Between the summer of 2014 and last year's French Open, Novak Djokovic went on one of the great runs in modern tennis history, winning six of eight majors. Many observers ceded the era to him. We'd have to wait for Djokovic, 30, to get old and/or bored before men's tennis could surprise us again.
Then, for no easily discernible reason, the Serb's game fell apart. On Wednesday, Djokovic reached the nadir of a year-long downward trend. He was not only beaten by Dominic Thiem in the French Open quarter-final, but crushed.
Djokovic was knocked down in the first set (6-7), backed over a few times in the second (3-6) and then flattened in the third (0-6). It was the first time he'd been blanked in a set at a major in nearly 12 years. More notably, it was the first time you could ever recall seeing Djokovic give up in the midst of a match.
"This is tank city," analyst John McEnroe said, describing the approach.
Afterward, Djokovic was despondent in that very Djokovic kind of way – all the right words were coming out of his mouth, but a few inches north, his eyes told the real story. There isn't much more Djokovic can do. He's already fired his entire coaching team and taken desperate measures in replacing them.
He recently put himself under the tutelage of Pepe Imaz, a former World No. 146 whose academy runs on a philosophy of "peace and love," and his brother, Marko, a failed pro. Andre Agassi joined the braintrust ahead of the French Open, arrived an hour late to one of Djokovic's first matches because it conflicted with a TV appearance, then left the tournament early because he was homesick.
It's hard to say where Djokovic can go from there. A team of very fit legal consultants? A witch doctor? Maybe he has a cousin with some thoughts on swing mechanics?
Djokovic alluded to another idea. When it was proposed to him that he might want to take a break from tennis, Djokovic said, "Trust me. I'm thinking about many things."
This was greeted in many sporting quarters as an admission of failure. Quit the game? Even for a while? That's loser talk.
Immediately upon introducing the notion, Djokovic pulled it back – "… I have responsibilities toward the game itself, and toward others …" – but one does wonder, "Why not?" Not so along ago, in what is now thought of as the pastoral golden age of pro sports, very few athletes thought of themselves as such year-round. Bobby Hull was an off-season farmer. Yogi Berra worked at a hardware store. Phil Rizzuto sold suits. Those were the days when training camp involved actual training.
Before the ownership oligarchy was bent, a second job was an economic necessity, but it was also a salutary break from the game.
There were months at a time where you didn't play hockey/baseball/what-have-you. You didn't follow a game-specific workout routine. You didn't obsess over what you ate.
Most important, you allowed your mind to wander to more prosaic concerns – getting to the job on time, learning how to be at home again, keeping track of garbage day.
At the height of his powers, Larry Bird famously mowed his own lawn. It became a bit of a tourist attraction. You think he did that because he couldn't find a landscaper? No, he did it because he wanted to do at least a little work that didn't involve bouncing a ball.
If a top star did that these days, they'd be treated as an irresponsible lunatic. What if they mowed over their own foot? And, really, shouldn't they be spending their spare time doing burpees with a small army of personal trainers or locked up in a hyperbaric chamber visualizing their next playoff run?
Athletes are both the perpetrators and victims of this Spartan school of thought. They are all falling over themselves to tell you the number of hours they've spent pulling a tractor tire across the football field at their hometown high school. And, hey, they just hired a new psychologist and they're is the greatest. Really breaking down those mental walls to peak performance and helping remove fear.
A 10-minute conversation with someone such as former Blue Jay Roy Halladay left you convinced that he'd thought more about pitching than most Benedictine monks have thought about God.
Anything less than total, year-long commitment to relentless improvement is a failing of character. Pro sport has become a cult, a sort of soft-core Stalinism in spandex.
Djokovic would be a prime example. He started playing tennis when he was 4. He was discovered at 6. He left home to live full-time at a foreign academy at 12. He turned pro at 16.
He's spent 80 per cent of his life doing little else but playing, practising, training for and thinking about tennis. Plainly, it's worked out for him. But now it isn't.
These days, top tennis pros earn far more. Their careers are longer. Their fame is stickier.
Though there is no reason to believe their opportunities would dry up if they left for a bit, or that they would face any sort of financial hardship, most comport themselves as if they were tenuously employed. They have to keep trudging ahead, regardless of how poorly that strategy is working out.
It's a particularly poor approach since players of Djokovic's stature don't do this work for work's sake. They do it to win. Anything less than that is pointless. It's actively chipping away at a very profitable brand. From a purely economic viewpoint, it is better for Djokovic not to play at all than to lose the way he did on Wednesday. One of his many new coaches might remind him of that.
It leaves you wondering who will be the first elite pro in his or her prime to shift the paradigm by saying, "I'm not winning, so I'm going to stop playing until I've figured out how to do that again."
It probably won't be Djokovic. It will be somebody.