Spectator Sport

First Serb

Like this journal’s esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal levels of thrills, shocks, gut-wrenching excitement and great grace in victory and defeat. For most people in Britain, tennis tends to be something they think about over a couple of weeks in mid-summer. Damn shame, that. I was watching Roger Federer’s synapse-stunning third round victory over Serbia’s Janko Tipsarevic a few days back — Federer won 10-8 in the fifth against Janko, who with his specs and beard looks like a geography lecturer at Warwick, but whose favourite reading is in fact Dostoevsky — when the commentators went over to veteran tennis sage Bud Collins. ‘Well, Roger may be the greatest player on earth,’ said Bud, ‘But he’s up against someone who wants to share that earth with him. And that’s what makes sport so great …’ I’ll drink to that.

Federer was finally toppled by another Serb, the eventual winner Novak Djokovic, while yet another Serb, photographers’ favourite Ana Ivanovic, was only beaten in the final by former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova. The arrival of these brilliant Serbs, all at the same time and in the men’s and women’s game, is one of the most exciting events in any sport for years. They are all charming, handsome and eye-wateringly talented. And they’ve all come out of a country which had the crap bombed out of it in 1999, and seem remarkably untroubled by it. Ivanovic practised hitting balls in an empty swimming pool because there weren’t any courts handy, and Djokovic’s mother says playing tennis saved them in the bombing.