Bound out of a traumatic youth in sunny form, and the trauma adds nothing to your appeal. If you crawl out scarred and prickly, expect no licence for those foibles
I am inclined to blame the personality-worship of tennis, the favoured sport of people who don't like sport. (No one in football demotes Lionel Messi for his blankness.) But even this won't do.
Djokovic is the most expansive and curious of the big three. He is not just multilingual but absorbed by the learning. He roams well east of his Serbian Orthodoxy for beliefs or at least practices. Whether or not his diet stems from "quantum physics", how telling that he cares.
His critics don't even get his real flaw right. It is not the bionic coldness that Slav athletes have had pinned on them since Rocky IV, so much as its near-opposite. A man who maintains a "gratitude journal" and "connection with my own soul" has too open, not too closed, a mind.
And if his personality were the kind you can cut your fingers on, how could it not be? Without whitewashing life in Basel or Mallorca, 1990s Belgrade was quite the hardship posting.
The riddle of the unloved champion defeats me, almost. I don't quite know what irks people about him. But nor am I surprised that his background counts so little in mitigation.
In 20 years in and around politics, one truth has taken a while to register on me. A "back story" counts for almost nothing. It brings little understanding from the public. It earns zero latitude for personal flaws. Even aside from natural present-bias, voters have lots of reasons to discount the biographical. Those who had a benign start in life want no reminding of their dumb luck. Those who didn't want no reminding of their failure to reach escape velocity.
Childhood hardship did not help John Major against Tony Blair. Its lavish opposite did not bar Donald Trump or Boris Johnson from People's Tribune status. When politicians beat their social betters (Bill Clinton vs George HW Bush), it is only incidentally because of their background. As hard as it is to isolate variables here, I sense that back story, a politico obsession, decides almost no election. The same holds in business. People prefer Stowe School's Richard Branson to even a mild version of the hard-face-and-short-fuse kind of self-made man.
If you bound out of a traumatic youth in sunny form, the trauma adds nothing to your appeal. If you crawl out scarred and prickly, expect no licence for those foibles. This is no less true in the workplace than in the public square. I have seen careers stall over it.
Given what Djokovic comes from, his personal intensity is natural. But he gets no pass for it. He is judged as Federer and Nadal are, despite formative differences that include a birth on the harsh side of the Iron Curtain. How often we prefer the idea of "mobility" to its individual case studies.
Written by: Janan Ganesh
© Financial Times
