He is not reckless, Novak Djokovic, but he knows how to set up a kill. More than any other player in tennis, he knows how to push you, how to goad you, how to make you your own worst enemy. You have limits — of pace, power, tenacity, endurance — and he knows not just how to find them but how to drive you past them, with minimal risk to himself. He hits safe shots a little deeper than you’d like. He drags you wider, makes you run harder to chase down the ball. His drop shots flop over the net with slightly more wicked backspin. His ground strokes fly at you with a little more force. To stay with him, you always have to do a little more than you are capable of doing comfortably — not necessarily a great deal more, because again, his mind-set is basically cautious, he’s not trying to go for too much, but a bit more, all the time — and doing more than you are capable of doing comfortably eventually makes you doubt your own capabilities. You start pressing. You aim for the outsides of lines instead of the insides, or you put a little extra juice on your serve, or you try to kill the point with a ludicrous cross-court winner instead of putting the ball back in play. You make mistakes, even when he isn’t forcing you to make them. He gets in your head, and even while he destroys you from the outside, he helps you beat yourself from within.
