The terrible moment that forever marked Novak Djokovic's career: "My father had to turn to the mafia."
Novak Djokovic is today, according to the data, the greatest tennis player of all time. However, his greatest achievements on the court cannot be explained without some truly difficult moments, including the difficult financial situation that led his father to even turn to the mafia to finance his career, as he recently revealed.
The tennis player commented on this in a recent interview on the (Ne)uspjeh prvaka YouTube channel, in which he went into detail about the tense situation he experienced at the beginning of his brilliant career, when he needed to travel to the United States and his family couldn't even dream of paying for that opportunity.
"The trip in total cost about $5,000; it was impossible to have that kind of money in those days. My father had to turn to loan sharks, to the mafia. He explained the situation to them, and they charged 30% interest because we were in a hurry . My father agreed. We had a lot of problems; they even caused him a car accident, but he was able to pay it off in the end," he explains.
It is by no means the most tense episode for the Djokovic family; in fact, the man with the most Grand Slams in history told another story related to the few opportunities he really had to become what he is today :
" I remember one night he put 10 marks on the table and told me that was all the money we had . He told me that if I really wanted to pursue tennis, we would create a path to achieve it, that we would find a way to get the money we needed. Both he and my mother gave me the opportunity to choose. Tennis was an incredibly expensive sport, and it still is. I understood his message; I knew I had to grow up very quickly," he also recalled recently.
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