Djokovic Finally Won the Crowd, but Daniil Medvedev Won the U.S. Open

Medvedev’s victory felt like tennis thrusting itself toward a future of fresh champions. It’s time.
Daniil Medvedev hits a backhand shot at the U.S. Open tennis championship.
In the men’s final of the 2021 U.S. Open, Daniil Medvedev imperturbably undid Novak Djokovic, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4.Photograph by Al Bello / Getty Images

Daniil Medvedev is a player worth watching in isolation. Forget his opponent for a game or two, forget the score, and just watch him. Watch how he serves—how nonchalantly he seems to toss the ball to the sky, how little he bends his knees or back before swatting the ball. Watch how he waits to return a serve, way back near where the ball kids stand, loosely dangling his racquet: a portrait, you might think, in unreadiness. He embodies tennis unorthodoxy. His strides are too long. His hands, on his backhand, are too close to his body. He doesn’t look like a tennis player—and I’m not referring to the Errol Flynn pencil moustache he tried out earlier this year. It’s his form, his lanky, slackened presence, even the look of squinting puzzlement that he tends to wear for much of a match.

But Daniil Medvedev is a tennis player, a remarkable one—the world No. 2 on the men’s side—and, on Sunday afternoon, I got time to focus on him, just him, because his opponent was not quite there, not in an imposing way. In the men’s-championship final of the U.S. Open, Medvedev imperturbably undid Novak Djokovic, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4. Medvedev’s victory ended Djokovic’s quest to win all four major tournaments in a calendar year—the Grand Slam, last achieved in the men’s game by Rod Laver, in 1969. And it marked the first time that one of the Big Three—Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal—had lost a major final to a player not of his generation. (Medvedev is twenty-five, nearly a decade younger than Djokovic.) The match brought to a close the most exhilarating U.S. Open that this fan has ever attended. The denouement was not the expected one; Brad Pitt and Bradley Cooper and most of the rest of the big crowd inside Arthur Ashe Stadium were there to see Djokovic make history. But it was an apt conclusion, given the previous two weeks in Flushing, which were largely absent of elder greats (no Serena Williams, no Federer, no Nadal) and were instead full of out-of-nowhere upsets accomplished by players many fans had never heard of. Medvedev is not a newcomer, like the eighteen-year-old Emma Raducanu, who won the women’s final a day earlier. But his victory, like hers, suggested that tennis is finally thrusting itself toward a future of emerging stars and fresh champions. It’s time.

Medvedev broke Djokovic’s serve in the very first game. Then, in the next, he consolidated the break with two aces, one on a hundred-and-sixteen-mile-per-hour second serve. He held at love the next time he served (another ace, two service winners), establishing one of the chief factors of his triumph: that ungainly serve of his was hitting corner after corner with a variety of speed and spins that kept Djokovic, the greatest returner in the game, guessing, leaning, shanking . . . flummoxed. The serves that Medvedev struck did not come back to him often or, when they did, forcefully. He was putting lots of his first serves in and somehow winning most of his second-serve points, too. He would not have his serve broken until late in the third set, by which time the match was all but his. By then, some of the fans who’d come to see Djokovic clinch a Grand Slam had managed to loudly harass Medvedev into double faults.

When Djokovic did manage to get serves back, Medvedev was happy to rally. He was happy to rally when Djokovic was serving, too. Medvedev had dropped only one set the entire tournament, in the quarterfinals, to a Dutch qualifier named Botic van de Zandschulp. And so he’d spent less time on court than Djokovic to get to the final—he’d run less, battled less. Djokovic took five long sets on Friday night to vanquish Alexander Zverev. He is used to hanging around in long rallies and winning them—or using them to wear down his opponents, even when he loses the point. That wasn’t to be in the final; he couldn’t summon the court coverage. In the opening set, a sixteen-shot rally ended when Djokovic sailed a forehand long. In the fourth game of the second set, Medvedev won a twenty-seven-shot rally. Even during shorter points, Djokovic looked off balance or a step short. “My legs were not there,” he said, in his brief press conference following the match.

He tried, for a stretch, to drastically shorten points by coming to the net, even serving and volleying. But his first serve was not good enough often enough to yield enough weak returns that he could punch for volley winners. Nor, when he rushed the net, did he get close enough to angle drop volleys off the court. And what does it tell you when the master of the contemporary baseline game is trying to make like Pat Rafter?

Djokovic’s most compelling moment on the court came during a changeover, as he took his chair after holding serve to bring the third set to 5–4. The crowd grew loud, near frenzied; was there still a chance he could pull it out? People were on their feet. They chanted his nickname: Nole! Nole! Nole! He buried his face in a towel and wept. Much has been written about Djokovic’s urge to be understood, embraced, loved. Here it was, and it was cathartic. New York’s tennis fans, who had always rooted harder for his opponents, going back a decade or more; who had never given him the due he came to earn in Rome or Melbourne; who have always included hecklers, like the guy who shouted to distract him, midpoint, as he attempted an overhead shot during his second-round match against Tallon Griekspoor, ranked No. 121 in the world—they were, at last, roaring for him.

Djokovic was fighting back tears during the trophy-presentation ceremony that followed the match. Medvedev stood next to him and called him the greatest player in history, and the crowd roared more, and Djokovic tried not to weep more. Later, during his press conference, he spoke of his disappointment. He’d wanted badly to secure the Grand Slam, and to win his twenty-first major, which would have moved him into the career lead, one major ahead of Federer and Nadal, statistically bolstering the case that he’s the greatest ever. But he spoke more readily and earnestly about what the crowd support had meant to him. It was something that he’d never felt in New York. The emotion and energy, he said, “was as strong as winning twenty-four Slams. It touched my heart.” It was as new and unlikely as the young players’ upsets at the Open, this warmth for Novak Djokovic—and why shouldn’t it be time for that, too?