I have written tennis. I covered the entirety of Wimbledon in 1985 and 1986. The first year, some German kid named Boris Becker won. The second year, he won again.

Tennis is fairly far down the list of sports I know best … and sports I like. But when the staffing situation at the paper is dire, and it’s something I do, in fact, know at least a little about … there we go.

A few days before Abu Dhabi’s one big tennis event, which includes Djokovic, Nadal and Federer, I had a chance tonight to speak to Djokovic’s coach.

That story appeared here, in The National.

What did Marian Vajda have to say?

1. He talked about how Djokovic had a crisis of confidence in mid-2010 because he had trouble with his serve. “His serve was terrible in 2010,” Vajda said. “We can say it openly.”

2. He said Djokovic hopes/plans to have as much success in 2012 as he did in 2011, which would be a heck of an encore; he won three majors and 10 tournaments total, in 2011, but adds that Djokovic’s physical condition is the key to any of that.

3. He related how he came to be Djokovic’s coach in 2006. Someone in the Djokovic camp saw him coaching, and liked that he seemed like a taskmaster, and the coach from Slovakia met with Novak and his parents at the French Open … and he has been his coach since.

I met Vajda at the Fairmont Hotel, one of the posh new hotels in the Between Two Bridges area — across the water from the enormous Zayed Mosque. I actually wore khaki slacks and hard shoes; not because I thought Marian Vajda would be overdressed, but because I didn’t want to look underdressed in the Fairmont.

That’s tennis for you. Suddenly you worry about what you’re wearing.

Vajda was a pleasant man, cosmopolitan and chatty, like so many tennis people are. They travel the world, they’ve seen things, they have become articulate — or probably were even before they got started.

So, now, on to four days of coverage of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship, a six-man, three-day event in a very handy tennis stadium at Zayed Sports City.

Novak Djokovic plays Gael Monfils and David Ferrer plays Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Day 1, on Thursday, and the winner of the Djokovic match gets Roger Federer in one semi and the Ferrer-Tsonga winner gets Nadal in the other semi.

(Why Djokovic, No. 1 ranked in the world, has to play on the first day and Nadal and Federer do not, is not clear. And if you weren’t keeping track, this tournament has the world’s Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 16 ranked players in it. Yeah.)

The event is interesting … but it also is not actually an ATP event. It’s an exhibition. No rankings points at stake. The ATP season actually begins next week. This is a sort of warmup for it, not dissimilar to the women’s event I covered in Hong Kong for the International Herald Tribune three years ago.

Could be fun, though. Certainly, I’m familiar with all the guys involved, and I haven’t seen any of them in person since covering the Indian Wells tournament in the spring of 2009.

But it’s a little weird to be Tennis Guy for a week.