Explaining Novak Djokovic’s failure to get the New York crowd behind him at the U.S. Open, Martina Navratilova suggested this morning on Tennis Channel that it could be a “Slavic thing” – noting that neither she nor Lendl won their hearts. Immediately I recalled the match at the 1986 Open in which Boris Becker played the brilliant shotmaker Miroslav Mecir and the entire stadium seemed to be behind the boorish German.
To someone who has written a lot about Poland, Navratilova's theory didn't seem all that implausible.
