Most great tennis players are remembered for something they hit. Novak Djokovic is remembered for something he receives. The return of serve, treated by almost everyone else as the awkward start of a point, became in his hands the shot that decided matches.
He learned the game in Serbia during a period of sanctions and bombing, training in whatever facilities were available, including a converted swimming pool. The story is told often enough that it has become shorthand, but the practical consequence is worth noting: he grew up with a coach who emphasised fundamentals and repetition because there was not much else on offer.
The return
A big serve works by removing time. The returner is forced to guess, block the ball back short, and spend the rest of the point defending. Djokovic broke that logic by standing deep, reading the toss, and hitting a full stroke rather than a block - deep, flat and down the middle, so that the server's first shot after the serve is played from behind the baseline instead of inside it.
Against the biggest servers in the game the effect is to cancel the advantage entirely. A player who has built a career on free points suddenly finds himself in neutral rallies from the first ball, and neutral rallies are exactly where Djokovic prefers to be.
The splits
The other signature is physical. He slides on hard courts, a technique borrowed from clay and widely considered a good way to injure yourself on an abrasive surface, and he recovers from positions that look like the end of the point. The full sideways stretch into a backhand, knee almost on the ground, has been photographed so many times it has become the image of his game.
That flexibility is trained rather than lucky. He works on mobility and range of movement as a daily discipline, and he has been open about the dietary changes he made early in his career after persistent breathing problems and mid-match collapses.
The third man
He arrived into a sport already divided between two enormously popular champions and spent years as the outsider in that story, frequently playing in front of crowds openly supporting his opponent. He has talked about how long it took to stop finding that painful and start using it.
The rivalry made all three better. Djokovic had to solve a player who had made clay his own, and another whose game was built to take time away on fast courts, and the solutions he found - the depth of the return, the backhand down the line, the refusal to shorten points - became the template that younger players now study.
Against the biggest servers in the game, his return turns a free point into a rally. That is the whole trick, repeated ten thousand times.
The elastic defence
Watch a long rally and the pattern repeats: he is pushed wide, he gets there, and the ball that comes back is not a desperate lob but a deep crosscourt drive that puts the opponent back under pressure. Defence that resets the point is ordinary. Defence that reverses it is rare, and it is the reason so many opponents describe the experience of playing him as exhausting rather than overpowering.
He holds the men's record for Grand Slam singles titles and has won each of the four majors more than once, which no amount of specialisation can produce. It requires a game with no obvious surface preference and a body that can be adapted to each one.
Sliding into shots on hard courts was considered close to reckless before Djokovic made it routine. Coaches now teach a controlled version of it, because stopping a full sprint without sliding puts a great deal more load on the knee.
Longevity as a project
He treats recovery, sleep and diet as part of the job rather than as support for it, and he has been mocked for some of it over the years. The results are hard to argue with: he has remained competitive at the top of the game into an age bracket that used to be the retirement zone, and he has done it without the long injury absences that usually accompany that kind of career length.
Whether or not the specific methods matter, the underlying idea has become standard. Younger players now arrive on tour with teams that look like the one he assembled, and a professional career is planned in decades rather than years.
The backhand down the line
If the return is the shot that defines him, the two-handed backhand down the line is the one that wins the points. It is struck flat and early, often from a defensive position, and it travels into the smallest target on the court with enough pace that the opponent cannot recover across.
Most players hit that shot occasionally and as a surprise. He hits it as a standard reply, which changes the geometry of every rally: a ball played to his backhand corner is no longer a safe way to keep the point going. Coaches describe it as the reason he can neutralise an attacking player and then take over the same point without ever hitting a winner from a comfortable position.
