The Big Four of men’s tennis are not leaving quickly or quietly. Amazon Prime released a documentary about the Twelve Final Days of Roger Federer’s career in June. A new book about Novak Djokovic was published in early July. Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray and Djokovic all showed up in Paris to play in the Olympic Games a few weeks later.
Paris was definitely the end for the Scot, who played his “home” championships at Wimbledon for the last time in June. “I would love to keep playing but I can’t,” he told the centre court crowd there. “We’ve worked extremely hard just to be on the court competing, probably not at the level any of us wanted, but we tried.”
Nadal is not so sure. He entered the Olympics ranked 161 in the world after playing little tennis in the last year and losing in the first round of the French Open in May for the first time in his career. An Olympics in Paris offered a chance to return to the clay court at Roland Garros where he has made fourteen French Open finals, winning them all without ever being taken beyond four sets.
Djokovic is in better shape. He was seeded first at the Olympics after the world’s new Number 1–ranked player, Italy’s Jannik Sinner, withdrew with tonsillitis. The Serb had a brilliant 2023, winning three of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the annual Australian, French and US Opens plus the Wimbledon Championships. He was beaten by Sinner in the semi-finals of the Australian Open in January and then withdrew during the French Open with a knee injury that required an operation, bouncing back quickly to make the Wimbledon final a few weeks later.
At the Olympics, Murray played doubles for Great Britain with Dan Evans. They saved match points to squeeze through their first round match but were knocked out in the quarter-finals. Nadal won his first singles match then found himself drawn to play Djokovic in the second round, where he lost the sixtieth meeting between the two in straight sets. Playing doubles as well, a dream combination of Nadal and Spain’s new star Carlos Alcaraz made it to the quarter-finals where they too were soundly defeated by an American pair.
Djokovic marched on. He and Alcaraz, sixteen years younger, met in the men’s singles final on Sunday. The match lasted nearly three hours: two tie-breaker sets, not a single break of serve, fourteen of fourteen break points saved. Neither player had lost a set on their way to the final. The Serb didn’t lose one there either. On Monday morning the tennis world woke to a familiar idea with an unfamiliar twist. Novak Djokovic had won something he had never won before, an Olympic gold medal.
Born in 1981, Roger Federer is the oldest of the Big Four. Like a first-born child, he got to dominate the stage for a while but had to learn to share it, first with Nadal, who is five years younger, and then with Djokovic and Murray, born a week apart in May 1987. “I got to the top sort of alone,” he says in Federer: Twelve Final Days. His first major came within a year of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi winning their last, and just before Andy Roddick claimed his only one. Then there was Rafa and Roger, and then Novak. “Novak, I guess he was the party crasher,” says Federer. “Probably a lot of people said ‘We don’t need a third guy, we’re happy with Roger and Rafa.’” But now there were three, and then four or even five if Murray’s and Stan Wawrinka’s considerable successes are given their dues.
Federer led this group onto the stage and now he has brought some artistry to the job of leading them off it. Directed by Joe Sabia and Academy Award winner Asif Kapadia, known for his feature-length documentaries about Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, singer Amy Winehouse and footballer Diego Maradona, Twelve Final Days screened at the Sydney Film Festival in June. “It was never intended for the public,” Federer told Variety magazine. “However, we captured so many powerful moments, and it transformed into a deeply personal journey.”
The film opens with a montage of three Federer shots, chasing down balls and returning them for clean winners past stunned rivals at the net, each amazing but oddly generic, highlight-reel freak shots that most top players have pulled off. Then the film finds its groove, slo-mo’s of Federer in whites playing Nadal at Wimbledon, eyes-on-the-forehand, eyes-on-the-single-handed-backhand, dancing on the baseline to make room for the inside-out forehand.
In? Out? We don’t see. This is what the Twelve Final Days brought to an end, what John McEnroe calls “the most beautiful player I’ve ever seen play tennis” and Bjorn Borg “an artist on the tennis court — he could do anything with a tennis racquet.” Federer’s wife Mirka, who has been courtside for almost every match, says it so simply: “I will miss seeing him play tennis.”
Then the film gets to business. Federer is preparing to read the letter to “my tennis family and beyond” that will announce his retirement. He has “worked hard to return to full competitive form,” but after more than 1500 matches over twenty-four years, he knows his body’s limits. “Its message to me lately has been clear.” There will be just one more tournament, the Laver Cup in London, a team competition started a few years ago by Federer’s management company and others. It turns out there will be just one more match, playing doubles with Nadal for a Team Europe that also includes Djokovic and Murray. Federer will get a match point on his own serve, but there will be no victory.
Off the court for nearly two years now, Federer has been working out what to do with his life. In June, he gave the commencement address to graduates at the Ivy League Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where his business partner’s daughter was part of the Class of 2024. It was, he said, just the second time he had ever been to a college campus, having left home at fourteen and school at sixteen to play tennis full time.
“Retired, the word is awful. Like you, I finished one big thing and I’m moving on to the next. Like you, I’m figuring out what that is. Graduates, I feel your pain. I know what it’s like when people keep asking you what your plan is for the rest of your life.”
He had three tips for the Class of 2024, “tennis lessons” he called them. First, “Effortless is a myth.” Early in his career, when he had talent and a Wimbledon Junior title but no big trophies, many in the tennis world started whispering that the young Swiss did not have what it took to be a champion. He was especially stung by a comment from a rival: “Roger will be the favourite for the first two hours then I’ll be the favourite after that.” Federer found he needed other talents. “Talent has a broad definition… In tennis like in life, discipline is also a talent, and so is patience. Trusting yourself is a talent… Managing your life, managing yourself. These can be talents too.”
Second, “It’s only a point.” Federer won nearly 80 per cent of his more than 1500 matches but just 54 per cent of the points. It’s a quirk of tennis’s scoring system and the dominance of the serve but there’s a wider message. “When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.” Even the miracle winner that “ends up on ESPN’s Top Ten playlist” is only a point. “The best in the world… know they will lose… again and again… and have learned how to deal with it.”
Third, “Life is bigger than the court.” A tennis court occupies 2106 square feet. The game played within this small space showed Federer the world, “but tennis could never be the world.” Now, having graduated in tennis, “I’m here to tell you… that leaving a familiar world behind and finding new ones is incredibly, deeply, wonderfully exciting.”
This “era” of the Big Four is actually several eras. In the first, from Wimbledon in 2003 when Federer won his first major tournament, until the US Open in 2007, the Swiss won an astounding twelve of the eighteen Grand Slam events. The next three years were dominated by the rivalry between Federer and Nadal, who won ten of the twelve majors between them. Djokovic blew away that dominance in 2011, winning the Australian and US Opens and Wimbledon, beating Federer and Nadal ten times in the four Slams and losing just once. This began the third phase of the Big Four era, the Djokovic years, which have been going more or less ever since.
They were interrupted first by Murray’s burst in 2012–13, when he won London Olympic gold on the Wimbledon courts and the US Open and the next year’s Wimbledon (a victory he repeated in 2016). Then Federer’s compatriot Stan Wawrinka won a major in each of the years 2014–16. Finally, the rivalry between Federer and Nadal re-bloomed: they took out six of the eight majors between Wimbledon 2016 and the 2018 French Open after Djokovic had won all four in a row, the “Novak Slam,” in 2015–16.
Mark Hodgkinson’s Searching for Novak sits atop the numerical reality that has reframed the concept of a Big Four. If tennis greatness is measured by major championship victories, Djokovic, with twenty-four to Nadal’s twenty-two and Federer’s twenty is the GOAT, the Greatest (male player) Of All Time.
Even if we count the “Pro Majors,” as we should — the top tournaments played by the best professional players in the world in the decades until 1968, when only amateurs could enter the four Grand Slams — Djokovic is ahead of Ken Rosewall’s total of twenty-three, which includes fifteen pro and eight amateur titles.
Introduce other measures and the comparisons get more complicated. Djokovic has spent many more weeks as the world’s top-ranked player but Federer spent more consecutive weeks. Nadal is the only player to have achieved that status in three separate decades, the 2000s, the 2010s and the first few weeks of the 2020s.
Hodgkinson, though, is less interested in reciting Djokovic’s numbers than in his mind. “The most fascinating thing about him isn’t how he moves or strikes the ball, but how he thinks. He has the most original mind in tennis, perhaps across all sports.” The author does not quote Djokovic directly, just things he is reported to have said to others, but he has had a lot of access to his coaches, fitness advisers, dieticians, mentors and others who are cited extensively.
Novak is the oldest of three boys, the “golden child” whose prowess at tennis drew the family’s financial and emotional resources towards him. He experienced “indelible trauma” as a small boy in Belgrade during NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, emerging from an underground bunker each day to look for somewhere to hit tennis balls.
He showed up at the local courts with average technique but energy “like he’s from outer space, like an alien,” according to a coach who was stunned to see someone so young warming up and cooling down like a professional. The coach encouraged Djokovic to listen to music because he thought it would accustom a player to his opponent’s service rhythms, “his hands, the way he tossed the ball…, how he moved his body and the racquet towards the ball, how he hit the ball and everything about the racquet … that rhythm of reading and reacting.” And “the most important part”: understanding music would make young Novak “a happier person.”
Djokovic was a kid who grew up gorging at his parents’ pizzeria but gave up gluten when a dietician convinced him it would change his body, his mind and his results. The advice was correct and Djokovic learned to pay attention to every detail of his life, relentlessly asking the question: “How will this help my tennis?” He’s an Orthodox Christian, affirmed when he raises his eyes from the court to the heavens after each victory, but he pays a lot of attention to “New Age spirituality… the paranormal and… edgy science; anything legal he believes will supercharge his life on and off the court.” With chapter titles like “Lone wolf” and “Dark energy,” the search for Djokovic’s mind takes the reader to some exotic zones.
There’s a special place for Australia, the venue for Djokovic’s most successful Slam. He’s won the title at Rod Laver Arena ten times, never losing a semi-final or final until this year, and apparently has a special tree he visits in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens. This unique image changed dramatically when Djokovic arrived for the tournament in January 2022, unvaccinated against Covid, and had his visa revoked. He spent several days in the “Outbreak Hotel” in Melbourne trying to get the decision reversed.
Hodgkinson plays the politics of this massive international incident carefully but does not underplay its significance. It is “Peak Djokovic,” the “moment that illustrated, more than any other, his true Novak-ness, when he was doing, saying and thinking things that were surely beyond all other tennis players… at the centre of a rolling, all-consuming, global controversy.”
There is one story about Djokovic’s mind: the medico who had weaned him off gluten got in touch to convince him to reimagine this as “an occasion for spiritual growth.” He encouraged the isolated tennis player to “observe these guys” who had been in immigration detention in the same hotel for years. “You’ve never previously had exposure to people who [have] suffered at that level so take the opportunity to learn from them and from this experience.”
There is also a story about relative privilege. Djokovic eventually got gluten-free food from the Serbian embassy and a leave pass to meet with lawyers. Hodgkinson talked to human rights lawyer Alison Battisson, who had clients in the same hotel, and to a detainee, locked up from 2013 when he arrived by boat on Christmas Island and was not released until 2022. Battisson speculated about the mental health impact of the “loss of control” felt by a tennis player used to being able to control almost everything.
The incident drew attention to the plight of people detained for years, not days. For Djokovic, it ended relatively quickly though unsatisfactorily. He had to depart from Australia and was unable to defend his Australian Open title.
Hodgkinson leaves it with the conclusion of the dietician: Serbia “is a small nation and we’re looking for some big guys to be the leaders and to give us something to be proud of. We see this injustice and as a nation we got upset that he was trapped like this. We got emotional… Those politicians, they’re nowhere now. But Novak, he’s still on top.”
The two members of the Big Four who have already left the tour got no fairy tales with their final bows. Federer lost his last set at Wimbledon 6–0. After losing his doubles match at the Olympics, Murray joke-posted to X: “Never even liked tennis anyway.” Nadal is unlikely to play the US Open but has committed to the Laver Cup in Berlin in September where he might replicate Federer’s documented exit.
In the thirteen years from 2011–23, the last of the Big Four standing tall, the Serb Novak Djokovic, won twenty-three of the forty-eight men’s singles crowns at the major tournaments he played. He missed the 2017 US Open with injury; Wimbledon was not played in the Covid year 2020; his vaccination status prevented him playing the 2022 Australian and US Opens. Since turning thirty in 2017, he has won as many major tournaments as he won in his twenties, twelve in each decade. It is a long, extraordinary period of dominance by a single player.
Federer’s and Murray’s bodies gave out before their tennis tournament desires. Nadal has been playing with that fate for years. Could Djokovic be the one who lets his mind choose for his body? The limbs are still willing but not silent. Olympic gold in the best-of-three-sets final of a six-round tournament in Paris might mask the looming reality: of the last eight (best-of-five-sets, seven-round) majors played up to Wimbledon 2024, Djokovic has won three, all in 2023, and Alcaraz four. The eras of the Big Four or Three might already be over.
It’s a special time for tennis fans. But it is also just tennis, people hitting balls into and occasionally out of a small space. Even for tennis, it is, to some extent, ordinary. As the Spaniard Rafael Nadal explained to English-speaking media at Federer’s Laver Cup farewell, it’s “the normal cycle of life. Some people leave. Some people needs to come.” •
Federer: Twelve Final Days
Directed by Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia | Amazon MGM Studios | 100 minutes
Searching for Novak: The Man Behind the Enigma
By Mark Hodgkinson | Cassell | $34.99 | 291 pages
