Novak Djokovic and That Weird Thing Called Empathy

You might want to walk backwards, but you'll still have to look

I came across the word empathy quite late in life. It must have been through some fiction story that I was using as an escape from calculus. At that age, I had this weird habit — the later I found a word, the more complex I deemed the concept. So, in my head, empathy became a deep adult emotion, out of reach for the energy of adolescence or early adulthood. Even its dictionary definition of “sharing someone’s feelings” seemed reductive, like the simplicity of those words was concealing something.

Now that I look back, I did not see too much empathy around me either. There was a lot of feeling bad for those in strife, maybe some tax-free perspective that sunshine allows, but not enough of wanting to share what someone was going through. A relative got a divorce to exit a toxic marriage, only to walk into lectures on why love marriages are problematic. So I looked left, looked right, and moved on with life thinking that’s just how things work. I learnt to sympathise and help, but never really to take off my glasses and wear someone else’s.

Over time, through experiences on both sides of the table, I understood what it means for someone to get you, or at least attempt to. It was therapeutic to see another person, who could just pat my shoulder and walk away, acknowledge my perspective as valid, even as a situation was going south. There is a warmth in empathy that few other human emotions can generate. Even from the other side, the world seems more pleasant. Patience becomes a necessary filter. Lesser arguments, even rarer miscommunications.

Sport is a nice playground to hone these principles. One invests with time and emotions, and periodic disappointment is inevitable. It will take a lot to not fling your coffee mug at the screen when Ravichandran Ashwin throws his wicket away. At other times, it will be disturbing to see grown men behaving like petulant kids who just had their candies stolen. Empathy is easier when a known face sits across from you, but can you extend the same space to a silhouette on a screen? A lot of mental rewiring later, the realisation will dawn that athletes who have trained for excellence all their life have the same vulnerabilities as us. Elite talent of hitting a fluffy yellow ball does not necessarily mean that their limbic cortex has also turned to steel.

Not all athletes are deep thinkers, but Novak Djokovic certainly is. He has strong opinions about how to lead life, how to recover from medical conditions, and how positive vibes can change the molecular structure of water. These thoughts have gone through complex neural connections in Novak’s head to coagulate into opinions. They are, hence, valid, even if not always accurate in their projection.

Around this time last year, I was finishing a book by Will Storr called Heretics. Storr gets inside the lives of those who believe in the opposite of conventional wisdom and science. Full disclosure — I picked this book up to find hilarious nuggets about flat-earthers and suchlike. It had a lot of that, sure, but never without context. The actions of someone who believes homoeopathy can cure cancer fall perfectly in line with their behaviour in other situations. By the final pages of the book, you are no longer looking at these people as, like the book says, Heretics, but as people merely with a different route of conditioning and thought process.

I blame Storr for the five grams of empathy I have for Novak Djokovic today. Throughout the pandemic, Novak has made a brazen display of his disregard for public safety and socially responsible behaviour. While most of us were finding ways to deal with human loss, he was organising tournaments, for packed crowds, in Serbia and Croatia. Once that amusement park closed down, he took to social media to air his views about slaloming past the virus, the power of levitation, and how Covid can’t touch you if you listen to Hotline Bling by Drake five times a day. He didn’t say that last bit, but would you be surprised if he did?

I get that he chose to not take the vaccine. That’s okay, and he is entitled to anything he wants to do with his body. Had his reports fulfilled the medical exemption criteria for the Australian Open, we’d be talking about the likelihood of him landing his 21st Grand Slam. But what transpired over a hazy week, between incorrect medical reports and evidence of him meeting people while under the infection, left the organisers and Australian government with little choice. Australia have been remarkably strict about border control, even between states. Last year, some of their cricketers, on their way back from the IPL, had to isolate for weeks before meeting their family. This year, the entire Ashes series, the quadrennial mega event in a cricket-mad country, had to play out in front of sparse crowds.

Djokovic is one of only three players in the top hundred of men’s tennis who are yet to take the vaccine. He turned up at Melbourne hoping to wiggle past the authorities and get to do his thing. I am so glad the Australian government drew a line. The public theatre it became could have probably been avoided, but Novak did nothing to help. Had he found an iota of internal respect for what Australians have been through over the last two years, he would have taken all precautions necessary to ensure he wasn’t endangering others, even if the vaccine was a personal red flag.

Can the silhouette on your screen show empathy for you?

Novak keeps doing Novak things, and we brush it off as eccentric behaviour. Like when, at the US Open in 2020, he mistakenly hit a ball towards a line judge in a moment of rage. Or at the Olympics last year, when he refused to play the bronze-medal match for mixed doubles. This saga, too, might become water off a duck’s back when he wins his next Grand Slam and becomes the most successful men’s tennis player of all time. Given his fitness and recent form, he might win five more. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are soldering on with creaking bodies, so it is quite likely that Novak leaves them behind soon enough. But with every passing tournament, it is becoming clearer that Djokovic’s story will not be afforded the same velvet brush that will be used for his two biggest rivals. The chapter on Djokovic will have to contain sections on organising a superspreader event and attending a photoshoot while infected.

Speaking of velvet-brush legacies, it was Muhammad Ali’s birthday last week, and social media was oozing with tributes. When I honed into those who knew him, saw him, or reported on him, I found their tones interesting. Almost no one spoke about his boxing. He was the supreme athlete, the greatest of a bruising, violent sport, and yet, integrity seemed to be his most radiant attribute. He was far from perfect, talked an abnormal amount of trash, but stood up for the vulnerable when he could have chosen otherwise. Ali’s refusal to get drafted into the US Army for the Vietnam War cost him three years of his career and the world heavyweight title. At a time when toeing the line rewarded you like nothing else, Muhammed Ali sent the bar for empathy to the sky.

Sometimes, it feels like Novak is building a ladder to bring it down and drill it underground.