The former Serbian-Australian tennis player entrusted his social networks to his father Damir: “There are many conflicting and complex feelings for me”. The story of a complicated relationship, lived between physical and psychological abuses
A little father and daughter. The parent who embraces her and looks seriously in the room, a little girl with a nice helmet that smiles. This is the image that Jelena Dokic has chosen to announce to the world and to her followers the death of her dad Damir, who passed away on May 16. The choice of the shot is not accidental. “For the end of this chapter, I chose to focus on a nice memory like this photo,” he explained in his post on Instagram. Jelena speaks of the “end of a chapter and life as I knew it”. All combined with the past, all left in the memories of the past where that little girl could not smile. Dad Damir, master of his career and not only of his daughter had forbidden him: when he took the field, Jelena was forbidden to smile. “As you know, the relationship with my father was difficult and painful,” writes the former tennis player on social media. A relationship made of physical and psychological abuses: emotional blackmail, verbal attacks, slaps, spit and sometimes beatings with the belt. Many things were visible in the sunlight already when Jelena was engaged in the climb of the female circuit, others told her in her autobiography, “Unbreakable”. Dad Damir, in fact, was well known in the world of tennis for his violent attitudes, with his player and beyond.
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The veteran self -refineration of the Croatian war of independence, fighting alongside the Serbs, the ex coach had immediately captured attention. It all started in 1999, when Jelena in Wimbledon challenges Martina Hingis: the number 169 against number 1. Surprisingly, it is the Serbian, still very young, to impose himself in the first round of that Slam: “Nobody thought I could win, except for my dad. He asked me”. The victory for Dokic was worth much more than points, money, glory. A success for her meant escaping from her father’s slaps: a violent practice started since childhood and which Jelena’s fame has not put an end to. The new millennium for the former champion meant many beautiful things: the semifinal in Wimbledon, the success in Rome, the best ranking. At the same time, however, he had to respond to the media of the attitudes of a master father who certainly did not hide his nature. At the US Open, Damir pulled the fish on the canteen’s edict because in his opinion he had paid too much. He had accused the organization of the Australian Open of having made up the draw to obstruct his daughter’s journey to Melbourne. Yet Damir had chosen the country of the kangaroos to escape from the Balkans, afflicted by an infinite war, and had brought the family to Sydney to look for a different life. The same state that had given citizenship to Jelena, but that she later betrayed to choose the Serbian one. Years later, always in his biography, a diary where he put in writing everything he never managed to say, he admitted the truth: it was always his father who forced her to play to play for Serbia, while maintaining Australian citizenship.
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In the social message of mourning, Jelena describes the years with her father “hard and difficult”. A period so “difficult and complicated”, like the mourning that he is going through, that they led the former number four in the world to escape home in the middle of the night, with rackets and little money that the parent had not subtracted. In 2009 Damir was arrested after threatening the Australian ambassador to Belgrade with a grenade and after the police found an arsenal in his house. Finished in jail, the physical distance to himself and his father could have helped Wimbledon’s semifinalist to start a new chapter of his life. Some scars, however, remain. In fact, they don’t heal: sometimes we strive to forget their existence, sometimes they only clean themselves stronger than ever. The distance, physical and emotional, did not save Jelena from those suicidal thoughts that crossed her head on April 28, 2022: “I wanted to throw me from the 26th floor. It had become everything unsustainable. That day there was no sound, there was no image, nothing made sense … only tears, sadness, depression, anxiety and pain”, had confessed the former tennis player. The tears of that April 28 arise from the anxiety and pain of a violent and manipulator father. Today, however, the emotions are different: “It is never easy to lose a father, even if foreign. The loss of a parent involves a difficult and complicated mourning. There are many conflicting and complex feelings for me”. And in the difficulty of a moment where it seems impossible to find the right thing to say, to Jelena Dokic just close her message: “My last words. Rip”.
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