It’s easy to write about disliking something. It’s much, much harder to do so generously, with the skill to make even casual readers care about the nuances of a tennis point—yet that’s exactly what Scott Stossel does in this long, reasoned, highly enjoyable screed about Serbian tennis great Novak Djokovic. All haterade should taste this good.
But rooting interests in sports can be irrational and ill-founded, the arbitrariness of their application bearing no relation to their intensity. Maybe my inability to like Djokovic reflects badly on me. That I prefer Roger Federer, all effortless elegance and Swiss-watch precision, perhaps suggests an aesthetic (even an aristocratic) prejudice against the grittier, sweatier, try-hard style that Djokovic brings to the game. But no one is sweatier or grittier than Rafael Nadal, a Tasmanian devil in a cloud of red clay, and I adore him not only for his brute baseline grinding and the nuclear intensity of his game but for his manifest sweetness of soul: He is proof that an adamantine will to win can coexist with sportsmanship and humility.
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