Source : the age
There was a time when Jelena Dokic could barely speak. She couldn’t string a sentence together. She couldn’t look people in the eye. Throughout her childhood, her father Damir had kept her quiet with the threat of his fists. She was too scared to risk using her own words and parroted his, instead. He taught her not only that she’d be punished for daring to speak, but also that if she did speak, no one would listen. “I was silenced for my whole life,” she says.
Over decades of abuse, Dokic’s voice all but dried up. It seems like a minor thing beside the bruises, the name-calling and the punishments, but it lasted long after the marks had faded. Silencing doesn’t get much air time in the public conversation about family violence, but almost every victim has experienced it. “Don’t you dare say anything to anyone,” her father told her, “because I’ll kill you.” When someone’s voice is quashed, their sense of self fades to nothing. Even after the physical abuse is over, the ability to express oneself without fear is one of the hardest things to recover.
Jelena Dokic has found her voice.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
These days, by her own admission, Dokic won’t shut up. It’s a standing joke in the tennis commentary team at Nine (publisher of this masthead) that she could talk underwater. She’s a favourite among audiences because of her sharp insights, both about the game and those who play it. People who’ve had therapy themselves tend to be incisive about others, too. I ask whether volatile Australian talent Nick Kyrgios is misunderstood. “I don’t know if he even knows,” she says. “I don’t know if he knows who he is as a player and as a person yet.”
Most Australians are familiar with the story of Dokic’s childhood; some of us watched it unfold, complicit as passive bystanders. Many know about her sporting achievements, which include a No. 4 ranking and reaching the semis at Wimbledon.
Fewer, however, understand the magnitude of what she’s achieved since. How, just a decade or so ago, she was broke and bedridden with depression, crushed by the weight of her trauma and robbed of her prize winnings by her father. She was afraid of getting on a plane, afraid of dying, afraid of her own voice. She was scared that shadowy people were following her though the streets. It’s taken momentous courage to put her life back together. And now, she’s in demand on the lucrative speaker circuit. She has a close network of friends.
The turning point, she says, was learning to use her voice again. With that power restored, Dokic was unleashed.
Eggs, salmon toast and coffee at the Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
We meet at the Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park. This column usually invites its guests to lunch, but there is no time for that in Dokic’s whirlwind timetable. She’s sitting primly on a lounge waiting for me, in a stylish navy dress. I introduce myself and that famous, charismatic smile washes over her face.
We walk up to the hotel breakfast buffet, where neither of us eats nearly enough to justify the $54 a person cost. We grab toast, eggs and a bit of bacon and salmon before finding a quiet table next to a long glass window. I had worried an hour wasn’t enough, as most guests take a while to warm up. I was nervous, too, about pressing her about her traumatic past in such a short time. I needn’t have worried. The power of speech has returned to Dokic in full force; she is warm, articulate and insightful.
We begin by discussing the hectic month of tennis that lies in front of her. She can’t wait. Despite all the trauma infused in her memories of it, and despite the fact she never chose to do it in the first place – it was her father’s idea – the sport is still Dokic’s happy place. “Loved it, even though I went through so much because of it,” she says. “I love hitting balls. I love watching players practise. I’ll do the commentary days and still go out there and watch matches. I’m glad because that’s another thing that could have turned into maybe a bit of hate.”
Flashback to Yugoslavia, in 1989. Dokic is six years old and her father, Damir, is inspired by Monica Seles to buy a white tennis racquet for his daughter. He throws balls to her in their apartment courtyard, and she sends them flying back. She’s a natural. Her father, who has never played, becomes a self-styled expert. He’d had disappointments in his own life – an alcoholic father, an abusive mother, frustrated career ambitions – and wants another shot at success through his daughter. He is increasingly obsessive, controlling and cruel. She grows afraid. Her fear drives her to excellence.
“I would do it all again”: Dokic doesn’t regret her tennis career and still loves the game.Credit: Reuters
Their move to Australia tightens his grip. She leaves her friends behind, and Australian kids bully her. She’s isolated. She trains all the time. She has coaches, but her father is always courtside, glowering and often drunk. When they’re alone, he hits her, pulls her hair, calls her a slut and a whore. She wears long-sleeved shirts to hide the marks on her skin, but they can’t hide it all. People suspect her father is abusing her but, worried the beatings will get worse, she denies everything.
She perfects her poker face, even as she becomes more successful, his abuse becomes worse, and his drunken antics become more embarrassing.
Dokic’s book, written with journalist Jessica Halloran in 2017, details all this. But the footage in her new documentary, Unbreakable, brings it to life (Halloran is co-director). There she is at the 2001 Australian Open, booed by 15,000 people after Damir insists she play for Yugoslavia. He’d made the decision, yet she carried the blame. There she is at a press conference, a wide-eyed child defending her aggressive father. “Someone said in the documentary that my press conferences look like hostage situations,” Dokic says. “And I was like, ‘oh my god, that’s exactly it’.”
Dokic’s challenge, as an adult, has been to reckon with her history. She has done so unflinchingly, and worked hard to manage the crippling anxiety, the eating disorder, the post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma.
Jelena Dokic at the US Open in 2000.Credit: Getty Images
But her story also requires the Australian community – particularly sports bodies, child protection authorities and the media – to tackle difficult questions about their own role in her abuse. Everyone suspected Damir was a brute yet believed a stony-faced child when she was pushed in front of the world’s media to say she was OK. The signs were everywhere; in one highly publicised incident at the 2000 US Open, he was banned because of a violent, highly public outburst over the price of fish in the players’ lounge.
Still, Dokic was left in Damir’s hands. “Two underage kids [Dokic and her younger brother] were going home with this person,” she says. “Even at the time, to me, it was incredible that no one asked that question.”
Her father wasn’t the only abuser hiding in plain sight. The history of professional sport, and particularly tennis, is thick with abusive fathers. They included Andre Agassi’s former boxer father, Mike, who taped a racquet to his son’s hand as soon as he could walk and allegedly gave him speed pills before matches, and Mary Pierce’s father, also Mike, who reportedly once screamed, “kill the bitch” to his daughter during a tournament, and was banned from all tour events for four years. She later hired a bodyguard to keep him away (it’s not just sport, either; Beethoven’s father would force him to practise all night, and refuse to let him sleep).
The community’s understanding of abuse and the lifelong trauma it causes has grown since Dokic’s time. But kids are still at risk on the sporting field. Governing bodies might be catching up, but it’s harder to manage pushy parents who still allow their ambitions and methods to tip over into abuse, particularly behind closed doors. A Flinders University study of almost 1000 people involved in community sport found one in three had experienced parental abuse. Most was psychological, such as humiliation, insults, excessive criticism, ignoring their child after a match, and forcing children to train to the point of exhaustion.
Dokic arrives to the sound of boos at the Australian Open in 2001.Credit: 2001
“The narrative used to be, if you are extremely tough on your child, especially from a young age, it creates champions,” Dokic says. “It creates anything but. The longevity of their careers is cut. It leaves them with mental health struggles. It leaves them with trauma. It leaves them with no self-worth and confidence later on.
“We can’t eradicate this thing, but we need to do the best we can. It’s not nice to hear stories coming out of especially junior tournaments, where so many parents come up to me and say this is happening, that is happening.”
Still, there’s a level of sacrifice and discipline required for success, Dokic says. “There’s no going around it. You want to be an athlete, you sacrifice. You don’t go out, you miss birthday parties. Is it worth it? I think so. I would do it all again.”
Dokic says it took just a handful of people to help her begin the process of recovering her voice; to convince her she was worth listening to. “I always say you maybe need just one person to believe in you and to open that door a little bit for you to feel like, ‘I can do it’.” Halloran was one. Her former partner, and still good friend, Tin Bikic was another. A third was Todd Woodbridge, the former tennis champion, who encouraged her to face her past, then move into commentary. “He said, ‘Forget about tennis, tennis is done. You can do this, you can do that, but you’re going to have to be honest with your story’.”
Voicing that story, even just to her co-author, was horrendously painful at first. Every step forward – the therapy, confronting her memories, battling the physical triggers (she would duck when her former partner tried to touch her hair) – took enormous courage. As hard, if not harder, than playing before 15,000 booing fans. But, like Gisele Pelicot, she came to realise that “it is not for us to have shame”, as Pelicot said, “but for them”. With each telling, her story has become easier to carry. She tells it often now. “Speaking saved my life,” she says. “So that’s why I’m such a big kind of advocate of being able to have a place to talk and speak up.”
Many in her position would be eaten away by anger at the injustice of what was allowed to happen to her. Yet it wasn’t rage that consumed Dokic, when her trauma finally caught up with her; it was sadness. It must take a Herculean effort – a grace that’s beyond many of us – but she is determined to focus on forgiveness. She says she doesn’t even hate her father. Rather than let her story destroy her, she wants it to help others. “I’m actually friends with a lot of people that knew, and we talk about it all the time, and they’ve even apologised, which I’m so grateful for,” she says.
It’s this hard-fought peace that is, arguably, Dokic’s greatest achievement. “I always say that [tennis is] the least interesting thing about me,” she says. “I think everything I’ve done post-tennis career is really what I’m extra proud of. It’s not easy … to go into these different things when you have no knowledge, when you have no confidence, when you don’t know what’s next. So to have built these different careers and leave a legacy behind is extremely meaningful.”
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