NEW YORK — Novak Djokovic has lost in the first round of the U.S. Open, and the result, by the standards of the sport, is the tennis equivalent of a door that, for twenty years, has been so firmly closed that people have, at this point, built furniture against it. The 38-time Grand Slam champion fell in five sets to Argentina’s Mariano Navone, his first opening-round defeat at a major since the Australian Open of 2006, a match he battled through while visibly ill.

The detail that has the sport talking is not that he lost. The detail is how close he was to not losing. Djokovic led by two sets to one and held a break in the fourth, and then, over the final two sets, did what Djokovic does, which is to be, for a moment, a human being with a temperature and a schedule, and the match, which had been a formality, became, in the words of one analyst, “a different kind of formality.”

"He was up two sets to one. You can lead by two sets to one and still, in tennis, be in the first round. That is not a flaw in the system. That is the system."

Navone, who has been, for the better part of a decade, a very good tennis player in the way that a very good restaurant is a very good restaurant, has now, for the second time in a short period, been described by the broadcast booth as “the player everyone has a story about.” The story, in this case, is that he won, and that the person he beat had, until the changeover in the third set, been described in the present tense.

The illness has not been specified, and the camp has not been, in the language of the tour, “concerned so much as attentive.” The tour, which has a long and well-documented history of players competing through everything from the flu to the concept of the off day, has been, per the officials, “respectful of the process.”

THE MATCH, AT A GLANCE

  • First-round major loss since 2006, a gap of twenty years, which is, in tour time, “a moment” rather than a span
  • Leading two sets to one and holding a break in the fourth, before the final two sets did, in the players’ own word, “the rest of the explaining”
  • Navone, who has been, for some time, “a name you recognize,” now, per the bracket, “a name you have to beat”
  • The illness, which has been, per the camp, “managed,” in the way that a tour manages everything, including the word “managed”
  • The first round, which has now, in 2026, produced, per the draw, “a result,” a word the sport uses when it is, in fact, a story

The draw, which has not yet been consulted about the implications, is, per the tournament, “a draw,” and the bracket, which has, in a single match, produced what one historian called “a new paragraph,” is, per the officials, “still in progress,” which is, in tennis, the phrase that means “the story is not over, but the first round, in this case, is.”

At press time, Navone was preparing for the second round, and Djokovic was, per the tour, “resting,” a word that, in the vocabulary of the sport, has, for twenty years, meant “the next match,” and, in this case, means, for the moment, nothing at all.