Novak Djokovic waltzes to a 20th-straight victory over Gaël Monfils at Brisbane International

In 2004, in the small town of Santa Margherita di Pula in Sardinia, Italy, two teenage tennis players, met in the quarter-final of a nondescript ITF “futures” tournament.

The elder of the two, a 17-year-old Frenchman named Gaël Monfils, won that encounter, in what is the third-tier tennis…