GRAND SCRAM

Novak Djokovic may have lost his legal fight with Australia, but there were no winners in the court of public opinion.

The un-dearly departed left Melbourne late Sunday night on an Emirates Airlines Boeing 777.

FlightRadar showed that plane, on a 13-hour long haul to Dubai, was the most tracked flight on its website.

Novak Djokovic was good and gone, escorted to the airport by federal police.

Djokovic’s final destination was unclear as of this writing. His primary residence is Monte Carlo but he owns many properties. He could have been headed for Serbia, to a hero’s welcome. President Aleksandar Vucic had urged the national treasure to come on home.

“They think they humiliated him with this, the best player in the world, by the 10-day harassment. They humiliated themselves,” Vucic said. “And Djokovic can return to his country with head high up and look everyone in the eye.”

Serbs are a proud people. They also have a national identity forged by historical grievances. They’ll gnaw on this bone for ages to come.

Australians don’t have much truck with idiots either, for all that they embrace the eccentric and the unconventional. Most would doubtless have taken schadenfreude pleasure from the tweet posted by Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, following Sunday’s court ruling dismissing Djokovic’s appeal of his cancelled visa. “I can confirm that Djokovic has now departed Australia.”

Few internationally renowned athletes are as polarizing as Djokovic. That was true even before he became a wing nut anti-vaxxer and persona non grata Down Under. His former coach, Boris Becker, once told an interviewer, after a Wimbledon final where the crowd clapped at his mis-hits: “You cannot make people love you.”

Out of a whirlwind weekend, amidst all the crazy, the Australian Open emerged on Monday from under the long shadow cast by Djokovic’s rassle with politicians, sports authorities and judges. The world No. 1 and nine-time winner can’t defend his four-peat title, nor attempt to break a three-way tie — with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer — with a record-setting 21st Grand Slam trophy.

His spot, at the top of the draw, was filled by “lucky loser” Salvatore Caruso. The Italian journeyman, who failed to survive the qualifiers, is ranked 175th in the world.

In Djokovic’s compelled absence, the only former Australian Open champion in this year’s tournament is Nadal, whose lone title in Melbourne came in 2009. This will be the first time in eight years that the last man standing at Rod Laver Arena won’t be Djokovic or Federer, the Swiss Express recovering from knee surgery. The last player to surmount the Big Three wall in Melbourne was Stan Wawrinka, who defeated Nadal in 2014. He’s also on the post-surgery shelf.

Djokovic could have averted this whole shemozzle if he’d just gotten his damn jab. Other vaccine-hesitant tennis luminaries — Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas — accepted the needle as a mandatory requirement to enter Australia for the first major of the year. On the tennis circuit, 97 per cent of players are now vaccinated. But Djokovic believed himself bigger than the Open, bigger than the game, deploying a medical exemption hustle that contained incorrect travel information while failing to self-isolate after he too fell victim to the COVID virus, testing positive for the second time on Dec. 16.

His anti-vaccine and anti-science posture has made the 34-year-old Djokovic both paragon and martyr for the unbelievers.

He is not, however, the only villain of the piece. Tennis Australia has some explaining to do as an accomplice to the flim-flam. The association has been accused of inadvertently triggering the whole fiasco by telling players who had tested positive within six months of the Open that they could be exempt from strict border rules. Leaked documents shows that advice was circulated a week after the federal government had emailed the tournament director, stating that anyone not fully vaccinated wouldn’t be approved for entry.

Following the initial court decision that found in favour of Djokovic — his visa would be scotched three times — Tennis Australia boss Craig Tilley Team claimed the whole process was mired in “contradictory and conflicting information,” adding that Open organizers were “not migration experts.” Perhaps not, but they were in this bizarre saga up to their necks, with rumours swirling — and contained in court documents from Djokovic’s legal team — that cancelling the player’s visa “would threaten the viability of Australia continuing to host the Australian Open.”

Tennis Australia looked for a loophole and thought it had found it. That loophole certainly didn’t exist for some lowly ranked doubles players and the Croatian coach who were barred entry on a medical exemption. Yet they literally put their finger on the scales to tip a Djokovic bias.

Most players in Melbourne were loath to be drawn into the circus of controversy. Nadal was palpably fed up with the squabble in his final pre-Open news conference. “I think the situation have been too far. I’m a little bit tired of the situation because I just believe that it’s more important to talk about the sport, about tennis.” Even tough, “I know tennis is zero important comparing from what we are facing now, this virus, no? If there is a solution and that solution is the vaccine, that’s it.”

A dissenting view came from Canada’s Vasek Pospisil, who has trained with Djokovic at his Belgrade academy and, with the Serb, launched a breakaway players’ association in 2020. Not mincing words, Pospisil tweeted that the whole process was politically orchestrated. “Novak would never have gone to Australia if he had not been given an exemption to enter the country by the government … He would have skipped the Australian Open and been home with his family and no one would be talking about this mess. There was a political agenda at play here with the elections coming up which couldn’t be more obvious. This is not his fault. He did not force his way into the country and did not ‘make his own rules;’ he was ready to stay home.”

Well duh, of course it was political. That didn’t make it wrong or protective of health in a country overwhelmed by the Omicron infection or, baldly stated, a smackdown of Djokovic’s entitlement.

Barring calamity, Djokovic will succeed in his quest of the most Slam titles ever. That might make him the greatest of all time. It won’t make him the grandest of all time.

The measure of a man is not only in the record books. It’s also in his essence as a human being of honour and virtue.