Novak Djoković has been back in the news due to his refusal to talk to Channel 9, the main Australian broadcaster of the Australian Open currently on in Melbourne, after commentator Tony Jones insulted his hard-core fans amongst the Serb community of Australia. Of course, for the likes of white Anglo-Australian men such as Tony Jones, the "wogs" just "can't handle a joke". Had it been directed the other way though, they wouldn't see it simply as a "joke". A (non-)apology has since been issued and the matter dismissed.
That's not to say that the Australian Open's audiences have been exemplary. Far from it! Since the 1990s the Australian Open has seen fans from Australia's immigrant communities rather loudly support their tennis stars from their ancestral countries, displaying behaviour more akin to the football (soccer) stands than the polite clapping and silence traditional of tennis audiences. It reached to such a point that in 2020 Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas publicly appealed to Greek fans to be "a little more respectful". And we've even seen fans clash with each other, bringing (irrelevant) ethnic conflicts from the other side of the world to the tennis court. The craziest thing is that a large number of these rowdy fans not only have no interest in tennis whatsoever but have never even been to the ancestral country they're so passionate about!
Back to Nole. The Australian media on the whole has not been favourable to Novak Djoković, particularly since 2022 when his anti-vax stance was at major odds with Australia's strict quarantine laws at the time.
Ex-Yugo social media at the time had two opposing stances on the matter.
It was either:
☆ "If Tito was around, the Aussies wouldn't be treating Novak Djoković like that"
This is a reference to the high international status Yugoslavia had during Tito's rule... and the lack of that status that the Balkans have now
or
☆ "If Tito was around, Novak would have been vaccinated"
This last quote is in part reference to the swift response that the Yugoslav authorities displayed when in March 1972 a Kosovar Albanian man returned from hajj with smallpox and quickly infected 140 people. Within a month, all 18 million of Yugoslavia's population were vaccinated and the pandemic declared over by the end of May 1972. A far cry from the mass vaccine scepticism present in the Balkans today.
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