This year was my first experience in watching a tennis tournament from its start to finish—not every match of course but staying connected to the action throughout. It taught me something obvious perhaps but extremely important.
Every player has skills, vastly more skills (and speed and strength) than any player in your town or club. But it’s not skills that wins the day. It’s discipline and stamina. The ability to physically endure with consistency from beginning to the grueling end is what makes for total mastery.
Perhaps this is obvious to any sports fan. But it is not so obvious to a casual watcher of this or that snippet online. We are given one or two exciting rallies and thrill at the precision of this or that placement or spin. But we watch in abstract isolation from what is happening on the ground. The 40th game on day 13 after 3 hours or hard play is a very different thing from the first set on the first day.
Training is all about the acquisition of the discipline and energy to make it through to the end.
For my part, after an hour of hard play in hot weather, I’m ready to collapse and blend into the hard court. I can barely muster the energy to leave the court, much less swing a racket with gusto and skill. The abilities I had in the first game are a distant memory, not to return until the following day or two as I recover from the exertion. You can say that this is pathetic but I’m guessing it is rather normal.
What all these players in a tournament like this go through is something very different indeed. New York City was exceptionally hot and humid during the U.S. Open. That adds tremendously to the burden of play but the players themselves come trained to endure it to various degrees. Those who can persist in this climate with the hardest matches of their lives are the ones that rise up the ranks to the top.
Again, they all have fast serves, hard returns, excellent spin, smart strategy, and precision placement. It’s the relentlessness of the exertion over days and weeks, with matches that last hours in blaring sun, that sorts the masters from the merely outstanding. This is the stuff of training that is not apparent to spectators.
Once you realize this, the behavior of players on and off court comes into focus. You can see it in the way Novak Djokovic economizes on his movements, breathing, and emotions. The announcers are forever talking about the likely emotional ups and downs of the players but this is just the peanut gallery talking. The players themselves seek maximum emotional and even spiritual steadiness, smoothing out the highs and lows with a disciplined focus on the precise goals.
Emotional outbursts at this level of play only get in the way and waste energies needed to make it to the end. Not only that: players on tour cannot and do not abuse substances such as alcohol and weed. They do not party. They are as disciplined about their sleep as they are in their training. At this level of play, it has to be this way. They know that one misstep can wreck their dreams.
It was awesome to observe how Novak at the end rose up, warmingly congratulated his opponent, and walked calmly to his box, smiled and waved at fans, changed shirts, granted the interview, and then accepted his prize. It looked for all the world like he didn’t have a bead of sweat on him, which is surely not true. Neither was he huffing and puffing or struggling to move, as I would be (actually I would more likely be in a hospital at that point).
It was at this point that it became clear what makes a champion. It is not only skill and power. It is not even the determination to be the victor. It is the mental and physical discipline to practice complete bodily control, managing breathing and movements in ways that expand and spread out the ability to allocate the expenditure of energy. That requires remarkable mental acuity and focus. One misstep or misthought can cost a person the entire tournament.
And by the way, this is true in every field. It’s true in ballet, opera, theater, public speaking, journalism, editing, medicine, law, finance, real estate development, software coding, or serving tables at restaurants. Every line of work, every life skill, requires some measure of the same. Excellence always consists in mastery over mind and body.
Looking back at this, one can see why Novak was unwilling to take the COVID vaccine. There was no sense in which he was vulnerable to a medically significant outcome from the virus. He knew that. We’ve all known that since at least February 2020. Healthy working-age adults were generally not in any danger. We’ve also known that with such viruses, the immune system can adapt and scale to build in protections against future infection.
It didn’t take an immunologist and epidemiologist to know this. They once taught all of this in 9th-grade biology. Certainly Novak knew it.
Think back when all the world’s governments and media howlers were screaming at him: get the vaccine! He heard: “allow some person you do not know to inject a substance containing lipid nanoparticles that encode a spike protein that will attempt to nullify one strain of a constantly mutating virus wherever it appears in your body.”
He knew for sure that he didn’t need it. He and everyone found out rather quickly that the shot would not stop infection or transmission. He also figured that such an injection came with some risks, as do all pharmaceuticals.
Why in the world would he surrender his mind and body over to such crazy demands? From his point of view, it was far too risky for his health. He was right about this. Many great athletes the world over have been injured or died. This is apparently because the technology of these shots weaken the heart, making athletes who exert themselves far more than the average person particularly vulnerable to dangers.
Many other players went along because they were thinking only about the next tournament and the next year. They were forced to take the shot to participate, and accepted the devil’s bargain. This was a short-sighted decision. Novak protected his health and bodily integrity above all else. Even if this decision gained him a 0.2 percent advantage, it might be just enough to get him the number one spot that he lost in his exclusion. This is exactly what happened.
His decision is a lesson and an inspiration not only to other players but to everyone who strives to live a professional life of discipline and excellence. There is no room for compromise with principle. Indeed, sticking with principles is the path to victory. He has learned this from a long career. Others with whom he was in competition have not entirely learned this point. His decision might have made the key difference for him. We’ll never know for sure but it is possible. That aside, he maintained complete control over his body.
If you spend years eschewing bad food, liquor, weed, awful drugs, and train for hours a day for years working to perfect energy and movement, why in the world would you allow some untested micro-balls of lab-created stuff to swirl throughout your body to stave off the effects of a pathogen that was not really ever a fundamental threat? That was a question he must have asked himself. He answered: I will not do this. No power on earth could make him do otherwise.
As a result, his choices should serve as an example to everyone in the world. Your life and your choices are yours alone. Letting someone else, particularly pharmaceutical companies backed by government, take away your decision-making rights cannot lead to a good outcome for you. But standing up for your right to make good choices also comes at a cost. It is one we should be willing to pay in order to achieve victory in the end.
