FLUSHING MEADOWS. N.Y. — The Novak Djokovic impersonator who played the first three rounds of the U.S. Open on his behalf has left the grounds.
The real one has returned, to do what he has done for the better part of two decades: wreck anyone standing in the way of his journey into the final weekend of yet another major.
With a close-to-dominant 6-3, 7-5, 3-6, 6-4 win over last year’s finalist Taylor Fritz, Djokovic sent a message to the young guns still left in the draw, including the two players who have monopolized the Grand Slam titles he once collected like stamps. He is alive, he is kicking and he is not about to go quietly in his pursuit of a 25th Grand Slam singles title.
Waiting for him in the last four is Carlos Alcaraz, the 22-year-old wunderkind who deposed Djokovic as the king of Wimbledon in 2023. If he can somehow survive that, there’s a good chance he will face Jannik Sinner, Alcaraz’s archnemesis at the top of tennis.
The hard part starts now. But last week, Djokovic was wandering around Arthur Ashe Stadium looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, miserable about his level of play and gasping for air as he tried to find his wind after six weeks without any competition.
Tuesday night, he mostly looked like the tennis wrecking machine of old against one of his favorite pigeons. He is now 11-0 against Fritz, twisting the world No. 4 around the court and at times making Fritz look like the world No. 40. The ball flew off his strings like a sling shot. He slid and stretched and switched directions like he had springs in his shoes. He cranked aces when he needed them and landed second serves on the backs and outsides of the lines.
Down a set, Fritz had two chances to take a lead early in the second. But each time, Djokovic turned back the clock, finally escaping from trouble with a forehand that shot across the court as if on a wire, at the end of a high-octane exchange from the baseline.
As soon as it broke the sideline, he stared up at the crowd and waved his hand to make sure it showed appreciation. When the crowd sent back a roar, he took an exaggerated bow. The party was on.
Novak Djokovic frustrated Taylor Fritz — and his upside down headband — throughout the first two sets. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Fritz would get another chance two games later, but another big serve and an overhead winner snuffed it out. Djokovic has long been relentlessly efficient in the biggest matches on the biggest stages, and through the first set and a half, Fritz earned nine break points against Djokovic’s serve but converted none. Djokovic earned just five but converted two, getting the edge in the second set off a sloppy forehand from Fritz whose rally tolerance dropped as his frustration rose, something Djokovic has seen countless times in his career as he tortures opponents into exceeding their limits. As if by remote control, they do it to themselves.
Fritz ruminated too on the decisions he made with slight openings — 0-15, 0-30, 15-30 — that don’t register on the break-point record.
“I was just converting and playing these points just really poorly,” he said in his news conference.
When Fritz finally broke through as Djokovic tried to serve out the second set, Fritz gave him the edge right back, double-faulting twice and playing his worst game of the night. When the American netted a short backhand on Djokovic’s first set point, Djokovic blew three kisses to the crowd on the way to his chair, and that was basically that. He has lost a match just once after winning the first two sets, to Jurgen Meltzer — 16 years ago.
Now, at 38, Djokovic has landed in his fourth Grand Slam semifinal of the year. He beat a player half his age to open the tournament; Fritz is more than a decade younger than him. And even Alcaraz, the 22-year-old Spanish dynamo with the buzzcut who has played untouchable tennis for five matches in New York, has recent memories of the Djokovic fever dream to wipe away.
Alcaraz was in the ascendancy against Djokovic in the Australian Open quarterfinals, when Djokovic tore his hamstring. Instead of finishing Djokovic off, Alcaraz overthought the situation as Djokovic simplified it, playing the brand of spot-serving, first-strike tennis that he has adopted in his later years, and beat Alcaraz when the match was his to take.
Djokovic also beat him in an epic Olympic final last July in Paris, shattering Alcaraz’s spirits for months — but to do it, he had to play better tennis than he has played at any time the past two years, since he won this tournament in 2023. He also had to hit two of the best forehands of his life. The final score? 7-6, 7-6.
Djokovic is a year older now, and often looks much older than that. A week ago Sunday, he looked lethargic and slow, and had a nasty blister on his foot. Last Friday, he tweaked his back and looked hobbled. Sunday night, he had a trainer massaging his shoulder and neck and inspecting other body parts, but his feel for the ball was back and by the end he was stutter-stepping across the court once more.
But for a brief period in the third set Tuesday, when the crowd razzed him and got under his skin, helping Fritz to break his serve and delay the inevitable, he looked every bit here for a fight. At 5-4 in the fourth with Fritz serving, Djokovic lunged and scrambled across and back to keep the American locked down. He shuffled forward and then back before he served to try and grab an advantage.
Djokovic was locked in, drawing two quick errors from a suddenly tight Fritz. Fritz held steady for one baseline battle, but wobbled on the next. Djokovic kissed the crucifix around his neck as he went for his towel, then hit the accelerator from third gear on a forehand to bring up two match points.
Fritz survived one more point, on yet another long rally, and then one more, as Djokovic sent a backhand long. Djokovic was hunched in between them as the late-night crowd came alive for the Californian, who just missed escaping with a topspin lob that flew a few inches long when a crunched backhand pass might have done.
A point later he was on the cliff again, and slipped off with a double fault. Djokovic was through, and dancing on the court.
The next five days will take one of the great fights of his life, and maybe even two of them, but a lot changes in a week in Djokovic’s tennis life. Or maybe nothing really changes at all.
How Djokovic beat Fritz
Fritz created 13 break points to Djokovic’s nine in his four-set defeat, but the American put away two to Djokovic’s four. Part of that was Fritz’s errors in tough moments, but there was no doubting that Djokovic served with the greater variety of the two.
Fritz clearly set out to be aggressive and go after the Djokovic serve, and from a points-won perspective he was successful. The problem was that he wasn’t winning the right ones, and on break points he looked uncertain of how to end the point — going for the kill when it wasn’t on, and then being too conservative off a slower delivery.
Part of that uncertainty was down to the way Djokovic was mixing up his serves. Whether it was the disconcertingly slow one out wide or the big one down the T, Fritz was never quite sure what was coming. The serve-and-volley play also kept Fritz guessing.
The American on the other hand is a much more consistent line-and-length server, who can hit spots but has less ability to mix up his speeds. Djokovic was able to read Fritz’s serve on the big points and neutralize the rally. He pinched his only two break points in the second set, while Fritz toiled away missing chance after chance.
Things changed in the third set when Fritz went for slightly less with his first serve and massively lifted his first-serve percentage. This was a smart play given the chasm between his first- and second-serve points won in the first two sets (86 percent compared to 34 percent, including a shocking nine percent in the first set). In the third set, Fritz made 70 percent of his first serves, compared to 50 across the first two.
He subsequently didn’t face a break point in the third set, and after a tricky opening game went on a run of dropping just three points in seven service games across the third and fourth sets. He was generally holding much more comfortably than his opponent, but Djokovic did what he’s done so many times before, breaking at the very end to clinch the match.
In rallies, Djokovic also brought more variety to proceedings, which was no surprise. He has the drop shot in his locker in a way that Fritz doesn’t (even if it cost him a couple of breaks), and could get his opponent off balance by changing direction mid-rally. Fritz was content to go backhand to backhand with his opponent, but less willing to pull the trigger, and when he did pull it on either side, his shift in pace was far less pronounced than that of Djokovic.
Only when the shackles came off in the third set did Fritz start to get on top of Djokovic, ending the set with 18 winners, and reducing his unforced error count to seven, down from 13 and 12 in the opening sets. But Djokovic was able to reset for the fourth set, and gradually started to find greater depth on his groundstrokes and draw errors again from Fritz. He did this on the first two points of the last game, and then again to earn his first two match points and then the decisive third.
Fritz has a Plan A game that is better than pretty much everyone on the tour. But to beat the very best like Djokovic, he needs to improve his variety and be more responsive to changes from his opponents. Something he singled Carlos Alcaraz out for after losing to the Spaniard at Wimbledon in July.
(Top photo: Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)
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