Call of the Wild (Tennis Triumph)

Confused for a minute over the pic of young Novak holding the latest of his Australian Open trophies down in Melbourne. An over-sized cup in this case that the winner usually fills with champagne and then takes draughts for the cameras, &etc. Here the Serbian star had brought the cup over to the stands where his team it must have been reached down from their seats above to share the triumph, with the tricolour flag spread. In the usual way, the chaps were roaring their delight as they placed their hands on the rim of the silver cup below, a bearded man with two others, older than their young charge. One of the men stretching down had one hand on the cup and the other signing something with fingers. Not the thumbs-up here but three fingers stretched. Oh yes. How did that go again, the three fingered sign? The three Ss was it, or Cs in our Cyrillic script? Samo Sloga... No, that old emblem was four: Sama Sloga Srbina Spasava, Only Unity Safeguards the Serb. (Disunity destroys.) Initially the thought was for the team collective. It was a team effort always in high performance sport; neither Novak nor any other outstanding sportsman could do it all alone. Like the others, Nole was always generous in these acknowledgements. Well then, not in this case. Three fingers were for out Orthodox crossing in prayers and in church. The Catholics did it with a lopata—all five fingers that looked like a shovel. Children used to be taught from earliest days, even secretly during the communist era. We were all back to the future now, however, narrow ethno-nationalism, which in the West began to get underway with Milosevic in the last of the 1980s; specifically the 600th anniversary of the battle at Kosovo Field. None shall harm you, Slobo on a famous tour had promised the locals Serbs in the Southern autonomous region, where they were greatly outnumbered by the Muslim Shiptars. Months later the great anniversary was held on that field that had been drenched so profusely with Serb blood, Milosevic officiating again with leaders of the church and the cat fully out of the bag. Above the great, seething crowd at the commemoration in 1989 at Kosovo the chief of the Psychiatric Unit at the Sarajevo Hospital had watched on. Years later the man was encountered in the former house of the Nobel Winner, Ivo Andric, in Herceg Novi. Before he turned his hand to politics, Karadjic had been on the same staff in Sarajevo. With Putin in power in Moscow rather than Yeltsin (to say nothing of the incumbent in Washington), fair chance Slobo could have achieved his plan of driving the Muslim population of Kosovo over the border into Albania. The position in that corner of the Balkans festered still. Young Novak often put down his determination and strength of will to the period of NATO bombing and hardship.