TENNIS in DEPTH.

The father of tennis player Jelena Dokic will face a retrial on the charges that he threatened the Australian ambassador to Serbia.

Damir Dokic was sentenced to 15 months in jail in June, but a retrial was ordered because ambassador Claire Birgin did not testify in person during the original hearing. She was as instead represented by a lawyer.

Mr Dokic, 50, was brought under police escort to the court in Ruma, a town about 30 miles northwest of Belgrade.

“We expect justice from the court and that Damir will be a free man,” Bosiljka Djukic, Mr Dokic’s lawyer, said before the court proceedings started.

In June, Mr Dokic was found guilty of “endangering the security” of the ambassador in Belgrade and unlawful possession of weapons, including a hand grenade, which were impounded during a police search of his home.

Mr Dokic was arrested in May after reportedly saying he would blow up Birgin’s car if she didn’t stop negative articles about him from being published in Australia. Ms Dokic had given interviews to the Australian media, saying her father had beaten her.

Mr Dokic told Serbian media he would fire a rocket launcher at Birgin’s car, but later said the statements were made in anger. He also has admitted having beaten his daughter.

Ms Dokic, who burst on to the tennis scene in 1999 aged 16 when she beat the then World No 1 Martina Hingis at Wimbledon, has been shadowed for years by rumours of her father’s abuse. Coaches and team-mates told of hearing her being hit in her hotel room and of seeing bruises on her.

Her father, a former boxer and truck driver who dreamed of coaching his daughter to success and fame, became a controversial figure on the circuit. In 1999 he was ejected from a tennis tournament in Birmingham for calling tennis officials Nazis and the next year he flew into a rage over the price of a meal in the US Open players’ cafe, swearing at tennis officials and ripping his daughter’s competition accreditation from her neck.

Ms Dokic fled her family in 2002 after a tournament in Europe and has hardly spoken to her father since. She has struggled to reclaim her position of almost a decade ago but made a comeback at this year’s Australian Open, almost defeating the world No 3 Dinara Safina in the quarter-finals, after entering as a wild card.

She told Sport and Style of her decision to run from her family: “There was no other way I could deal with the situation I was in. I just wanted to get out of my own skin,” she said. “I wanted someone else’s life.”

The trauma of her early life had served only to strengthen her resolve on the court, she added. “When you go through stuff like that, playing a tennis match is a pretty easy thing to do.”

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