On a Shanghai tennis court, an education in grace

Grace can be hard, but that's precisely what makes it alluring.

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Emotional cousins Arthur Rinderknech (near left) and Valentin Vacherot, who won 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, on stage after the Shanghai Masters final.

(PHOTO: AFP)

You have to find it when you least feel like it. You have to show it when you're down, beaten, lost, saliva congealing in a dry mouth after a long match. You have to extract it when self-esteem's leaking like sweat.

No professional athlete wants losing to become a habit, but somehow they make grace into one. Certainly he does, this beaten-up, breaking-apart champion, for whom winning was a mad, consuming, validating, vitalising thing. But now the precision machine inside him is broken, his deterioration clear in a quarter-step loss of speed, yet somehow he's kept his grip on grace.

This is the continuing beauty of Novak Djokovic. No one has won more than him in tennis and so you might presume no one should find losing harder. He's not programmed to fall. He's not practised at failing. At 38, you can see him, on some lunatic, prideful search to exhaust every fraction of desire and lung power which remains, trying to attempt some human version of kintsugi and repair himself.

Yet in the Shanghai Masters semifinals, when he let go of what he has so few of, which is chances, and lost to a world No. 204, he still found what sport is short of Grace.