Why Australia will miss the Novak Djokovic circus

Novak Djokovic has been booted out of Australia’s Fort Sensible, and gone with him is an extraordinary athletic and social spectacle that fascinated Australia, writes Joe Hildebrand.

In a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Bart visits a historic military fort. A tour guide regales him with its story.

“The enemy surrounded the fort, and said that if the captain was sent out, the rest would be spared,” he says.

“What did they do?” Bart asks.

“They sent him out!” the guide replies.

“Was he killed?” Bart asks.

“And how!” the guide says triumphantly. “That’s why they call it Fort Sensible!”

Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic leaves the Park Hotel on Sunday. Picture: AAP Image/James Ross

The brilliance of the joke is obvious: Often the most rational course of action is also the most inhuman — or, more specifically, the most unhuman.

Either way, it certainly ain’t the Alamo and Novak Djokovic probably knows how the captain feels.

It is clear that Djokovic should never have been let into the country and that there was a calamitous stuff-up in communicating to him that he would be allowed in.

Yet once he was actually here the obsession with which he was detained and debated and finally deported made Australia once more resemble the hick town of Springfield.

And now that he is gone I wonder if a few of us might not be scratching our heads, searching longingly for his name in the newspaper and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Indeed more than a few of us might be suffering from a bit of buyer’s remorse. For a week the Australian Open was the most electrifying event on the planet before the first ball had even been served.

Novak Djokovic leaves the Park hotel in Melbourne on Sunday. Picture: Diego Fedele/Getty Images

Novak Djokovic with the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup trophy in 2021. Picture: William West/AFP

It will now be watched with much less interest and by far fewer eyeballs.

Like the troops of Fort Sensible, we have done the rational thing but it is also the most bloodless and boring. We have deprived ourselves and the world of witnessing the most extraordinary human experiment.

How far would Djokovic have got? What would the crowd reaction have been? Would he have buckled under all this pressure or is he the psychological cyborg his persona projects?

The sheer scale and potential of the spectacle was irresistible but now we will simply never know what might have been.

And that is just another sorry side-effect of the snafu. Frankly we should never have been tempted with it.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews may well say now that Djokovic could have avoided all this if he’d simply got vaccinated but it was his own chief health officer Brett Sutton who said he didn’t have to.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

A timeline of events produced by Melbourne’s Age newspaper — hardly the right-wing hate media — reveals that Sutton explicitly told Tennis Australia: “Anyone with a history of recent Covid-19 infection (defined as within six months) and who can provide appropriate evidence of this medical history, is exempt from quarantine obligations upon arrival in Victoria from overseas.”

This appears to be in direct contradiction to what the federal Department of Health and federal Health Minister had previously told the sporting body.

Perhaps TA was just looking for the advice it wanted to hear. And it appears it was Sutton’s advice that got them over the line, because just a few days after receiving it they sent a memo to players saying that if they could produce a positive Covid test result from the past six months they would be exempt from vaccine requirements — in apparent disregard of the federal warnings.

And of course we all know how that turned out.

Thus Australia got dumped upon it a problem that we never should have had in full view of the world. And we embarrassed ourselves further in the panicked scramble to deal with it.

After all that global humiliation you’d think that we might have at least got some good tennis but now we’ve been deprived of that too. We lost our face and we didn’t even get the chance to have our fun.

And that’s the sorriest thing about this whole sorry tale — we’ve managed to extract from it the worst of both worlds. The only spectacle we’ve got out of it is the circus of Djokovic’s deportation.

At least the good news is that all the various layers of government and bureaucracy have now got together and formalised systems and worked out clear and consistent rules so that nothing like this ever happens again.

Just kidding! Thought I should end on a joke as well.

JOE HILDEBRAND IS THE HOST OF THE NEW SKY NEWS SHOW THE BLAME GAME STARTING FRIDAY JAN 28 AT 8.30PM