The sellout crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium was cheering Novak Djokovic’s miscues and even disrupting his service motion on occasion, all with the common goal of trying to propel Roger Federer across the finish line under the Sunday night lights at the United States Open.
But Djokovic said that was not the way he processed the partisan noise.
“What I was actually doing was trying to play a mind game with myself,” he said in an interview on Monday. “They would scream, ‘Roger!’ and I would imagine they were screaming, ‘Novak!