It was a great privilege to be at the Australian Open last Sunday to see Djokovic beat Murray in straight sets.
I was fortunate enough to be in the presence of a truly humble man we used to call the Rockhampton Rocket. Now he's better known as Rod Laver AC and he is the most self-effacing person you could ever meet. During the match a fan approached saying: "I can't believe that I am in the Rod Laver Arena with Rod Laver."
"Neither can I," remarked the smiling champion who won 200 singles titles - a record that still stands today. 
A little further across the room was Ashley Cooper. Older readers will remember Ashley as one of our great stars, winner of four grand slams including Wimbledon in 1958. In that year, eight of the top 10 players in the world were Australians, who had the advantage of being able to play on beautifully maintained grass courts while Europe was still rebuilding cities following World War II.
World tennis never looked back because of these great Australians, many of whom, including Ken Rosewall and Neil Fraser, are regular faces at the Open every year.
It's worth remembering that Rosewall and Laver broke away from the traditional divide of amateur and professional tennis to create "Open" tennis, where any player could compete if they were good enough. And so the great modern game began.
The Australian Open finished last Sunday, with more than 720,000 attending the main courts.
When you add the additional 200,000-plus who attended in the surrounding parkland, the Melbourne event is bigger than the US Open, the French Open and Wimbledon. When it comes to tennis, we may not have as many players in the top 10 these days but we do have the No. 1 tournament. That is an enormous boost to our economy and our global standing.
At the same time as the Open, high up in the Swiss Alps, 3500 world leaders were at the Davos World Economic Forum talking about important things. Our former PM Tony Abbott attended last year and was apparently largely ignored. Malcolm Turnbull didn't make the same mistake. He didn't go.
You could hear some insider talk about how Australia seems to be slipping a bit these days, but I'd rather be with the winners like Rod Laver and Neil Fraser and the modern-day champions who come from all over the world to be in Melbourne. Many of these players could make more money in China or the Middle East but they choose to be at the No. 1 tournament.
We have to be a destination of choice and to do that we have to be world class in everything we do. That's the lesson that the Rod Lavers of the world teach us.
Having got rich during the past decades by digging up the ground, we are at a point of needing to fully realise that our only real resource is our people. If we can learn from this we'll continue to be a very wealthy nation.
If we get it wrong, we will be, as Lee Kwan Yu once said, "The poor white trash of Asia."
Australians are highly educated, motivated and successful. But we are also laconic and laid back. Perhaps a little too laid back for our own good these days.We love to win but do we have a sufficient fear of failure?
The great United States tennis ace Jimmy Connors put his spin on this when he said, "I hate to lose more than I love to win."
The world doesn't care about Australia, nor should it.
We simply have to excel at anything we do. We can't relax.
Louise pipes up: "Tell your grandkids. Life wasn't meant to be easy." Charlie says: "Someone else said that."
I get that. Game, set and match.