Novak Djokovic won his fourth straight Wimbledon title and his seventh overall.
Alastair Grant/Associated Press
WIMBLEDON, England—Sunday’s men’s singles final lived up to expectations.
There was entertainment. There was incredibly clean and creative tennis, starting with a real flourish of Nick Kyrgios’ style that edged out Novak Djokovic’s substance and experience in the opening set.
There were no outrageous outbursts or a player throwing balls at his opponent. Nobody “throws a match”. In fact, there were small moments where Kyrgios temporarily made Djokovic look like a bland player.
But then Djokovic went into Djokovic mode.
“I played a hell of a first set and put myself in a position to take control of the game, but he’s really quiet,” Kyrgios told reporters after the game. “He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary today, but he was never shaken – that’s his greatest strength. … Hats off to him. It was a hell of a game. I couldn’t play those clutch points well today.
And that’s really what it was all about: the match turned on a few critical plays and points, and went in favor of the older, more experienced and more buttoned-up player in those important moments.
Djokovic won 4–6, 6–3, 6–4, 7–6(3) for his fourth consecutive Wimbledon title and seventh overall, tying him with Pete Sampras and putting him one behind Roger Federer.
“Every time it becomes more and more meaningful and special,” Djokovic said during his on-court interview. “It has always been and will be the most special tournament in my heart. The one that motivated and inspired me to start playing tennis in a small little mountain resort in Serbia.
His stats and place in history also become more meaningful. At 35, he becomes the second oldest player to win Wimbledon (Federer was the oldest), he played his record 32nd major final and is now closing in on Rafael Nadal with 21 Grand Slam titles.
We do too much “power” on the grass courts. The real virtue on the surface is movement. Djokovic is so flexible, is so athletic and anticipates so well, grass does wonders for his game. He can play attack, he can play defense and he can, underestimated, play volleys (he actually had a slight advantage over Kyrgios in net points on Sunday, 60% against 56%). Djokovic could have been onto something with that Impossible mission-like the movement of an airplane. Although it’s too early to proclaim Djokovic the ‘greatest of all time’ on grass – Federer still has eight titles here – we wouldn’t even have had this conversation five years ago. Djokovic is the youngest of the Big Three (Federer is 40, Rafa 36), but whatever the chronological difference, it seems more than that right now.
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One wondered if Kyrgios would be completely paralyzed at the moment, playing his first Grand Slam final in the best series of his career. He even mentioned this possibility, but it was not at all the case on Sunday. He was great in the first set, where he only committed five unforced errors and broke Djokovic’s serve.
“He’s a tennis genius,” Goran Ivanišević, Djokovic’s coach and winner here in 2001, said of Kyrgios. “You can’t prepare for Nick Kygrios, he’s by far the best server in the game. … It’s impossible to create tactics [against him].”
Kyrgios served 30 aces against Djokovic in Sunday’s men’s singles final at Wimbledon.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press
But for the rest of the match, Kyrgios couldn’t maintain his level. There wasn’t a full-fledged Kyrgrios burn, but rather a few odd moments, including getting loud in his box for not supporting him enough when he got up to 40 in the games. It’s not what you usually see in a tennis match, let alone a Wimbledon final, which is why people are compelled to watch. But that didn’t necessarily help his tennis, creating something of a ‘say’ for Djokovic, who won the third frame in one of the cleanest sets in tennis you’ve ever seen played – he won 94% of his first serves and had only two unforced errors.
In the fourth set, Djokovic showed why he is the sport’s closest close. He knew this match would have been much tougher had it gone five sets – an already 60-40 pro-Kyrgios crowd would have grown and he would push back thoughts of how he came to history in the fourth set . As much as we talk about Nadal’s mental strength, Djokovic’s is of a different variety but just as effective.
As Kyrgios described playing against Djokovic on Sunday and against the Big Three in general, he said: “You win the first set and you feel like you have to climb Mount Everest to get there.”
Whether the Aussie can build on that will be a big question going forward. Wimbledon provided tangible proof of what would happen if Kyrgios put everything together on the pitch. Does this real taste for success give him the motivation to surpass himself and support him?
On the pitch, some people realize that Kyrgios can be his worst enemy and it’s not nice to see an athlete wasting his talent. After the match, Djokovic literally turned to the player he fought against for three hours and encouraged him to take his career seriously. Kyrgios, 27, is no longer a kid, but we realized this week that when he takes things seriously, it’s to the sport’s advantage and he brings an undeniable electricity to the court . It polarizes large swathes of people – they either love it or hate it. It’s utterly uncomfortable to talk about it in general (or the silly tennis talk around sneaky serve sportsmanship and the like) due to the ongoing domestic violence allegations Kyrgios is facing and the date to which he is due to appear in court next month. Where it goes from here will partly be dictated by that.
Under completely different and non-comparable circumstances, Djokovic is currently unable to play in another Slam until Roland-Garros 2023. Unless he chooses to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or there are policy changes in New York and Australia, he will not be eligible. He’s shown a brilliant few weeks of tennis, but we don’t know when we’ll see him back on one of these four big stages.
But, for today, at least, he is the former and future king, and the great tennis GOAT debate continues.
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