by Rafael Nadal
I don’t think there is anything in any area of life that gives you the same rush as winning in sport, whatever the sport and at whatever the level. There is no feeling as intense or as joyous. And the more you crave winning, the greater the rush when you succeed.
My first taste of that in tennis came when I was eight and won the championship of the Balearic Islands in the under-12s category. That ranks for me, still today, as one of the greatest victories of my career. A difference of four years at that age feels like an eternity; the older children in my category seemed like distant, higher beings. That was why I entered the tournament with no notion at all that I might win. I’d only won one tournament up until then, and it was against children my own age. But by now, and for over a year, I’d been training with Toni practically an hour and a half a day, five days a week, every week. I don’t imagine any other boy competing in that tournament trained as much as I did, or with as hard a coach. I also think that, with Toni’s help, I had a better understanding of the game than other kids. That’s what gave me the edge, and maybe still does.
If you watch the number ten player in the world and the number five hundred in training, you won’t necessarily be able to tell who is higher up in the rankings. Without the pressure of competition, they’ll move and hit the ball much the same way. But really knowing how to play is not only about striking the ball well, it’s about making the right choices, about knowing when you should go for a drop shot or hit the ball hard, or high, or deep, when you play with backspin or topspin or flat, and where in the court you should aim to hit it. Toni made me think a lot about the basic tactics of tennis from an early age. If I messed up, Toni would ask, “Where did you go wrong?” And we’d talk about it, analyze my mistakes at length. Far from seeking to make me his puppet, he strove to make me think for myself. Toni said tennis was a game in which you had to process a lot of information very fast; you had to think better than your rival to succeed. And to think straight, you had to keep your cool.
By pushing me always to the edge, he built up my mental strength, an effort that paid dividends in the quarter finals of that first under-12s championship I played, in a match where my rival was the favorite, a boy three years older than me. I lost the first three games without winning a point but ended up winning in straight sets. I won the final in two sets too. I’ve still got the cup at home, on display alongside the trophies I’ve won as a professional.
It was a very important victory, for it provided me with the impetus for everything that followed. But the setting was far from grand. For the final, in the neighboring island of Ibiza, about fifty people turned up—most of them my family members. They were happy when I won, I remember, but nothing over the top. No wild celebrations afterward: that is not our style. Some kids, in tennis as in other sports, are driven by the ambition of their parents, usually their fathers. I had Toni. But the intensity of his desire for me to triumph was complemented in a healthy way by my father’s relaxed attitude to the whole thing. He was far, far removed from those parents who aspire to achieve their lives’ frustrated dreams through the success of their children. He drove me to games up and down and across Mallorca every weekend—for which I can never thank him enough—and he stayed to watch me play, not because he wanted me to be a star but because he wanted me to be happy. It never crossed his mind in those days that I’d end up being a professional tennis player, never mind that I’d win what I’ve won.
There’s an anecdote from my childhood my father and I both remember well that reveals his attitude toward me and my attitude toward tennis, and how different each was. It was two years after I’d won the Balearic Islands championship, just after the summer vacation, in September. I’d had a really fun August with my friends, fishing, swimming in the sea, playing football on the beach. But I hadn’t trained much, and then, suddenly, I was playing in a tournament in Palma. My father drove me there, as usual, and I lost. I still remember the score: 6–3, 6–3, against a guy I should have beaten. On the way back home in the car I was deathly silent. My father, who’d never seen me so gloomy, tried to cheer me up. He said, “Come on. It’s not such a big deal. Don’t feel bad. You can’t always win.” I said nothing. He couldn’t shake me out of my dark mood. So he went on. “Look. You’ve had a fantastic summer with your friends. Be happy with that. You can’t have everything. You can’t be a slave to tennis.” He thought he was presenting me with a convincing argument, but I burst out crying, which shocked him still more because I never cried. Not then. He insisted. “Come on, you’ve had a terrific summer. Why’s that not enough?” “Yes, Dad,” I replied, “but all the fun I had then can’t make up for the pain I’m feeling right now. I never want to feel this way again.”
My father repeats those words to this day, and he is still stunned that I should have said something so perceptive, and so prescient, at such a young age. He sees that exchange we had in the car as a defining moment, as a day in which his understanding of his son changed, and my understanding of my ambitions in life changed too. I grasped that the one thing that upset me above all other things was the feeling that I had let myself down, that I had lost without giving my best. Instead of driving back home, he took me to a restaurant by the sea to eat what was then my favorite food, fried shrimp. We didn’t talk much as we ate, but we both knew a bridge had been crossed. Something had been said that would define and shape me for a long time to come.
Eleven years later, in 2007, I relived that same sense of despair after losing the Wimbledon final to Roger Federer. As the tears fell, I thought, “I never want to feel this way again.” And I thought that again, but in a much more collected and constructive frame of mind, at the start of the rematch in 2008.
Winning that first point on Federer’s serve, and winning it well, was the first step in curing a hurt I’d been carrying for twelve months. But then, on the second point, after a decent rally ended with me going for the winner too soon and hitting a rather wild forehand out, it was back to the beginning. That’s tennis. You play a great point, you win with a fine shot at the end of a long and tense rally, but that has no more value in the final score than the gift of a point I gave him here. That’s where the mental strength comes in, what separates champions from near champions. You put that failure immediately behind you, clean out of your mind. You do not allow your mind to dwell on it. You draw, instead, on the strength of having won the first point and build on that, thinking only of what comes next.
The problem was that all too quickly he began to show why he was the best in the world. He won the game with a bullet of a diagonally angled backhand, with a forehand drive down the line and with an ace. I went back to my chair the wiser and, in the long run, the stronger for having received an instant reminder that this was not going to be a repeat of the easy win I’d had over him in the French Open only twenty-eight days earlier; and a reminder too that Federer’s serve, on a grass surface that benefits the big servers, was much better than mine.
He won that first game at 15, but there was some consolation, and much to sustain my belief in victory. Though I’d lost four of the five points, we’d had long rallies in each, in all of which I had been timing the ball well. He’d had to fight to win his serve. The disadvantage was that now I’d have to come from behind, possibly for the duration of the set, to remain on level terms.
Things went better than I had expected. The plan was to serve to his backhand corner, which I did on every point in the second game, and practically every service point throughout. The fourth point of that game encouraged me to continue in that vein. I served to his backhand; he hit a high, sliced return, which I hit deep to his backhand again; then the same again and again, hitting the ball with top spin high and deep to his backhand, pinning him back uncomfortably. Four balls, one after the other, on the same spot and high to his left. That gave him little option each time but to float a slice back to the center of the court, giving me time to get into position and place the ball exactly where I wanted it to go. If I had h
it to his forehand, he would have risked a flatter, stronger return and I might have lost control of the point. That way, I did control the point, which ended with him losing his cool for a critical instant and going for a backhand drive that flew high and way off course. I wasn’t going to win every point this way, but here was a clear signal that this was a plan I had to stick to.
And next game, the breakthrough. Federer had only lost two service games in six matches on his way to the final; this would be his third. I won one point with a shot deep to his forehand corner, but otherwise kept pinning him back on the backhand side. Three times there he fluffed his shots. I was 2–1 up, next up to serve, and, for now, winning the psychological battle, which usually translates into you playing better than your opponent, because you’re thinking more clearly. I felt satisfied but not elated. There was a long road ahead, and any thought of victory, any hint now of a movie with a happy ending entering my head, would have been suicide. What I had to do was keep focused and transmit to him by my actions and my demeanor that I was not going to flag on any point. If he wanted to beat me, he’d have to play every single point well, very well; not only would he have to be at the top of his game, he’d have to be at the top of his game for a long time. My objective now was to convey to him that he was going to have to spend hours stretched to the limit.
He got the message. He did not let up again. But it was too late. We both played at our best to the very end of the first set, but I held all my service games and won it 6–4.
* * *
Uncle Toni
Ask Toni Nadal what his last words were to his nephew before he left the Wimbledon locker room at the start of the 2008 final and he’ll tell you: “I told him to battle to the end and endure.” Ask him why Rafa has made it to the top of world tennis and he’ll reply: “Because it’s all in the head, in your attitude, in wanting more, in enduring more than your rival.” Ask him what he says to Rafa on those days when the body rebels and the pain seems too great to compete on court, and his reply will be: “I say to him, ‘Look, you’ve got two roads to choose from: tell yourself you’ve had enough and we leave, or be prepared to suffer and keep going. The choice is between enduring and giving up.’ ”
“Endurance” is a word Toni has been hammering into Nadal’s skull from a very early age. It expresses a Spartan philosophy of life uncommon on an island, and in a country, where the pleasure principle reigns. Toni comes across as a Spaniard from an earlier age, as if he were descended from Hernán Cortés, the sixteenth-century conquistador who landed in Mexico with a force of barely a hundred men, burned his boats so no one would be tempted to flee for home, and, after overcoming appalling privations and outrageous odds, defeated the Aztec empire, claiming its treasure and vast lands for the Spanish crown.
Toni, chunkily built and swarthy, with thick, powerful legs, looks like good conquistador material. Cold-eyed and resolute, he is a straight-speaker who makes little visible effort to ingratiate himself with those around him. He is not unkind: in the eyes of his family, he is generous to a fault with strangers who ask him for tickets to matches or with journalists needing a quote. But toward those closest to him, while unbendingly loyal, he can be moody, gruff, and quarrelsome. He is not the black sheep of the family, because ostracism is not something the tight-knit Nadals do. As Carlos Costa, who knows the Nadal family well, says, “Toni is different.” He is grumpier than his brothers, more contrary; he is a moralizer, stiffly opinionated, always up for an argument.
But he is not quite as tough, or as self-sufficient a conquistador, as appearances might suggest. There has been a tendency in some of the sports media to suggest that Rafa would be nothing without Toni. One could make the opposite case: that Toni would be nothing without Rafa. The truth, though, lies in the middle. Toni and Rafa are a mutually dependent duo whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. They are more powerful together than each would be on his own.
Toni once dreamt he might become a tennis champion. He excelled at the game in his youth, establishing a name for himself as one of Mallorca’s finest. He was also the island’s best table tennis player for a while, as well as a chess player of local repute. He had the body and he had the brains, but when he became a tennis professional and left home to try to conquer the Spanish mainland, he discovered that, while a steady player, he lacked the killer punch, which was precisely the quality he strove hardest to imbue in his young charges when he took up coaching. Boys whom he taught alongside his nephew recall that whereas other coaches highlighted the need to control the ball, Toni’s emphasis was always on the aggressive cultivation of winners. Toni himself cites the example of the golfer Jack Nicklaus saying once in a coaching video that his advice to young players was “First, hit the ball far; then we’ll think about getting it in the hole.” Toni took the lesson to heart. His advice to his nephew, right from the start, when he was four years old, was “First, hit the ball hard; then we’ll see about keeping it in.”
And then he set about the more challenging task of constructing a mentally armor-plated competitor. He began, as he meant to continue, by treating his nephew with undisguised injustice in the company of his peers, while requiring him never to complain. The boys Nadal trained with recall that when Toni bellowed an order to him, made him stay behind and pick up the balls, then sweep the courts after training, he would bow his head and do as he was told. When the two trained alone, and the sun shone glaringly on one half of the court, that was the half where Toni would tell Rafa to play. If at the start of a session they were playing with good, sound balls, Toni would unexpectedly produce a bad one, a bare one that bounced erratically, or a soggy, lifeless one that hardly bounced at all. If his nephew complained, Toni would say, “The balls might be third rate but you’re fourth rate!”
Cruel to be kind, as Toni saw it, he would play games with Rafa in which the winner was the first to twenty points. He would allow the excited child to get to nineteen, and then he’d raise his game, beating him to the post, ruining his nephew’s day just as he was beginning to savor the thrill of an unlikely little victory. The blows to morale and the relentlessly harsh discipline to which he submitted Rafa all had a grand strategic purpose: teaching him to endure.
Toni’s own relationship with the principle of “endurance,” on the other hand, has been contradictory. Toni and his brother Sebastián first had impressed upon them the virtues of endurance during their teens, when they were away at boarding school in Palma, an hour’s drive from Manacor. The school principal would preach to the pupils at length on the benefits of accepting life’s inevitable trials and disappointments with manly resilience. The most immediate trial the brothers had to submit to was the harsh fact of boarding school existence itself, away from their unusually close, unusually nurturing family. Sebastián lasted the course. He stayed on at the school until the end of his appointed time. Toni lasted a year, after which he begged his parents to be allowed to return back home, and they consented. Later he began studying law and history at university but dropped out before obtaining his degree. After giving up on his quest to become a successful professional tennis player, he returned home to Manacor to coach children at the town’s club.
Here he settled, having at last found his calling and, by spectacular good fortune, a nephew who possessed a mettle and a God-given ability he had not discovered in any other child before, or ever would again. From the way Rafa struck the ball, from his natural sense of positioning and from his strength of will, Toni quickly formed the impression that he had on his hands a future champion of Spain. Fate had arrived at the family doorstep, and he would make the most of it, drawing on the lessons he had learned from his own mistakes to instill in his nephew the habits of a winner, helping him forge a future in whose glories he would be able legitimately to share.
Rafa’s success has given Toni a strong sense of vindication, encouraging him to become immensely forthright in his views, as severe in his certitudes as a black-clad Catholic in the Spanish court d
uring the age of Cortés. But he seeks no comfort in the afterlife or in a benevolent divinity. No Catholic himself, he is as adamant as he is on all matters that religion is weakness and tomfoolery. He dismisses faith in God as a primitive magical belief as infantile as his nephew’s former belief in his uncle’s power to make rain.
Where Toni is unbendingly doctrinaire, however, is in his views regarding the way children should be brought up. “The problem nowadays,” he says, “is that children have become too much the center of attention. Their parents, their families, everybody around them feels a need to put them on a pedestal. So much effort is invested in boosting their self-esteem that they are made to feel special in and of themselves, without having done anything. People get confused: they fail to grasp that you are not special because of who you are but because of what you do.
“I see it all the time, and then, if it turns out that they make money and acquire a little fame and everything is made easy for them and no one ever contradicts them, they are accommodated in every little detail of life, well . . . you end up with the most unbearable spoiled brats.”
The phenomenon is so common in professional sports that the surprise comes, in Toni’s view, when a brilliant young sportsman turns out to behave not like a brat but like an ordinary decent human being. Fawned upon, surrounded by grasping yes men, sports figures are told all the time they are gods, and they come to believe it. Rafa Nadal’s feet-on-the-ground civility, such a departure from the expected norm, never ceases to be remarked upon, and Toni is proud of that.
