Rafa
Page 6
Everything in the way Rafa Nadal was brought up prepared him to behave in this way. Were he to end up a superstar, Toni and his parents would make damn sure he’d end up a humble one. Were he to be applauded for his humility, as he often has been, that too would be disdained as excessive praise. “Humble is the way you have to be, period,” Toni says. “There’s no special merit in it. What’s more, I wouldn’t use the word ‘humble’ to describe Rafael. He just knows his place in the world. Everybody should know their place in the world. The point is that the world is quite big enough already without you imagining that you’re big too. People sometimes exaggerate this business of humility. It’s a question simply of knowing who you are, where you are, and that the world will continue exactly as it is without you.”
Toni’s reflex to stamp out the merest suggestion of complacency or self-regard in his nephew does not make him blind to his innate qualities, or to the influence his parents have had over him. “I don’t think he would have turned out badly on his own accord,” he concedes. “Because of his parents, who in their own way are just as much no-nonsense people as I am, and because of the way he is. He has always been obedient, which is a sign of intelligence in a child because it shows you understand that your elders know better than you, that you respect their superior experience of the world. So I do think the raw material we were working with here was of the finest material. But I made it my mission to encourage the tendency along. When I saw his enormous potential, I thought, beyond his actual abilities as a player, what kind of a person would I like to see on the court? Someone who has personality but is not a show-off. I don’t like divas, and there are plenty of them in the world of tennis. That’s why I forbade him ever to throw his racket to the ground during a match; why I always insisted on the need to put on what I call ‘a good face’ when he was playing—calm and serious, not angry or irritated; why it was always important to be sporting and gracious to your opponent, in victory and defeat.”
Respect for other people, for everyone irrespective of who they might be or what they might do, is the starting point of everything, Toni says. “What is not acceptable is that people who have had it all in life should behave coarsely with other people. No, the higher you are, the greater your duty to treat people with respect. I would have hated my nephew to have turned out any other way, to have performed tantrums on court, to have been churlish with his opponents, with the whole world watching on TV. Or, for that matter, to be impolite with the umpires or the fans. I always say, and his parents do too, that it is more important to be a good person than a good player.”
Toni is enough of a good person himself to recognize that at times he might have gone “too far in the other direction” with his nephew. His harshness toward him in training was a conscious and calculated strategy. As was his unfailingly belittling response to his nephew’s early competitive successes. If Rafa hit a great forehand during a match, well, there was a lot of work to do still on his backhand If he hit an impressive succession of strokes deep toward the baseline, yes, but what about his volleys? If he won a tournament, it was no big deal, and besides, what about his serve?
“You haven’t achieved anything yet,” Toni would say. “We need more, much more!”
The rest of the family looked on with a bemusement that, in the case of Rafa’s mother, occasionally gave way to anger. His father, Sebastián, had his misgivings. His uncle Rafael wondered sometimes whether Toni was pushing his nephew too hard. His godfather, his mother’s brother, Juan, went so far as to say that what Toni was doing to the child amounted to “mental cruelty.”
But Toni was hard on Rafa because he knew Rafa could take it and would eventually thrive. He would not have applied the same principles, he insists, with a weaker child. The sense that perhaps he might have been right was what stopped the more doubtful members of his family from outright rebellion. One who did not doubt Toni was Miguel Ángel, the professional football player. Another disciple of the endurance principle, in which he believes with almost as much reverence as Toni himself, Miguel Ángel says that success for the elite sportsman rests on the capacity “to suffer,” even to enjoy suffering.
“It means learning to accept that if you have to train two hours, you train two hours; if you have to train five, you train five; if you have to repeat an exercise fifty thousand times, you do it. That’s what separates the champions from the merely talented. And it’s all directly related to the winners’ mentality; at the same time as you are demonstrating endurance, your head becomes stronger. The things you receive as gifts, unless they come with a special sentimental attachment, you don’t value, whereas the things you achieve by your own efforts, you value a lot. The greater the effort, the greater the value.” This argument prevailed in the family at least to the point that no one, not even Rafa’s mother, ever really confronted Toni and told him to ease up on the child. They understood that spending so many hours and hours with Toni was wearing in the extreme, but that the two of them had reached a point where they could not live, much less succeed in tennis, without each other.
The family muttered but let Toni do his stuff, respected the sovereignty of his kingdom, a Spartan regime where no whining was allowed, where the young warrior in the making was exposed to all manner of tests and privations and was allowed no excuses, ever, however legitimate these might be. It was always his fault. If he lost a game because there happened to be a crack in the frame of his racket, Toni didn’t want to know; if he played badly because the racket had not been strung tightly enough and the ball went flying, Toni remained unimpressed. If he had a temperature, if his knee hurt, if he’d had a bad day at school: nothing worked on Toni. Rafa had to grin and endure.
* * *
CHAPTER 3
THE FOOTBALL STAR THAT NEVER WAS
Federer Served and won the first game of the second set without losing a point. Had there been the slightest suggestion of complacency in some remote corner of my head after winning the first set, this killed it. He pounded down four good serves with that deceptively easy action of his, and I had no reply. This was most definitely not going to be a repeat of the French Open final, in which he only won four games in total and I won the last set 6-0. He was fighting hard. If he won today, it would be his sixth Wimbledon title in a row, a feat no one had ever achieved. He’d won so much, he’d been so dominant for so long, that a part of him was playing, as he had said once, “for history.” Winning this match meant as much to him as it did to me; losing would be as painful for either of us.
In the second game, on my serve, he was more fired up than I remembered seeing him. Normally more serene on court than I am, he won the first two points with sensational forehands, one down the line and another cross court, to each of which he responded with a defiant yell. He won the game, broke my serve, blew me away. When Federer has these patches of utter brilliance, the only thing you can do is try and stay calm, wait for the storm to pass. There is not much you can do when the best player in history is seeing the ball as big as a football and hitting it with power, confidence, and laser accuracy. It happens and you have to be ready for it. You can’t let yourself be demoralized; you have to remember—or you have to convince yourself—that he cannot possibly sustain that level of play game after game, that—as Toni feels he needs to remind me—he is human too, that if you stay cool and stick to your game plan and keep trying to wear him down and make him uncomfortable, he’ll leave that zone sooner or later. His mental intensity will slacken, and you’ll have your chance. This time it was going to come later rather than sooner. He won his serve again, comfortably. I just about held on to win mine, and then he won his serve again. He was 4–1 up inside what seemed like five minutes of play. My first set victory felt like a long, long way off.
But then, I had a long, long history of playing matches in which worse setbacks had been overcome. I had the experience to cope. There is nothing bigger than a Wimbledon final, but there is a limit to just how nervous you can get during a match,
any match, or how important winning can be to you and, as I never forget, the tension and the euphoria are as great when you play a match as a child, when your dreams stretch no farther than the Balearic Islands junior football cup, or winning the Spanish under-12s national tennis championship. We were all very happy the evening I won that, at the age of eleven, but as usual it was Toni, unable to repress his instinct to bring me down to earth, who spoiled the party. He phoned up the Spanish Tennis Federation pretending to be a journalist and asked them for the list of the title’s last twenty-five winners. Then, in front of the rest of the family, he read out the names and asked me if I had ever heard of any of them. So and so, do you know him? No. This guy? No. And this one? No. There were just five who had reached a decent level as professionals, whose names meant something to me. Toni was triumphant. “You see? The chances of you making it as a pro are one in five. So, Rafael, don’t get too excited about today’s victory. There’s still a long, hard road ahead. And it all depends on you.”
Another thing that depended on me then was whether I was going to get sufficiently serious about my tennis to give up football. It was one of the hardest decisions I have had to confront, though in the end circumstances decided for me.
By now I was training five times a week and traveling abroad to compete in tennis tournaments, playing and winning in Europe against some of the best kids my age in the world. Yet I was still training during the week with my football team, then playing competitive games at weekends. And, as my mother reminded me, there was the matter of my school studies to attend to. Something had to give. I didn’t want it to be football. The very idea broke my heart. But in the end there wasn’t much choice. I knew and my parents knew that I couldn’t do everything. The pain would have been greater had my football team not been taken over by a new coach. The previous coach, whom I loved, had understood that I couldn’t be relied on to turn up at all our training sessions, but he was still happy for me to play for the team because I was the top goal scorer. The new guy was more dogmatic. He said that if I didn’t turn up to train as all the other boys did, I couldn’t play. If I missed just one training session a week, I was out of the team. So that was that. But for that coach, things might have turned out differently in my life. My father reckons that I could have gone on to become a good professional football player. He says that when I trained at football, I trained harder than all the other boys. And I did have that unusual self-confidence—or lunatic faith—in my team’s ability to win games against impossible odds.
I suspect, all the same, that my father had too much faith in my talents as a footballer. I was good but not that special. Tennis was the game at which I excelled, even if I enjoyed football as much, or more. I was a part of the Balearic Islands championship team in football but under-12s champion of Spain in tennis, and finalist that same year in the under-14 national championship. I was one year younger than my teammates in the football team but often two—sometimes three—years younger than my rivals in tennis.
A choice had to be made, and there was no disputing the evidence. Tennis it had to be. I have no regrets, because it was the right choice and because I am not a person who sees any value in dwelling on things you cannot change. And I think I understood it pretty well back then too. On YouTube, you can see a video of me when I was twelve being interviewed on TV during the under-14’s Spanish championships. In it, after explaining that I trained every day from four to eight in the evening, I say: “I enjoy football, but that’s just for fun.” I wasn’t even twelve and I already had a career.
There was no letup from Toni. No mercy. At the end of training one day in Manacor when I was thirteen I had the not very bright idea of trying to jump over the net, with disastrous results. I am not naturally very well coordinated. If I have found my rhythm on the tennis court it’s because I’ve worked at it. In my family I have a reputation for clumsiness. My godmother, Marilén, remembers how on Sunday mornings when I was a child the family would set off on bicycle rides. But I didn’t like to join in. I never felt comfortable on a bike. Or on a motorbike. Both are favorite forms of transport in the eastern half of Mallorca where I live, because it is mostly flat, but I was afraid I’d fall and I never took to either. When I got my driving license, Marilén exclaimed, “What a danger for us all!” I took the point and ever since have been a cautious driver.
My godfather, Juan, says I inherited my clumsiness from my mother, who as a child always used to fall and bump into things. That’s what happened to me that time after training in Manacor when I jumped the net. I tripped and fell badly, landing with my full weight on my wrist. It was a sprain and, what’s more, I was bleeding. Toni had no sympathy. “You, Rafael, you have got nothing inside your head!” he said. My godfather was there at the time, and while he had always been very cautious about criticizing Toni openly, this time he could not hold back. “Toni,” he said, “you’ve gone too far this time.”
My godfather drove me to the medical center in town to get me bandaged up. He was angry. He said that my uncle had been in the wrong. He understood that Toni was hardening me up for the battles that lay ahead and all that, but he’d crossed a line now. I was in pain and didn’t say anything, but one thing I understood better than my godfather was how important Toni was to me now that all my life’s ambitions centered on tennis; how unwise it would be, however great the temptation at that moment, to stoke family friction around the figure of Toni or allow myself to harbor negative thoughts about him. What I wanted was to triumph at tennis, and anything that got in the way of that dream, be it spending a lazy summer with my friends or building up feelings of antagonism toward Toni, had to be put to one side.
Because Toni was right. So often infuriating but, in the long run, right. Harsh lessons such as the one that Toni taught me that day have made me more able to live with the professional athlete’s burden of playing with pain. I put the lesson into practice even before I turned professional, when I won the Spanish under-14 national championships, not long after that fall at the net. That was one of the most memorable victories of my life because not only did I have to beat my opponent in the final, I had to overcome the pain barrier every inch of the way. The tournament took place in Madrid, and my rival was one of my best friends, and one of my best to this day, Toméu Salva, with whom I’d trained since the age of twelve.
In the very first round of the tournament I fell and broke the little finger of my left hand. But I refused to pull out or, under Toni’s vigilant eye, to complain. I’d got to the semis the year before, and this time I intended to win. So I played right through to the end and beat Tomeú in the final, beating him 6–4 in the third set. I had to grip the racket with four fingers, the broken one dangling, limp and lifeless. I didn’t bandage it because that would have made it more difficult to hit the ball. The biggest difficulty was on the forehand drive. On the two-handed backhand the weight shifts more to the right hand. I played through the pain to the point that I almost forgot about it. It’s a question of concentration, of putting everything out of your mind beyond the game itself. The principle has applied throughout my career. Titín’s judgment, having seen me in terrible shape many times before a match but perfectly capable once play starts, is that the adrenaline of competition helps kill the pain. Whatever the explanation, I look back at that teenage Rafael and I am proud of him. He set a benchmark of endurance that has served me as an example and as a reminder ever since that you can put mind over matter, and if you want something badly enough, no sacrifice is too great.
The measure of what I did in that final against Toméu came after I’d won the last point. The pain hit me so hard I couldn’t even lift up the cup. Another boy had to help me hold it up for the commemorative photograph.
Around that time, when I was still fourteen, I had a chance to break my ties with Toni. I was offered a scholarship to move to Barcelona, half an hour’s flight away from Mallorca, to train at the High Performance Centre of San Cugat, one of the best professional tennis academi
es in Europe. It was another big decision for me, and the truth is, I am not very good at making decisions, even now. Split-second ones on the court, sure; decisions that need some pondering off it, not so much. (That was why I was grateful, in a way, that the new coach had appeared on the football scene a couple of years earlier to make the decision for me to renounce the game I loved and opt for tennis.) So at moments like this I listen to what other people have to say before trying to weigh up the arguments. I don’t like to have opinions on things until I’ve got hold of all the facts. On this particular decision, it was my parents I listened to more than Toni, and they had it very clear. Given that we had a choice, being well off enough not to have to take the scholarship, my parents’ view was “He is doing very well with Toni and, besides, where is a boy going to be better off than at home?” Their main fear, never mind my tennis game, was that I might lose my bearings in Barcelona, alone without the family. They did not want me to become a problem adolescent. Avoiding that was more important to them than seeing me achieve success in my tennis career.
I was glad that was the decision my parents made because, in my heart of hearts, I did not want to leave home, either, and I am gladder still today looking back on it. Grating on my nerves as Toni sometimes was (in those days he had a habit of arranging with me to meet for training at nine in the morning and not arriving till ten), I knew I had a good thing going with him. I was not going to find a better coach, or guide.