INAT and the Hidden Spark of the Big Three

By Matt Vidaković

This is part of a series of texts inspired by Djokovic winning his 23rd Grand Slam title. This one in particular has been a long time coming, and it examines the “secret ingredient” that gives the greatest ATP player of all time his edge (spoiler: it’s not his diet). It’s a long read, but I like to think it’s worth the insight. Hope you enjoy it.

What is Inat?

Inat is a tricky word to translate. As a Serb, for me it carries much more weight than the simple translation offers — spite, defiance — it is those things, but also is not. At least, it is much more.

One of the tricky parts about translating inat is trying to instill the deep historical and culturological significance of the word. You will hear it treated as a virtue often, but just as often it is treated as a failing, a sin. This is because it is extremely potent in both its positive and negative form. 

This article perfectly encapsulates just what inat is (with a lot of context); it’s a great write up that I would urge you to read. But if you’re short on time, a short way to describe inat follows:

Inat is loosely translated as  “stubbornness” or “defiance” in English. Yet often it signifies a sense of spite or resentment towards someone or something – a good example of this is described by a helpful internet commenter on Quora wrote:

“It might be described as defiant stubbornness in behavior or attitude in spite of that attitude being detrimental to the interests of that person.. A person is said to be “inatitise” when pressures from other people to change his/her behavior or attitudes have an opposite effect and reinforce such behavior. But for such reinforcement to be “inat”, that persistence and refusal to change attitude or behavior has to be illogical or even detrimental to the interests of the person.”

Historically, inat is what makes the Serbian people somehow treat a catastrophic defeat vs the Ottoman Empire — and the subsequent five-century long Ottoman rule — as a triumph. It can be theorized that the same inat is what made it possible for the Serbian people to survive this with their culture and language retained (so arguably indeed, a triumph). Inat is what made Serbian people, even families and young children, wear shirts with targets and banners with targets on them as they congregated on bridges and other suspected targets of NATO bombing. “We are here. We see you. We defy you.” That’s inat. 

It’s obvious that inat is both a good thing and a terrible one. At its best, it is the fiery spirit of resistance against what seem like insurmountable odds. At its worst, it’s a delusional pride that leads to an ugly fall, a pointless belligerence.

There is no better embodiment of the potency, and downfalls, of inat then the greatest male tennis player of all time: one Novak Djokovic. 

The Spark

It’s impossible to talk about Novak Djokovic without the wider context of the Big Three. While this is not a Big Three article (though I will write one eventually), an important aspect of their domination is what I will, for the purpose of this text, call “The Spark”. To transcend from “tennis great” to the level of the Big Three, one needs 3 crucial ingredients. Two of them are needed for any true tennis great: an intense love of the sport and desire to win. You have to live and breathe tennis — and enjoy doing so — to be able to be one of the greats. Desire to win is a force that defeats all others, the compulsive drive for victory that trumps logic or points or titles.  The third one is a secret ingredient that elevates someone from a great tennis champion to one of the best ever: The Spark.

Each of the Big Three needed that extra little something. For Federer, that extra something was a kind of confident arrogance. Federer never truly believed he should ever lose. He was so sure of his talent that this allowed him to not only convince himself that each match was on his racquet — but more importantly, he emitted this aura. This is part of what allowed him to win a match even before stepping out on court, and those infamous FedExpress one-minute holds of serve; when you look across the net, you see someone that already knows they’ve won. To his credit, Federer later realized this “God-Given Talent” aura was beginning to harm him, and in the later stages in his career constantly insisted on “how much work” he is putting in – might sound paradoxical that the player with the most talent is constantly accenting his hard work and training, but it makes sense…he didn’t want to be remembered as the “lazy one just touched by the tennis gods.”

In his salty post-match conference after Djokovic hit The Shot, Federer insisted that “this is not the right way to play,” referring to Djokovic (presumably) hitting blindly and relying on luck. (Juan Jose Vallejo has written an excellent breakdown of why The Shot may have been more calculated than anyone realized.) What lay behind this (other than the obvious anger at losing the match) is the secret knowledge that this trope of “I was simply born amazing and able to hit miracle shots” — ever his vibe — was now being used against him. At its best, Federer’s secret spark allowed for an aura of complete dominance…at worst, it would render Federer petty and shell shocked after a loss.

Nadal’s extra “spark” could not be more different – a combination of extreme humbleness combined with a willingness to suffer. The humbleness functions both as etiquette and a pressure valve:  if Nadal is never the favorite, he never has to feel the pressure of being the favorite (or he can at least minimize it). The more important part of his “spark” is his willingness to suffer, the “hunker down” approach where you are prepared to go through physical and emotional stress in an almost masochistic fashion in order to win a tennis match. This creates a competitor with a willpower so daunting, few can match it.  This is why Rafael Nadal was, for years, an insurmountable obstacle for Novak Djokovic (and still is for most on the tour). Rafa is the perennial “What do I have to do to BEAT this guy?!” character.

Nadal even had a special appreciation for those that also liked to “suffer” – after being defeated by Gilles Simon in an attritional match in Madrid (this was when Madrid was still on hard court), Nadal said (paraphrasing) “I like to make the opponent run left and right, control the point… but he like to run, no?” – Nadal was smiling when he said this.

Both of these elements of Nadal’s “Spark”, like with Federer and like we will see with Djokovic, came with a downside: the humble bull would sometimes be so humble that it would start to instill doubt even in himself (if you believe you can be beaten, you open the door ever so slightly). His willingness to suffer has had the most obvious downside out of all of them. Nadal’s physical ailments are well documented (and will lead to his eventual retirement, as things stand).

For the record, I feel Alcaraz’s spark is the ability to keep smiling, an evolution of love for the game. But that is a story for another day…

Which leaves us with Djokovic. Djokovic’s spark… is INAT.

The Contrarian

I think the most obvious example of Djokovic embodying inat is, of course, the 2019 Wimbledon final – an event that also produced my favorite Djokovic photo of all time.

However, as someone that has followed Djokovic since his very early forays into the top echelons of ATP tennis – it’s been a staple of his tennis since day one. Be it my favorite little anecdote, when he wrote NOLE on his shoes with a sharpie to emulate Nadal’s custom Nikes, or The Shot heard around the world, it is clear Novak thrives in adversity; the more you hate on him or the worse the odds, the more it triggers Novak’s inat.

This inat actually allowed Novak to throw himself onto the rocks of the Fedal duopoly and crash like a wave over and over and over again. The fact that Fedal were so deeply entrenched in the hearts of fans was only fuel to the inat fire. Contrary to popular belief that Djokovic was obsessed with people loving him, with only Fedal getting the love, in Djokovic’s younger days he was viewed as a refreshing young upstart there to shake things up. His impressions of other players and interactions with the crowd were seen as funny. The inat started to flare up more when Novak would rake up the results, and yet not receive 20% of the Fedal acclaim (outside of Serbia). Were this any other, less inat-fueled, player, the innate spite would not have pushed them through the Fedal wall. As we’ve seen so many times, to win against Murray and then one of Federer or Nadal was a feat that, if accomplished, would end careers — but Novak just went “I’m not done here”.

So this inat thing sounds like a great superpower to have, right? Well…

A double edged sword

The signs were there early on. It can be debated that Djokovic inherited his inat from his father – a man whose every action depicts the downsides of the belligerent “inaćenje” (being full of inat/doing inat). Where Djokovic was happy to let his game do the talking, his parents hit the ground running with “The King is dead long live the King” spiel the moment their son beat Federer in the 2008 Australian Open semifinals. (As it turned out, Djokovic would need three years to win his next major, while Federer racked up four more in that period.)

For most of his early career, the downsides of Djokovic’s inat were not evident nor had any negative effect on his life and results. His grace when losing, which he retained to this day, helped this further.

The first serious sign of inat’s dark edge harming Djokovic’s career came along with his 2016 elbow injury. Djokovic’s dubious health/lifestyle beliefs clashed with his obvious need to have surgery on his elbow. His coach, many of the people around him, urged him vehemently to just do the surgery, his misguided beliefs about how “opening the body” was harmful be damned. This, perhaps predictably, triggered his inat. Djokovic would hold off on surgery for far too long until eventually succumbing, rather than risking his livelihood. Sources close to him say he cried after the surgery; he cried for being forced to violate his principles and ‘releasing the energies in his body’ with this invasive surgery. Recall that “violate his principles” is a recurring line Djokovic refuses to cross — an inat special.

Thus we get to the Australian debacle and Djokovic’s vaccination status in general. This is not a text about either of those specifically, but it is another clear representation of his inat. When asked about if “violating his principles” and getting vaccinated was an option — otherwise he’d have to miss out on important tournaments and maybe even the GOAT title — Djokovic defiantly said: so be it, if that’s how it is I’ll take the hit to my legacy. This is textbook inat.

If we combine the unnecessary time it took for Novak to do the surgery, plus all the issues his vaccination status caused, I feel comfortable saying Djokovic’s inat has deprived him of at least two major titles, if not a couple more.

Considering how much his inat has given him, in slam count… it seems like a worthy trade, no?

Future defiance

So where does that leave us? I think Djokovic’s “36 is the new 26” credo, and his joking dismissal of the Next (and Next Next) generation is also inat-fueled — and this has allowed him to sail into uncharted waters of dominance. He’s been told he’s old and the new kids are about to wrestle the torch from his hand for a decade. Until his defeat by Alcaraz, Djokovic has been definitely flaring his inat to make those claims untrue. Even now, Djokovic fans, such as myself, are hoping that this recent defeat to Carlos Alcaraz will also fuel and trigger his inat, allowing him to cast  himself as a wave onto a new kind of rock. The wish remains that the opportunities for the darker sides of inat to appear remain few and far between, so that, in spite of everything and everyone, Djokovic can cement his legacy as the GOAT.