Djokovic admits: Tennis is the hardest slog

Novak Djokovic agreed on Thursday that players can be “slaves” to tennis, after complaints by Carlos Alcaraz about the state of the nearly year-round sport.

With the Spaniard out of the Madrid Masters with leg and adductor injuries, the 37-year-old Djokovic was thrust back into the spotlight in the Spanish capital.

The Serb said that while the 21-year-old Alcaraz might have exaggerated a  bit in his definition of the commitment required to excel in the sport, he was also not far wrong.

“It’s an individual sport that requires a hundred percent, really a hundred percent of your physical, but also mental and emotional energy involved in the life of a tennis player, which is much more than just hitting a tennis ball on the court,” Djokovic said..

“I don’t want this to sound very arrogant or  pretentious, but we are blessed to be able to do what we do.

“Most of us love tennis, love the sport, and we fell in love as kids.”

But Djokovic added: “You have a lot of challenges, and one of them is the season length of the tennis, which is the longest of any sport in the world,

“It starts in January, ends at almost the end of November. with almost two-weeks long 1000 events. Now we essentially don’t have four Grand Slams we have maybe 12 Grand Slams.

“Every Grand Slam is two weeks and now you have 1000 events that are also almost two weeks. It’s a lot of the time that you spend on the road not seeing maybe your family or not being at home.