The Unbearable Greatness of Novak Djokovic

In a vacuum, Novak Djokovic might be viewed as the perfect tennis player.

• He is the Usain Bolt of tennis players. From 2013 to 2016, players at the Australian Open were tracked to determine their speed over a distance of three meters or more. Djokovic topped the list of athletes with a maximum speed of 22.38 mph. That’s not a typo. I didn’t mean to write 22.38 kilometers per hour. For context, that would have made him the second faster receiver in the NFL that year. If he could have maintained his maximum speed over 100 meters, Djokovic could have set the world record and won the Gold Medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
• He is the most flexible male player in tennis, able to maintain body control while almost doing the splits.
• He has the best service return in the world and is in the top 3 of all time (I put Connors and Agassi ahead of him because they had to play on much faster courts using faster tennis balls.)
• He is the best in the world at changing direction — that is, taking a ball coming cross-court, stepping into the court to hit it before an opponent can recover, and…