There was a time when Novak Djokovic relished serving as tennis’ disruptor-in-chief.

He had handled the job on the court to perfection. When he entered the top ranks of professional tennis in the late aughts, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal reigned.

For much of the next decade-and-a-half, Djokovic flipped over the buffet table. He surpassed Federer and Nadal’s records, achieving a winning head-to-head against both of them, as well as winning more Grand Slam titles, winning more ATP Masters 1000 titles, and spending more weeks as world No. 1 than either of them. There’s a decent chance that this season, Djokovic will supplant Federer at No. 2 in career titles, leaving Jimmy Connors’ record of 109 tournament wins as the last remaining important record he does not have.

In August 2020, Djokovic basically decided to try to pull off the same feat off the court. He was president of the ATP Tour player council; Federer and Nadal were leading members. Federer had partnered with Tennis Australia and the United States Tennis Association, organizers of the Australian and U.S. Opens, to create the Laver Cup. The team competition became an official part of the ATP Tour calendar, despite not awarding ranking points.

Then Djokovic resigned, throwing his weight behind the Professional Tennis Players’ Association (PTPA), which he co-founded with Canadian tennis player Vasek Pospisil. Federer and Nadal stayed with the tour and called for unity, though the time was ripe for disruption. The Covid-19 pandemic had brought tennis to a standstill. It was a shadow of itself financially. Players grew angrier by the week about diminished pay and an ever-growing list of requirements and restrictions.

Players had a voice through the ATP player council. Three player representatives sat on the ATP Tour board; three tournament representatives did, too. On any deadlocks, the chairman of the tour, Andrea Gaudenzi, would have the deciding vote. Djokovic instead proposed an organization of independent contractors, lacking the collective strength of a true union but independent in governance.

So there was the PTPA, the organization that will now have to work hard to survive without Djokovic, if only because his departure, which he announced Sunday, threatens to create the perception of a player-led organization without a major player leading it.

Djokovic was 33, a clear world No. 1, and in peak health with many years left in his already storied career when he co-founded the PTPA. He was determined to leave the experience of being a tennis player better for future players than it had been for him. More money for players at every level. More freedom to play when and where they wanted to. A real say in the operations of the sport.

More than five years later, plenty has changed — for the PTPA, for the organizations that run tennis, and for Djokovic. The Serbian champion increasingly found that disrupting tennis didn’t fit all that well with his shifting role as the sport’s elder statesman, a position he garnered through all the winning he did in recent years, even as he aged, which helped make him more of a crowd favorite and sentimental hero than he had ever been.

He liked that, as anyone else would. With his retirement approaching sooner or later, he’d prefer for it to continue, and even crescendo as the exit grows closer and he finally leaves the stage, though not even he knows when that might happen.

Could that happen if the organization he co-founded, and which gained so much legitimacy from him, was trying to use the judicial and regulatory systems on two continents to tear down the sport?

Djokovic, like basically everyone in tennis, lives a life filled with conflicts.

He has been a leading critic of the ATP Tour. He and his family now oversee an ATP tour event in Athens.

The past two years, he has partnered with officials in Saudi Arabia, collecting millions to appear at the Six Kings Slam exhibition event. The Saudis are now among the leading investors in the men’s and women’s tours and are set to hold an ATP Masters 1000 tournament as soon as 2028.

Djokovic reveres the Grand Slams, especially Wimbledon, which he has won seven times, and the Australian Open, which he has won 10 times. Last year, a group of top players asked him to sign a letter demanding a greater share of their revenues in prize money. He did.

Then, some of those players circulated a second letter, demanding greater pay and also greater contributions to pension and parental leave programs for players and a voice in how the four majors operate. Djokovic passed, just as he had when the leaders of the PTPA asked him to put his name on its antitrust lawsuits against the tours, World Tennis, which is the sport’s international governing body, and the International Tennis Integrity Agency, its anti-doping and anti-corruption authority. It removed the latter two organizations as defendants last September, but added the four Grand Slams.

Djokovic was still a de facto leader of the PTPA. Its staff said they were in regular contact with him as the PTPA’s relationships with the sport’s ruling organizations became increasingly adversarial, and filing the lawsuit became inevitable.

Djokovic was well aware of what would happen if he became a named plaintiff in the antitrust actions. The world would see the conflict as him against tennis — and that’s just not where he was anymore.

He was not far away from a time when the leaders of those organizations might approach him about ordering up statues of his likeness. Would that sort of thing happen if he were leading an existential fight for control of the sport’s future?

Everywhere he turned, it seemed to him that people were looking to use him to benefit themselves, and it wasn’t clear what he stood to gain from it all. Maybe, after all these years as a disruptor, doing his best impression of Switzerland was the best solution, even if that decision caused plenty of head-scratching and softened the emotional impact of the lawsuit.

Nine months after the filing, he finds himself at an even further distance from the process. Antitrust actions are not high tea at the All England Club. By definition, one side is trying to drive a battering ram through what it sees as the other side’s domain.

Powerful entities generally resist having their power taken away from them. They use every tool at their disposal to weaken their opponents, often attacking their legitimacy in every possible way. No one is off-limits.

That’s not the sort of place someone in Djokovic’s position, widely viewed as the sport’s greatest player, wanted to be in at this point in his career. During a news conference at last year’s U.S. Open, he reflected on his place in the discussions around reform the past few years, recalling how hard it was to go through all the meetings and the roadblocks, but also suggesting that it was time for others to take the lead.

Then, on Sunday, Djokovic announced that he was officially parting ways with the organization that once seemed like it could be foundational to his legacy.

“After careful consideration, I have decided to step away completely from the Professional Tennis Players Association,” Djokovic announced on social media. “This decision comes after ongoing concerns regarding transparency, governance, and the way my voice and image have been represented.”

The PTPA pushed back a few hours later.

“We always welcome the opportunity to address issues with any player, and remain available to do so,” the organization said in a statement. “The PTPA initiated litigation against the tours and Grand Slams to advance reforms related to governance, transparency, and player rights. As a result, we have been targets of a coordinated defamation and witness intimidation campaign through the spreading of inaccurate and misleading narratives intended to discredit the PTPA, its staff, and its work.”

The question now is whether the PTPA can survive without Djokovic. The organization has a for-profit arm, Winners Alliance, which seeks partnerships for athletes and helps fund the operations of the PTPA. It also has private investors, notably Bill Ackman, the outspoken Wall Street veteran and tennis enthusiast.

Winners Alliance was an investor in Grand Slam Track, Olympian Michael Johnson’s ill-fated start-up league that has gone bankrupt. It has asserted that the athletes who were part of that effort get paid, but GST’s bankruptcy disclosure showed collective debts of over $ 1 million to global stars including Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Gabby Thomas, Josh Kerr and Kenny Bednarek.

Ahmad Nassar, who previously worked with the NFL Players Association and in college sports, serves as both the executive director of the PTPA and the chief executive of Winners Alliance. He is the one who has to keep both ships afloat without the legitimacy that Djokovic’s support delivered, even if Djokovic had been leading from the rear for some time, and there are questions on the horizon.

With Djokovic’s departure, will investors follow? Will companies want to partner with an entity that no longer has any association with him? While Djokovic’s departure has little bearing on antitrust lawsuits, it can add to the perception of an adrift organization — an organization that needs funding to continue if it wants to stay the legal course it has set for itself and for tennis.

Djokovic has decided that it is not his problem anymore. He has a legendary career to complete. He has the opportunity to set up his post-retirement existence as he chooses, something only a handful of ex-athletes get the chance to do.

With Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner dominating the sport, another period of on-court disruption appears unlikely. Now his days of disruption off the court appear at an end, too.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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