Rafa

by Rafael Nadal

One day when I was seven, I was playing in a match against a boy of twelve. We didn’t rate our chances very highly, so Toni told me before the game that if I went down 0–5, he’d bring on the rain so the game would have to be called off. Well, as I saw it at the time, he lost faith too soon. Because the rain started falling when I was down 0–3. Then I won the next two games and suddenly I felt confident about my chances. So I went up to my uncle during the changeover at 2–3 and I said, “I think you can stop the rain now. I reckon I can beat this guy.” A couple of games later the rain stopped, and in the end I lost 7–5. But two more years had to pass before I stopped believing my uncle was a rainmaker.

  So there was fun and magic in my relationship with Toni, even if the prevailing mood when we trained was stony and severe. And we had plenty of success. If he hadn’t made me play without water that day, if he hadn’t singled me out for especially harsh treatment when I was in that group of little kids learning the game, if I hadn’t cried as I did at the injustice and abuse he heaped on me, maybe I would not be the player I am today. He always stressed the importance of endurance. “Endure, put up with whatever comes your way, learn to overcome weakness and pain, push yourself to breaking point but never cave in. If you don’t learn that lesson, you’ll never succeed as an elite athlete”: that was what he taught me.

  Often I’d struggle to contain my rage. “Why is it me and not the other boys who have to sweep the court after training?” I’d ask myself. “Why do I have to pick up more balls than the other? Why does he scream at me that way when I hit the ball out?” But I learned to internalize that anger too, not to fret at the injustice, to accept it and get on with it. Yes, he might have gone too far, but it’s worked very well for me. All that tension in every single coaching session, right from the very start, has allowed me today to face up to the difficult moments in a match with more self-control than might otherwise have been the case. Toni did a lot to build that fighting character people say they see in me on court.

  But my values as a person and my way of being, which ultimately is what underlines my game, come from my father and mother. It’s true that Toni has insisted I have to behave well on court, set an example, never throw a racket to the floor in anger, something I have never, ever done. But—and this is the point—if I had been brought up differently at home, I might not have paid him any attention. My parents always imposed a lot of discipline on me. They were very proper about things like table manners—“Don’t talk with your mouth full!” “Sit up straight!”—about the need to be courteous and polite to everybody—say “good morning” and “good afternoon” to people we meet, shake hands with everybody. Both my parents and, for that matter, my uncle Toni have always said that, never mind the tennis, their biggest desire was that I should grow up to be “good people.” My mother says that if I were not, if I behaved like a spoiled brat, she would still love me, but she’d be too embarrassed to travel halfway around the world to watch me play. They drummed into me the importance of treating everybody with respect from an early age. Whenever our team lost a football match, my father insisted that I had to go up to the players of the rival team afterward and congratulate them. I had to say to each one of them something like “Well done, champ. Very well played.” I didn’t like it. I felt miserable when we lost, and my face must have showed that my heart wasn’t in the words I was saying. But I knew I’d get into trouble if I didn’t do as my father said, so I did it. And the habit stayed with me. It comes naturally to me to praise an opponent after he’s beaten me, or even if I’ve won, if he deserves it.

  For all the discipline, I had an amazingly happy and warm family life as a child, and maybe that is why I was able to put up with the harsh treatment I received from Toni. One balanced the other out, because above all what my parents gave me was an incredible feeling of security. My father, Sebastián, is the oldest of my grandparents’ five children and I was the first grandchild. This meant that I was fussed over by my three uncles and my aunt, who had no children of their own then, as well as by my grandparents, right from my very first days. They tell me that I was the family mascot, their “favorite toy.” My father says that when I was only fifteen days old, he and my mother would leave me to stay overnight at my grandparents’, where my uncles and my aunt still lived. When I was a baby and then later when I was a child of two and three, they’d take me with them to the bar where they met their friends, chatted, and played cards or billiards or Ping Pong. Mixing in adult company became the most natural thing in the world for me. I have unforgettably warm memories of those times. My aunt Marilén, who is also my godmother, would take me to the beach in Porto Cristo, just ten minutes away from Manacor, which is inland, and I’d lie on her tummy, dozing in the sun. With my uncles I’d play football in the corridor of the apartment, or down in the garage. One of my uncles, Miguel Ángel, was a professional footballer. He played for Mallorca, and later for Barcelona and for Spain. When I was very small, they’d take me along to the stadium to watch him play. For all the haranguing I got from Toni, I am not one of those athletes whose life stories are all about overcoming dark beginnings in their rise to the top. I had a fairy tale childhood.

  One thing I do seem to have in common with everyone I’ve ever heard about who has succeeded in sports is a fanatical competitive edge. As a little boy I’d hate losing at anything. Cards, a little football game in the garage, whatever. I’d throw fits of rage if I lost; I still do. Just a couple of years ago I lost at cards with my family and I went so far as to accuse the others of cheating, which I now see was going a little too far. I don’t know where all that comes from. Maybe from watching my uncles compete in the bar at billiards with their friends. Yet it used to amaze even them that, sweet as I supposedly was, I became transformed into a little demon whenever there was a game on.

  On the other hand, the desire to succeed—linked to the knowledge that you have to work hard to fulfill your ambitions—definitely can be traced to my family. On my mother’s side, they own a furniture business in Manacor, the furniture industry having long been the heart of the town’s economy. My grandfather’s father died when he was ten, and from an early age he learned the family craft. He became a master furniture maker. In my mother’s house, where I live, we still have an incredibly fine chest of drawers that he made with his own hands. My grandfather tells me that in the year 1970, two thousand beds were made in Mallorca and the neighboring Balearic Islands of Ibiza and Menorca. Half of them were made in his workshops. One of my uncles, my godfather, runs the business now.

  The genetic influence on me is even more clear on my father’s side of the family. Not that a passion for sports has always been what defines them. My grandfather, also called Rafael, is a musician. A story he has told us many times reveals what an incredibly single-minded and driven person he was when he was still young. When he was sixteen—he is in his eighties now and going very strong, still working in music, doing opera with children—he set up and directed a choir in town. A serious choir, so serious that when he was nineteen, the head of what was then the newly formed symphonic orchestra of Mallorca—we’re talking the late 1940s now—came to him and asked him if he could prepare his choir for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Palma, the island’s capital. This was not long after the Spanish Civil War and the country was very poor. It was an amazingly ambitious enterprise. All the more so because, of the eighty-four members of the choir, only half a dozen knew how to read music. The rest were amateurs. But my grandfather did not let this deter him. They rehearsed every single day for six and a half months, and, as he says, “the day came when a Mallorcan heard Beethoven’s Ninth for the first time, live, inside a theater.” It was, as he tells it, a famous day in the island’s history. It would not have happened without him. And he was only nineteen.

  I think it might have been a little disappointing for him that none of his five children showed any aptitude for music, and surprising that three of them should have turned out to be gifted at sports. Not
my father, though. He’s a businessman, heart and soul; one of those who doesn’t just do it for the money, but for the thrill of it too. He loves making deals, setting up companies, creating jobs. He’s always been this way.

  One summer when he was sixteen he set up a bar in Porto Cristo, the beach resort nearest to Manacor, where he organized musical events. From the proceeds he bought himself his first motorbike. When he was nineteen, he saw an opportunity in the used cars business. He found that agents were charging a lot of money for the paperwork needed to change the ownership of vehicles, so he figured out how to offer the service at a better price. He worked as a bank employee for a short while, got bored, and then, through a friend of his father—who aside from his music had a sideline in real estate—he got involved in a glass-making business in Manacor. They cut the glass for windows, tables, and doors. The business went well because of a tourism boom in Mallorca, and in two years my father raised a loan, with my uncle Toni as his partner, and bought out the company. Toni had no talent for, or interest in, business, so my father did all the work, allowing Toni to dedicate himself full-time to his tennis coaching, and to me. Today my father is as busy as he ever has been. He’s still involved in the glass business; he has interests in real estate and he helps explore potentially lucrative investments on my behalf. Thanks to the good luck I’ve had and the contacts I’ve made, he is operating at a higher level of business, internationally, than ever before. He doesn’t need to do this for himself, but he does it for me, and also because he enjoys it. He doesn’t stop; he can never have enough new challenges, which is maybe one reason why in the family they all say I take after my father.

  The sporty uncles were Toni, who played professional tennis before becoming a coach; Rafael, who played football in a Mallorcan league for several years; and Miguel Ángel, who made it to the very top in football. His big break came when he signed, aged nineteen, for Mallorca, a club that played in the Spanish first division. The actual day when he signed the contract (with my father acting as his agent) was the day I was born, June 3, 1986. Miguel Ángel was a tall, strong, intelligent, all-terrain player, as capable of playing in defense as in midfield. And he scored a fair number of goals too. Anyone who is impressed by my physical condition or my hard work and perseverance should look at him: he carried on playing professional football at the highest level to the age of thirty-eight. He played sixty-two times for the Spanish national team and more than three hundred times in eight seasons for Barcelona, during which time he won five national league championships and the biggest trophy in club football, the European Cup. I went to watch him play often, but I especially remember him taking me to Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium, the largest in Europe, when I was ten, to play with half a dozen members of the first team after their official training session had ended. I wore a Barcelona shirt that day. A long time would pass before my family stopped teasing me about that because, despite adoring my uncle Miguel Ángel, I have always been and always will be a Real Madrid fan. As everybody knows, Real and Barça are the two most bitter rivals in world football. Why am I a Real fan? Simple. Because my father is, which gives you the measure of how great his influence has been on me as a person.

  Every member of my family has contributed to who I am now. In the case of my uncle Miguel Ángel, I was lucky to get a taste of the kind of life that would await me after I made the grade as a tennis player. He was a big star, especially in Mallorca. In sports, along with the tennis player Carlos Moyá, who was once ranked number one in the world, he was the island’s pride. My uncle was a great example to me. He gave me a glimpse of the life I was to live: he made money and he became famous; he appeared in the media, and he was mobbed and cheered wherever he went. But he never took himself too seriously; he never believed it—he never felt he truly deserved all the adulation he received—and he always remained a modest and straightforward person. That for me he always remained just my uncle meant that I also learned from a young age to put all that celebrity stuff in perspective and, when the time came, to keep my feet on the ground. Miguel Ángel gave practical, flesh-and-blood solidity to the lessons in humility my uncle Toni and my parents taught me early on in my life. I’m very much aware now that everything that’s happened to me is not because of who I am, but because of what I do. There is a difference. There’s Rafa Nadal the tennis player who people see triumphing, and there’s me, Rafael, the person, the same as I always was and the same as I would have been whatever I’d done with my life, whether I’d become well known or not. Miguel Ángel’s also been important for my family: the experience with him prepared them for the experience with me. They were able to cope with my fame more easily and naturally than they might have otherwise.

  Miguel Ángel, now assistant coach at Mallorca Football Club, in the Spanish first division, points out to me these days that other people whose family members have been famous let things go to their heads when they themselves become well known. He says that, quite apart from anything he might have done, my parents and Toni are the ones who prepared me to deal with all the trappings of celebrity, and he praises me for having shown the intelligence to learn those lessons well. Miguel Ángel also believes that I am not fully conscious of the magnitude of what I have achieved. He may be right and, if so, it is probably just as well.

  Things might have turned out very differently for me if I’d opted to play football for a living instead of tennis. Football was the game all kids played in Mallorca, whether they had a family connection with the sport or not. I took the game deadly seriously. Miguel Ángel lived at home with my grandparents in the early years of his professional career. When he had a game the next day, I’d say to him the night before, “Come on! We’ve got to train! We have to win tomorrow!” And with great solemnity, at ten at night, me just four years old, I’d lead him and my uncle Rafael down to the garage for a session of hard running, with and without the ball. It’s comical thinking about it now, but I think that awareness of the importance of preparing hard for success in sport reinforced in me the idea I’ve always had that you get as much out of your game as you put into it.

  Football was my passion as a child, and remains so today. I can be at a tournament in Australia or Bangkok, and if there is a big Real Madrid game on TV at five in the morning, I’ll wake up to watch it—even, sometimes, if I have a match on later that day. And I’ll build my day’s training program, if need be, around the timing of the games. I’m a fanatic. My godfather remembers when I was four years old, how he would show me pictures of the shields of all the teams in the Spanish first division, and—to his amazement—I’d be able to put a name correctly to all of them. Playing at any level, even if it was just a little game in the garage with one of my uncles, I’d get terribly angry if I lost. And I never wanted to stop. My uncle Rafael still recalls, with some pain, the times when I’d stay at his home on Friday night and then wake him up at nine thirty, when he’d gone to bed the night before at five, to get him to come out and play with me. I always managed to convince him. A part of him hated me at the time, but he tells me he found it impossible to resist my enthusiasm. These days I’m on the receiving end. I am the oldest of thirteen cousins, and it is they now who wake me up to play after a long night out. But I’m always up for it. Because I just enjoy it so much and because I never forget how seriously I took the game as a child, especially after I started playing for the local Manacor team competitively in a kids’ league at the age of seven.

  My dad and Miguel Ángel enjoy reminding me how after each of my matches I’d analyze the plays as studiously as we did my uncle’s first division games. I’d discuss my failings as well as my goals, which I scored a lot of from my position on the left wing of the attack (about fifty a season), despite being the youngest member of the team by a year. We trained all week, and on the night before a match I’d be a bag of nerves. I’d wake up at six in the morning to think through the game and prepare myself mentally for it. Partly to calm my nerves, I’d always clean and polish my boots
before a match. My mother and sister chuckle when they remember this, because they say that when it comes to sports I am a disciplined and orderly person, but in everything else I am distracted and chaotic. They are right. My room at home is always a mess—my hotel room when I am traveling too—and I often forget things. All my focus is on the game I am playing, as it was back then before a big match. I’d visualize the game ahead, imagine goals I might score and passes I might make. I’d limber up in my room. I’d prepare almost as intensely as I do before a big tennis match now, and with as much tension. Looking back on it now, it’s funny, but then it was the world to me. More important than tennis, at first, for all the intensity of my sessions with Toni and the belief he transmitted to me that I’d play for a living one day. My dream then, like so many boys my age in Spain, was to be a professional footballer. Even though I was playing competitive tennis too, from the age of seven, and doing well, I always got more nervous before a football match. I guess it was because I wasn’t playing for myself alone; I felt a sense of responsibility toward my teammates.

  I also had a blind faith in our capacity to win games, even when all seemed lost. My uncles remind me how I was always so much more convinced of our chances than the rest of the boys on our team, how there were games when we were losing 5–0 and I’d be there in the locker room yelling, “Let’s not give up! We can still win this!” Or the time when we lost 6–0 away in Palma, and on the way back I said, “It doesn’t matter. When we play them at home, we’ll win.”

  But there were more victories than defeats. I remember lots of games vividly. I remember, in particular, the season we won the Balearic Islands championship, when I was eleven years old. The decisive game was against Mallorca, the big team from the capital of the island. We were losing 1–0 at halftime but came back to win 2–1. A penalty decided the game for us. It was a run I made into the penalty area that provoked a player on the other team into handling the ball right on the goal line. The normal thing would have been for me to take the penalty, as I was the team’s top goal scorer, but I didn’t dare. You look at me now playing a Wimbledon final and you maybe wonder why not. Well, strength of character is something I’ve had to work on. Taking on that responsibility was too much for me at that moment. Luckily, my teammate scored. The joy of winning that championship was as great as the joy of winning a Grand Slam tennis tournament. It may sound strange, but the two are comparable. At that moment it was the greatest thing to which I could aspire. It was the same excitement and sense of triumph, only on a smaller stage.