The air in Belgrade, even on a sunny winter morning, has a pervasive chemical tang — a toxic mix of coal smoke, bus exhaust, and the raw effluents of heavy industry. The city has actually fallen on hard times since the bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia, though its standard of living has been falling for 25 years. Belgrade's leaders and their armies fought and lost four wars in the 1990s, and the territory they rule, which now consists of Serbia alone, continues to shrink with the recently declared independence of Kosovo, a rebel southern province. Serbia is, in short, a humbled and broken country, its international reputation blackened by the atrocities of ethnic cleansing — and the Serbs, always fond of salvation narratives, are these days in need of a redeemer.

From all appearances, they have settled on Djoković. His hatchet face, his burning eyes seem to be on every front page, on every billboard. "He has done more for this country than any politician," my first Belgrade cabdriver told me. A visitor has to remind himself frequently that Djoković is just a tennis player — a tennis player who is now 20. When Djoković comes home from the tour, the prime minister meets him at the airport; thousands of people gather for frenzied celebrations outside City Hall. Tennis, never before a big sport in Serbia, is suddenly the country's consuming passion. It's not simply that Djoković — along with two other locals, Jelena Janković and Ana Ivanović, rising stars on the women's circuit — has lately shown people that tennis can be a road to fame and fortune. It's also, poignantly, that he presents to the outside world an infinitely more attractive face than the sinister gangsters and seedy war criminals whom most foreigners learned to associate with Serbs in recent years. At least that's what I think that cabbie meant.

It's hard to overstate the extent of Novakmania. When he and I meet, at the modest offices of his family's sports-marketing business out in the concrete-block sprawl of New Belgrade, he sits at a desk, lanky and loose-jointed, wearing jeans and a rumpled white collarless shirt. He extols the charms of the medieval city just across the river — the traditional Serbian restaurants, the great old neighborhoods, the nightclubs — known as splavovi — on barges in the Danube. Unfortunately, he admits, he can no longer walk through the streets of his hometown. "People recognize me and — I don't want to say bother me — but they just come up. It's not really relaxing. All eyes on you."

This is true even when he's halfway across the world. After Djoković beat Federer in Montreal, the awards emcee described him as a Croatian. Djoković gently corrected him — too gently, according to Serbian nationalists back home. Debates about his patriotism raged in the Belgrade papers. At other times, he has inflamed anti-nationalists by flashing the Serbian three-fingered victory salute after matches. To many Balkan people, this salute is deeply ominous. It was the signature gesture of the Serbian militias — Milošević's death squads — in Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo. Djoković told me, defensively: "I'm not extremist. Three fingers is our symbol. It's like you have two fingers for peace. Three fingers is for us, for Serbia. That's what all the people throughout the history of this country did, when they are successful and when they want to show where they're from." (That is not quite true — the salute was popularized in the early 1990s by Vuk Drašković, a nationalist intellectual. But, to be fair, young Serbs like Djoković grew up with it, and most don't associate it with war.) At any rate, Djoković says he's not even interested in politics.

Still, there's no escaping such things in Serbia. The basic question facing the country today is whether to turn toward Europe in hopes of joining the E.U. or toward Putin's Russia, which wants Serbia in its orbit. This decision has historic implications, and Serbs are fiercely divided over it. Djoković comes down on the side of the E.U., which he thinks promises greater prosperity and a chance to leave the dark past behind. But the loss of Kosovo — and the E.U. has strongly backed its independence — is a very painful business for most Serbs, including Djoković. His father, Srdjan, comes from Kosovo, and as a result Novak considers it his true home. Joining Europe, moreover, means joining the enemy from the last Yugoslav war in 1999, when NATO bombers pounded Belgrade with thousands of airstrikes for 78 days. Young Djoković was there throughout the terror. "Very bad memories," he says. "It's something which I don't really like to talk about."

That year — 1999 — is, however, another inescapable subject. Lining a wall of the room where we talk are many trophies, but the one that Djoković jumps up to show me is an odd-looking gold-plated spire that he received after playing a local charity match. "Do you see this tower?" he asks. "It's called Avala Tower. This tower is a symbol for Belgrade. Whenever you come to the city from the south, you see this. It was the biggest radio and TV transmitter in our country, and NATO forces, they crushed it. Now they're planning to build a beautiful, even taller one, so we were playing a charity exhibition to raise money for the rebuilding." Djoković relates this story without rancor. War happens; it's horrific; he's just doing his bit for his town.

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