LONDON — Barring upset or injury, Novak Djokovic will be eating grass in less than two weeks.
After each of his past seven Wimbledon men’s singles wins, he has dropped down to the Centre Court turf and tasted a blade of grass. It’s going to take some monumental effort, or an unfortunate event, to prevent him from repeating this on July 16 and securing his 24th Grand Slam.
But there’s another honor on his radar as well — one that has not been achieved on the men’s side since 1969.
The calendar Grand Slam is an elusive feat. Only five players in the history of women’s and men’s singles have won the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open in a single year, and it has been managed only three times since the start of the Open era in 1968.
Djokovic has come close twice before, only to fall short. In 2021, he was one match away from securing all four Slams that year, but lost the US Open final to Daniil Medvedev. “Never have I lived through such pressure in my career,” he said after, at the Paris Masters.
Two years later, with the Australian and French Open title already secured, Djokovic is halfway there. But with it comes that same incredible burden.
The five who’ve done it
The quest officially began back in 1925, when the four tournaments gained major status. But tennis would have to wait until 1938 for its first calendar Grand Slam to be achieved, when American Don Budge swept all four majors. Budge was also the youngest to ever hold a “Career Slam” (winning all four during his career), which he did halfway through that year when he won the French Open just before his 23rd birthday.
“He stands tall in the record books,” five-time Slam champion Tony Trabert later said of Budge. “His backhand was what we called a concluder; the sort of shot people will still be talking about a hundred years later.”
Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly was 18 years old when she became the first to collect all four women’s singles titles in 1953, remarkably dropping only one set in the process. Her career would end two weeks after she won the 1954 Wimbledon title after she suffered injuries from a horse-riding accident. But by that point she’d already secured her spot in history and with it, an early understanding of tennis burnout. “Tennis can be a…
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