Djokovic’s sensibility recalled the soccer stadium rather than the country club, but he has become more courtly of late. Illustration by Stanley Chow

He is an athlete, a professional tennis player. He is six feet two inches tall. He weighs a hundred and seventy-six pounds. His legs, gummy and striated, bring to mind a pair of Twizzlers. He is a lover of animals. With his narrow neck and solid pelt of hair, he looks a bit like Pierre, his toy poodle.

He has a goofy sense of humor. A few years ago, he became famous for his imitations—Rafael Nadal picking at his wedgie, Roger Federer prancing swaybacked along the baseline. At an exhibition in Bratislava last year, he stuffed his shirt with sweat towels and hitched up an imaginary skirt. That was Serena Williams.

He speaks five languages beautifully. He never met a meme he didn’t like. The other night, after a match, he pulled an Afro wig out of his racket bag and danced to “Get Lucky.” A book he recently enjoyed was “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne. He absolutely believes one hundred per cent in that kind of philosophy of life. You attract things the way you think. You are what your thoughts are!

He is Serbian, but he lives in Monte Carlo. After he won Wimbledon, in 2011, a hundred thousand people gathered to celebrate in front of Belgrade’s Parliament. He wore a white blazer. It was the best night of his life. The President of Serbia told “60 Minutes” that he could win the nation’s highest office. At one point, a rumor went around that he had bought up the country’s entire supply of donkey cheese.

For eighty-five weeks, he has been the No. 1 tennis player in the world. In addition to Wimbledon, he has won thirty-six other A.T.P. singles titles, including a U.S. Open, and three Australian Opens straight. In 2011, he played what some people think is the best season of tennis in history, winning seventy of the seventy-six matches he played and recording a forty-one-match winning streak. He hasn’t lost before the semifinals of a Grand Slam in three years.

He bounces the ball a million times before he serves. His play is plasmatic. He seems to flow toward the corners of the court. He is an origami man, folding at the waist to dig up a drop shot, starfishing for a high forehand return, cocking his leg behind his head in an arabesque as he blasts a backhand down the line. He lunges, he dives, he beats his pecs. He once yelled—in Serbian—“Now you all will suck my dick!”

He is dominant, but he is not universally adored. His showy personality and subtle game are a niche taste. Haters call him Djokobitch. Jerzy Janowicz, the Polish player, said recently that he was “a fake.” But now, with the waning of the Federer-Nadal duopoly, which has fixated tennis for the past decade, the love he craves is within his reach. This week, at Flushing Meadows, where he was once booed, Novak Djokovic will attempt to assert his sovereignty.

The Friday before Wimbledon began, Djokovic was sitting at an outdoor table at Le Pain Quotidien, on Wimbledon Village High Street. He looked as though he’d just towelled off and stepped into a watch ad. His clothes were from Uniqlo, his sponsor: trim trousers, blue leather shoes, blue linen blazer, good white shirt. His nose had caught the sun. When he sat down, he said to the waitress, “Maybe a water, please, would be nice. Still water—not too cold.” (He avoids ice water—it inhibits the flow of blood to the muscles.) He also ordered a mint tea.

Two weeks earlier, Djokovic had lost, painfully, to Rafael Nadal in the semifinals of the French Open. The French Open is the only Grand Slam that is played on clay, tennis’s slowest surface. It is also the only Grand Slam that Djokovic hasn’t won. (It seems impossible, but Pete Sampras, Djokovic’s childhood idol, never won there, either.) Nadal, who is nearly untouchable on clay, which he grew up playing on, in Mallorca, had won the French Open in seven of the past eight years. But he had been out for seven months with a knee injury, and Djokovic, surging, had beaten him, for only the third time on clay, a month earlier at Monte Carlo. (Djokovic’s career record against Nadal is 15–21.) Djokovic was scarily fit, and he was no longer distracted by a series of health problems that had afflicted his father in 2012. There was talk among the tennis cognoscenti about the prospect of his surpassing his 2011 season.

Over a gruelling four hours and thirty-seven minutes in Paris, Djokovic had failed to prevail by the slightest of margins. Up a break and tied at deuce at 4–3 in the fifth set, he attacked with the diabolical incrementalism of a medieval torture master, stretching Nadal ever wider across the court, then charging forward to put away an easy overhead, after which he tripped and accidentally tapped the net, forfeiting a crucial point. The set, the match, and the coveted title soon fell away. Djokovic had been so upset that he booked a last-minute vacation and retreated to Corsica with his girlfriend of eight years, Jelena Ristic.

But now, resurfacing in England, he seemed at ease. The day before, he had played an exhibition match at the Boodles Challenge, in Buckinghamshire, against Grigor Dimitrov, a twenty-two-year-old Bulgarian comer known as Baby Fed. The stands were filled with suburban women. During the changeover between games, the crowd had kept up a slow clap. As the noise mounted, Djokovic stood up. Like a magician revealing a marvel, he peeled off his top—poof, abs!—and whirled it above his head, gyrating his hips. Then he pointed at Dimitrov. “We’re too sexy for our shirts!” the next day’s Daily Mail headline read. “Djokovic and Dimitrov send crowd into raptures by comparing torsos in Wimbledon warm-up.”

Djokovic seemed pleased that his impromptu striptease had caused a sensation. “They put in a photo?” he asked, at the café, stroking Pierre, who whimpered on his lap. “I heard many comments during that match yesterday. It was a lot of entertainment and fun—and, also, getting the crowd involved in the tennis match like never before!”

Djokovic’s reputation as a ham—his other nickname is the Djoker—obscures a difficult heritage. He was born in May of 1987 in Belgrade, which was then part of Yugoslavia. His parents, Srdjan and Dijana, owned a pizza parlor and snack bar in the mountain resort town of Kopaonik. Novak (Nole to his family), the eldest of three sons—Marko, who is twenty-two, and Djordje, who is eighteen, also play professional tennis—enjoyed what he described as a “beautiful” childhood. “You know, I grew up in restaurants,” he said, recalling afternoons spent washing dishes and dolloping Nutella on crêpes. “The job I’ve done most often was with my father, cleaning the snow in front of our restaurant with the shovel.” Once, it snowed so much that they chiselled a picnic table out of ice. Djokovic’s opening line as a trainee waiter: “Good afternoon, welcome to our restaurant. What would you like to drink? I might seem young, but I will be able to remember your orders.”

It was a fluke that Djokovic started playing tennis. His father had been a competitive skier; the family was athletic, but racket sports were not a part of its repertoire—nor, particularly, of that of Serbia, which, as a nation, favored team sports. For some reason, the government decided to build a tennis complex in Kopaonik, an improbable development that Djokovic interprets as a sign of providence. Djokovic loitered around the courts until Jelena Gencic, a pro who had once coached Monica Seles, finally invited him to join her clinic. He showed up the next morning, and by the end of the week Gencic was proclaiming that “the golden child” possessed “the biggest talent I have seen since Monica.” (Gencic became a lifelong mentor to Djokovic, encouraging him to read poetry and to listen to classical music; she died a week before the Nadal match, at the age of seventy-six.)