TennisThey Said What?

Correction: Novak Djokovic Doesn’t Own All The Donkey Cheese In The Whole Wide World

Early last week we told you a tale, and it was a false one. It was one of donkey cheese, Novak Djokovic and monopoly. That, as part of an effort to open up a chain of restaurants in his home country of Serbia, he had purchased all the super-secret-special cheese produced by super-secret-special donkeys on a super-secret-special reserve. But it turns out that the deal was never completed, according to the New York Times.

“Responding to a series of e-mail questions about pule, Jovan Vukadinovic, a manager at Zasavica, concluded with a rather deflating piece of information. ‘Novak Djokovic never bought our cheese,’ he wrote.

What happened, he explained, was this: Slobodan Simic, the farm’s donkey breeder, left a sample of the cheese with the manager of Mr. Djokovic’s restaurant in Belgrade, offering to let the restaurant have an exclusive on the product. He still awaits a reply. ‘That is the only truth, and the rest are made up by journalists,’ Mr. Vukadinovic wrote.”

He never bought the cheese!?!? WOAH, somebody lied. So who do we blame for this miscarriage of truth? Foreigners, of course.

“The Daily Mail, hot on the trail of pule, sent a reporter named Robert Hardman to Serbia for a tasting. When he discovered that the Djokovic story was shaky, he buried the bad news deep in the story and swathed it in a few layers of obfuscation, suggesting that Mr. Simic is now ‘waiting to clinch the deal.’”

So Novak Djokovic could still buy the cheese. Phew.

This concludes our important rare donkey cheese update and we apologize for the reporting error.

[New York Times]

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