what is the most interesting/most compelling thing about novaryna to you?
the whole thing is compelling. the age gap is compelling, the fact that she's women's number 1 and he's the winningest player of all time, that she's the young player on tour he's the closest to and gives her hours of advice/practices with her/came over to his house and made açai for his daughter (she's her favourite player), the fact he and jelena went on double dates with aryna and her man, that she was the one to break his decades long tiebreak record!!! they both wanna be loved, have big personalities, can come across as too much and have natural chemistry with each other. the AO exho where they flirt the whole time??? radicalizing. the grunts as moaning, complimenting his ass and "focus novak", also shoutout him being in her likes whenever she posts a bikini pic. me too king
but the Most compelling part to me is the ghost of Maria Sharapova haunting the narrative.
there's the obvious physical similarities of 6ft tall, blonde, Russian (adjacent), top wta player famous for her grunt. but it was when novak started recreating things he used to do with maria with saba I was like Oh. from the exaggerated imitations to having her hit balls at his dick to crashing Wimbledon press cons... do you get deja vu
I view masha as a kind of one that got away for novak. and the biggest difference is masha will always see novak as a contemporary while he's the goat for everyone younger. maria won her first slam at 17, years before novak and he was a (relative) nobody begging for a date while she was alr a champion, similarly she dated grigor who could never surpass her career (and there's a whole masha essay for another time). sabalenka is openly deferential, calls him the goat regularly and understands that her friendship with novak is something special because everyone wants a piece of him, in that she's chosen. with novaks looming retirement ever in the horizon, aryna won't be the one walking away from him
betting on Novak to mentor Jannik or Carlos or any of the atp rising stars after retirement ignores that he's already definitely very much Saba's mentor
