Slings & Arrows

The remaking of Jelena Dokic

This week, former tennis pro Jelena Dokic confirmed that her estranged father, Damir, had died aged 67. “Despite everything and no matter how hard, difficult and in the last 10 years even nonexistent our relationship and communication was, it is never easy losing a parent and a father even one you are estranged from,” she wrote on social media. “The loss of an estranged parent comes with a difficult and complicated grief.”

The following was first published in The Saturday Paper last November.

It’s hard to write about the documentary film Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story for several reasons, one of which is that portions were watched while weeping. Once one of our brightest tennis hopes, Dokic was crowned the world’s best female junior in 1998. Her male counterpart that year was Roger Federer.

The next year, just 16 years old and ranked 129 in the world, she met the world’s best in Martina Hingis at Wimbledon and beat her 6-2, 6-0. You might remember the moment, though you probably won’t remember her father’s response. Jelena does. As the crowd ecstatically cheered this great upset, the forbidding and violent Damir Dokic stood motionless. There’s no emotion. No gesture. Nothing. If anything, he looks either bored or disgusted.

It’s not the worst memory of her father – far from it – but the footage, and Jelena’s pained recollection of the moment, comes early in this film and foreshadows the increasingly grim disclosures about him.

Born in Osijek, Croatia (formerly part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1983, Jelena’s family moved to Australia when she was 11 to escape the interethnic wars that raged after Yugoslavia’s dissolution. She had adopted tennis the year before they immigrated, and was maniacally coached by her father.

As the head of a poor family, Damir saw the potential of his daughter’s athletic success as a means to financial comfort. This hope was held fanatically, and from a tender age Jelena was reminded that her family’s future depended on her tennis. It was an enormous burden, of course, and one that would take many years, and her family’s painful splintering, to liberate herself from.

Jelena says she was anxious and self-conscious upon her arrival in Australia – quite natural given her age, unforgiving father and the fact she spoke no English at the time. She deferred to her father and committed herself to tennis.

In harrowing detail, Jelena describes how her father’s verbal abuse and ritual humiliations began as soon as she held a racquet as a child. He screamed at her, telling her she was lazy, stupid, inadequate. A stray volley would be met with screams that she was betraying her family.

As children do, the abuse was internalised – it was frightening, but Jelena accepted the “truth” of it. Her burden was grave, after all, and her father was just making sure she bore it.

Damir’s drinking intensified in Australia. The verbal abuse worsened and her father began physically assaulting her. He would kick her shins until they were black, then order her onto a treadmill. He would punch her head until she fell and then stomp on her. If Jelena lost a match, he would order her to stand facing a wall, her nose touching it and head bowed in shame, and to maintain this position indefinitely. This was a common form of humiliation.

Her tennis, miraculously, only improved. In 1999, with Mark Philippoussis, the pair won the Hopman Cup – it wouldn’t be won again by Australia until 2016. That same year, she made the quarter-finals of Wimbledon, and the semi-finals the year after that. In 2001, she was ranked in the world’s top 10.

But her nightmare continued. She was abused, beaten. If she won a match, her excitement would evaporate as soon as she saw her father – he would, invariably, viciously critique her performance. And if she lost a match? Well, she was scared about what would happen then. After losing the Wimbledon semi-final in 2000, she was called “pathetic” by her father and he told her their hotel room wasn’t available to her that night – she’d have to find some other place to sleep.

Throughout this time, Damir’s behaviour had become notorious and a frequent question to Jelena at press conferences. While her performances weren’t often convincing – they resembled, as one former WTA official says, hostage videos – Jelena never wavered in her public support for her father. She was too frightened not to maintain it.

By now, Jelena was being coached by professionals – but as a sinisterly controlling man, Damir, fearful of others’ decent influence on his daughter lest it undermine his own, engineered animosity and break-ups between his daughter and coaches.

If the strains of pro sport weren’t enough – particularly for a teenage participant – Damir was forever intensifying them. During the 2000 US Open, he wildly threatened staff in the players’ cafeteria over the price of salmon, and was escorted off the grounds by security. There was footage of this, and of a tearful Jelena following him out, and it made international news. The WTA banned Damir from the tour for six months.

One disturbing footnote of this film is that Kia – the major sponsor of the Australian Open from 2002 – leveraged the moment and hired Damir as talent for several of their TV commercials. In them, he rants about knowing the value of things. Journalists also couldn’t get enough of him. He was a profitable freak show, always good for some conspiratorial rant about homosexuals, or the United States, or Tennis Australia. To anyone with eyes, it was obvious Damir wasn’t eccentric but unhinged, and that his daughter wasn’t so much devoted as enslaved.

A cruel, crucial moment came in late 2000 when Damir accused Tennis Australia of some unspecified vendetta. Jelena declared she would compete in the 2001 Australian Open under the Yugoslavian flag, before leaving Australia for good and making the United States home. “I am playing under the Yugoslavian flag, not for Australia,” she said. “It is a decision we have come up with and we have talked about it. If anybody has been attacked the way I am in the media, they would feel the same way.”

Damir told newspapers at the time: “I am scared very much what Australians will do to her, I am afraid there will be an incident if she plays well … Jelena was crying for the first time ever last night. I have never seen her cry about tennis in her life and she was saying that she could not believe that she got that kind of draw in Australia. She feels betrayed.”

Predictably, Jelena was publicly vilified. Pundits and punters alike considered this a contemptible act of ingratitude and betrayal – they had accepted this player from a war-torn country, and then funded and supported her sporting career. But the decision, of course, was not Jelena’s. It was a capricious decision made by Damir – one he demanded his 17-year-old daughter not only uphold but also publicly defend.

The burden Jelena had assumed at the age of 10 became much heavier. To honour her family now meant bearing the weight of the public’s hatred and taking ownership of a decision she didn’t make or want. It also meant leaving a country she loved. Before their move to Florida, Damir demanded his daughter throw out all her trophies. They’re all shit, he tells her. Meaningless. You will now acquire bigger and better ones.

By about 2002, and still a teenager, Jelena’s game started falling apart. Her father was an abusive monster, her mother a passive observer to her husband’s abuses, and she herself had been rendered a hated exile from her own country. For all of her devotion and talent, Jelena has rarely tasted excitement or pleasure.

She describes, again in extraordinary detail, the grimy funk of depression and anxiety she experienced. She was often suicidal and developed an eating disorder – embarking upon weeks-long cycles of starvation and bingeing. In Unbreakable, former Australian tennis pro Todd Woodbridge illustrates Jelena’s perpetual spiral: depression worsens commitment to training, worsened training leads to injury, injury leads to poorer results, poorer results lead to diminished self-worth and more depression.

In 2003, in a European hotel with her family on tour, Jelena writes a letter to her mother. It’s very early in the morning and her parents are asleep. Jelena has decided to leave them. To escape. She writes apologetically with a trembling hand, leaves the note on a table, then calls a taxi for the airport.

*

Jelena Dokic’s game never really recovered.

She made a heroic comeback of sorts in 2009 when she made the quarter-finals of the Australian Open. But she never again was the player she had been and – through no fault of her own – she never became the player she might have been. Damir was not interviewed for this film, despite attempts by its makers. I can only assume he still justifies his tyrannies as having been necessary for the production of greatness. All close observers of Jelena’s career are more likely to see it for what it was: destructive and wicked.

In 2009, Jelena gave an interview in which she said her father had beaten her. Her father’s response was to call the Australian embassy in Serbia and threaten to blow up the ambassador’s car if she did not arrange an apology from the journalists who published the story. He was arrested in Belgrade, where bombs were found, and later sentenced to 15 months in prison.

In 2017, Jelena told her story – and the basis for this film – in a memoir. Here it all is, she said. Here’s what you didn’t know (even if some, at the time, probably should have). She has since made a career in tennis coaching and commentary, and is long estranged from her father.

Jelena, now 41, has remade herself, in a way – for years she was both her father’s victim and spokesperson, and her memoir, public speaking and now this film are her way of disavowing her hostage tapes, of setting down what really happened. For doing so she has found great respect, but the public’s abuse also persists. It’s not much touched upon in the film – Unbreakable is harrowingly fixed to the story of parental abuse – but Jelena was very publicly and painfully shamed for her weight last year during her televised appearances at the Australian Open. It greatly distressed her, but she was determined to campaign against it. As she does against domestic violence, something for which she continues to fundraise. Writing her memoir and speaking publicly about her experience “has actually saved my life at times and I think it’s helped a lot of other people as well”, she said this year. “I do hear horrific stories, and I do connect with people. I feel like it’s my calling.” Jelena has assumed another burden, but voluntarily this time, and one she says is liberating.

It’s one final indictment of Damir that a film about his daughter would be almost entirely devoted to her relationship with him. But so it is. Her story is a nightmare, but I’m grateful Jelena had the strength to tell it.