"Novak Djokovic takes that personally, he's going to find anything he can as fuel" - Tennis analyst says Serb's mentality is similar to Michael Jordan

Tennis analyst Gill Gross believes that Novak Djokovic has a similar mentality to American basketball legend Michael Jordan.

Jordan was the biggest star in the NBA from the year 1985 to 2003. For the majority of his career the six-time champion played for the Chicago Bulls, but in the last two seasons he represented the Washington Wizards.

In 2020, Netflix partnered with ESPN Films and rolled out a documentary titled 'The Last Dance,' based on Jordan's career. The film focused on his winning mentality, particularly during his last season with the Bulls in 1997-98.

From the film, Gill Gross learned that Jordan fed off any negativity around or against him while running up and down a basketball court. Jordan talked about the things that got on his nerves, using the line "I took that personally."

The line later went viral, becoming a meme template on the internet.

"It was a meme in The Last Dance the Michael Jordan documentary where you would say something about Michael on the [basketball] court like if you trash talk MJ, there’s no worse idea than that," Gross said during a recent episode of the Monday Match Analysis podcast.

"And you could even say something that wasn’t even really a shot at him but 30 years later MJ is giving interviews and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah when he said that, I took that personally!’. He said ‘I took that personally’ so many times in The Last Dance that it became a meme," Gross added.

Gross found similarities between Jordan's and Novak Djokovic's motivation mantras.

"Novak takes that personally," he said. "He’s very much of that mindset where he’s going to find anything he can as fuel. He recently also said he wants to break Jimmy Connors’ record of 109 titles."

"So he’s going to continue to find things as long as he possibly. Not only in the long term when it comes to breaking records, but he’s going to keep searching for things, and even in the short term like an individual match where if it’s the crowd or [anyone]," Gross added.

---

Novak Djokovic got mad about Cameron Norrie accidentally hitting a ball at him: Gill Gross

Internazionali BNL D'Italia 2023 - Day Nine

Gill Gross also recalled Cameron Norrie accidentally hitting Novak Djokovic on his left calf during the second set of their encounter at the Italian Open earlier this year.

"The last time he played Cameron Norrie and Norrie hit a ball at him. It clearly wasn’t… he meant no harm and apologized but Djokovic got really mad about that," Gross said.

Gross opined that Djokovic made a fuss about the incident intentionally to push himself against the Brit. He said:

"I don’t think Novak is getting mad because he can’t control himself but he’s getting mad because he can control himself and he actually wanted to use that as fuel to beat Norrie in that match."

Djokovic ended up winning the match against Norrie quite comfortably, with a scoreline of 6-3, 6-4.