirtier fuel that some unlucky people find themselves running on. It is the same drive, put through a different burner.
The main engine burns it as craft. Steady, efficient, all day, for twenty years, and it is what gets you out of bed in February: the game itself, the work, the people you go home to. That is what keeps a man at the top of a professional sport, and it is what the camera found in Paris.
Inat is the afterburner: bolted to the same engine, fed from the same tank, capable of enormous thrust for a short time at a fuel cost nothing else in the aircraft can justify.
You do not cruise on an afterburner. You light it to get off the ground, or when something is on your tail.
What it costs
In January 2022, Djokovic flew to Melbourne to defend his Australian Open title. He was carrying a medical exemption from the country’s vaccination requirement, granted on the basis of a PCR-confirmed infection in December, approved by a panel of medical experts at Tennis Australia, reviewed by the Victorian government, and recorded as consistent with the published guidance of Australia’s own immunisation advisory body, which allowed deferral for six months after exactly that.
His visa was cancelled at the airport anyway. He won it back in court. It was cancelled a second time, personally, by the immigration minister, on public-interest grounds. The Full Court dismissed his appeal on the sixteenth and he was deported the day before the tournament began.
Over that year, holding his position cost him the Australian Open, the US Open, and a run of Masters events.
I am not relitigating the policy. The definition holds. Inat wants a specific audience that looked at you a specific way, and in January 2022 he had one that was not a stadium crowd: people with his paperwork in front of them and the power to decide whether he could work, who turned him around anyway. And then most of the planet, which is how I came to know about it in a year when I could not have named four tennis players.
In 2008 the price of not backing down was a stadium booing. In 2022 it was two Grand Slams out of a career that is measured in Grand Slams.
He went back to Melbourne in 2023 and won it.
Where it came from
In March of 1999, NATO began bombing Belgrade to force Milošević out of Kosovo. Novak Djokovic was eleven. His family spent seventy-eight consecutive nights in a basement shelter. The sirens went at half past eight. His father, Srdjan, has described those years as being on the edge of existence: a family spending money it did not have on a child’s tennis, in a city that was being hit.
And inat is not a neutral dictionary entry. Serbia has used the word about itself, including under that bombing, which means the thing was handed to him by a country before it was ever handed to him by a basement.
He did not select any of this off a menu.
Alfred Adler broke with Freud over exactly this question, arguing that we are pulled by our purposes rather than pushed by our histories. Here he is, as rendered by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, whose book is a dialogue about him rather than a book by him:
“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”
Which sharpens the claim rather than dissolving it. The basement handed him material almost nobody is handed. What he made of it he has been deciding every day since — twenty years of breathing and diet and meditation and every hour a professional athlete can buy.
That is not a disposition. That is a maintenance budget, and it is the reason the thing has not killed him.
The other way
The proof that you can get there without any of this was standing on the other side of the net in 2011.
Roger Federer spent two decades at the top of the same sport, finished with a career that needs no explaining, and did it in rooms that were already his. He never had to be booed into anything. That night in New York, twenty thousand people wanted him to win — which was Djokovic’s entire problem. The man across the net had gotten all the way there without ever once needing a building to be against him.
I know what the record shows and I know who the crowd was for.
So if you don’t have this, nothing is wrong with you. Most of the people at the top don’t.
The test
Earlier this year, I spent a birthday on a karting track, with real karts, quick enough to teach you something. The driver ahead of me, with two centimetres between his bumper and mine, missed his line, hit dirt, and took us both out of a pass I was seconds from making. Debris went across my visor. And I watched my own mind produce, instantly and with total conviction, the story where the problem was him. Others’ advantage. Others’ mistakes. Others, in my way, changing my outcome. The narrative came fast. It felt righteous. It felt true.
I spent a whole essay running that back frame by frame: where the fire lit, and where it went. It went into the grievance first. I took the next few corners with a narrator in the seat, building a case against a man who never knew he had been cast. Then, down a straight, I breathed it back onto the racing line, and I took the last driver at the finish. Same energy either way. The corners I spent litigating are the ones I do not get back.
And the test is not whether you need them: Roddick, the crowd, the minister.
You don’t. That is the part I had backwards for a while. Nobody put inat in Novak Djokovic and nobody can take it out — not Roddick with an apology, not a stadium changing its mind, not an immigration minister reversing himself on a Sunday. It was in him at twenty-one and it was in him at thirty-six with more majors than anyone who has ever played. The crowd was never the fuel. The crowd was the match.
Which means the only question that has ever mattered is what happens in the two seconds after it lights.
So: think of the last time it lit. Not the last time you were annoyed. The last time somebody looked at you a specific way and said something specific about you. You will have one, and you will find it fast. The tell is the speed of recall.
Now — what did you do with the next two seconds?
If it went into the work, into the shot or the page or whatever was actually in front of you, that is an afterburner used the way afterburners are for. Enormous thrust, briefly, in the direction you were already going.
If it went into the reply, the argument, the case you kept building on the drive home, then you spent it on the crowd. That is 2008. Nobody’s character is on trial here. It is simply expensive, and the bill gets paid in the only currency that ever counted, which is whatever you actually made.
Djokovic has spent two decades getting better at those two seconds, and he still misses some. Thirty-six years old in a Wimbledon final, swinging at a net post. What he has that most of us don’t is the budget: two decades and every resource a professional athlete can buy, spent on the upkeep of a thing that was going to fire whether he liked it or not.
Know that before you build another decade on it. The question was never whether you could put the thing down, because you can’t and neither can he. The question is whether you are paying for it as you go or quietly deferring, and this is one of those bills that arrives on a schedule you do not set.
It is checkable, and it takes two seconds.
Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter is on Prime Video from August 20. It opens on inat, which is how I ended up here.
Sources and Inspiration
The Courage to Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga