Very few tennis fans embraced Novak Djokovic the moment he came into the sport, and even today, many still hold grudges against the Serbian.
What possible grudge could you have towards Djokovic, one of the greatest tennis players of all time? Well, quite a few, according to some. Let's circle back to a time before Djokovic.
Roger Federer was seemingly at his peak, with nobody really there to oppose him. Then came this kid from Spain who was tremendously talented. Not only that, Rafael Nadal quickly proved he was impossibly good, and a rivalry was born—the perfect one.
Tennis was on cloud nine. But here comes the Joker to disrupt that all. While it took Djokovic a while to really disrupt the rivalry, it was clear pretty early that this was no ordinary tennis player.
He was there to stay and burst the bubble of so many tennis fans who simply wanted to watch Federer play Nadal over and over and over again.
Nobody knows it better than Andy Roddick, who had a front-row seat to it all. He spoke about it on his Served with Andy Roddick podcast.
"I feel like Novak Djokovic is the guy who broke up The Beatles. He is like tennis' Yoko [Ono]. He is the one who we didn't want, didn't need. We had the rivalry, we had the lefty-righty. We had the contrasting styles."
As jokingly as Roddick presented it, many definitely didn't want the Serbian when he did show up, and that's also likely why he now became arguably the greatest tennis player of all time because he wanted to prove to everyone that he belongs to the top.
"Then all of a sudden, this cyborg robot, but also someone who plays with a lot of emotion, comes in and is like, 'I'm not buying into the hype. I am complete. You can't go through me, you can't go around me. I'm gonna take the punches from these guys'."
"It was weird. It was almost like the kind of the mainstream not tennis-centric fan was kinda mad at him for it."
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