The 54th-ranked Mensik faced tough odds in only his second ATP final but harnessed his best weapon to subdue the 24-time Major winner with 14 aces and collapsed onto the court, overcome with emotion, after sealing it with an unreturnable serve. The oldest ever to reach a Masters 1000 final, 37-year-old Djokovic had hoped to join Jimmy Connors (109) and Roger Federer (103) as the only three men in the Open Era with 100 or more titles but ran out of steam in the end.
“When I was young I started to play tennis because of you,” Mensik said to his opponent at the trophy ceremony. “There is no harder task for a tennis player than to beat you in the finals of a tournament.”
Djokovic arrived on the court after several hours of rain delays with swelling near his right eye and appeared off-kilter as he handed Mensik a break with a clumsy shot out of bounds in the second game.
He slipped and fell in the fifth game, taking his time to get back up off the court as his legions of devoted fans in Hard Rock Stadium urged him on, and applied eye drops to his afflicted eye during the changeover.
The Serb levelled it in the seventh but boiled over with frustration as Mensik got off to a 5-0 head start in the tiebreak, fuming at his box, where his former rival-turned-coach Andy Murray sat stone-faced. The Czech held his nerve to clinch the set with an overhead smash.
The two players battled toe-to-toe in a thrilling second set, in which Mensik used his speed to his advantage to neutralise Djokovic’s fine drop shots at the net.
Djokovic had his veteran survival instincts on display as he fended off two break points in the fifth game but gradually showed the wear-and-tear of the match before collapsing from exhaustion after a 21-shot rally in the tiebreak. “It hurts me to admit it but you were better,” said Djokovic, who had previously invited Mensik to train with him after the then 16-year-old reached the Australian Open juniors final in 2022.
The victory was made all the more sweet as Mensik said he nearly dropped out of the tournament an hour before his first match due to knee pain.
