by Rafael Nadal
But I also need to switch off and have a good time and party till late or play football with my cousins, all of whom are younger than me, or go fishing, the perfect antidote to the all action stress of tennis. My friends back home mean the world to me and not to go out with them at night to our favorite bars in Manacor and Porto Cristo would mean losing, or at any rate diluting, those friendships. And that would be no good, because if you are happy and have a good time, that also has a positive impact on your tennis, on your training and the matches you play. To deny yourself necessary pleasures would be counterproductive. You’d end up feeling bitter, hating training, and even hating tennis, or becoming bored by it, which I know has happened to players who’ve taken the principle of professional self-denial too far. It is possible to do everything, I believe, but always keeping a balance, never, ever losing track of what’s important. In exceptional circumstances I might even skip morning training and train in the afternoon instead. What you can’t do is make the exception the rule. You can train once in the afternoon, but not three afternoons running. Because then training becomes secondary in your mind, it ceases to be the priority, and that’s the beginning of the end. You might as well prepare for retirement. The condition of having fun is keeping the line, sticking to your training regime: that is non-negotiable.
That said, I don’t train now as much as I used to when I was fifteen or sixteen. Then I’d train four and a half, five hours a day, partly with Toni but also a lot of the time with my physical trainer, Joan Forcades. Forcades, another Mallorcan, does not correspond to the image of the muscle-bound, shaven-headed, sergeant major one sometimes has in mind when thinking of a person in his profession. Born, like Toni, in 1960, he is a cultured man, a fanatical reader and film buff, who thinks a hundred thoughts a minute and wears his long hair in a ponytail. He has read every academic treatise there is on his subject and tailored a program for me specifically designed to strengthen every aspect of my tennis. When he worked on building up my muscular strength in those teenage years (we started together when I was fourteen) it was not with a view to give me a bodybuilder’s physique or to shape me for the demands of track athletics. To train as a sprinter or distance runner does not work with tennis, because it’s not what Forcades calls a “linear” game. Tennis is an intermittent game, requiring the body to sustain an on-off explosiveness, sprinting and braking, over a long period of time. Forcades says a tennis player must take his example from the hummingbird, the only animal that combines endless stamina with high speed, able to manage up to eighty wing flaps per second over a period of four hours. So we didn’t build bulk for bulk’s sake. To do so would be counterproductive because in tennis what you want is a balance between strength and speed; disproportionate muscular weight would slow you down. Forcades would feed me the theory in our frequent drives together from my home to a gym he had on the coast. The training we did was infinitely varied, though when I was sixteen, seventeen we spent a lot of time on a pulley device created to help astronauts stop their muscles from atrophying in the weightlessness of space. By pulling on a cord attached to a metallic flywheel I built up my arm and leg muscles, but especially my arms, so as to increase their acceleration speed, a major reason why (they tell me scientific studies have been made of this) I am able to apply more revolutions to the ball on my topspin forehands than any other player on the circuit. Training on this “YoYo” flywheel apparatus, as it’s called, I reached a point where I was able to perform the equivalent of 117-kilogram lifts without using weights. I also built up my body strength in those days hoisting myself up and down by the arms on parallel bars. We did exercises in water, we used step machines and indoor rowing machines, we did some yoga, we worked on the muscles but also on the joints and a lot on the tendons, too, to prevent injuries and to improve my elasticity of movement. As for running, we would do sequences that developed my ability to change direction fast, to move sideways back and forth at speed. Everything we did simulated the special stresses tennis exacts on the body and conditioned me to adapt the best I could for the urgent, stop-start nature of the game. And there was another thing Forcades was emphatic about: that we should stick to the training regime even when I least felt like it, when I was tired or in a bad mood or, for whatever reason, just not feeling up to it. Because there would be days during a tournament when I would not be feeling at my best either and by training in such circumstances I’d be better prepared to compete when I was below par.
I trained as an adolescent the way I have continued to train: as hard as I do when I play. If ever I needed pushing, Forcades had his methods. Appealing to my competitiveness, he would say something like, “Do you know Carlos Moyá (whom he also trained) can do ten of those in thirty seconds? Well, since you’re a bit tired today let’s stop at eight.” And then, of course, I’d do twelve.
My father and my uncles are all big, strong men, so there was nothing freakish about me developing a big, athletic body, but because I’d advanced so fast up the tennis ladder I had to make a special effort in my teens to build up my strength in order to compete with grown-up professional players. Several years passed before I found myself regularly playing against people my own age, or younger.
My first victory as a top-level professional, in an ATP tournament, came two months short of my sixteenth birthday in the Mallorca Open, against Ramón Delgado, who was ten years older than me. Thanks to this win I stepped up to the international Futures tour, the level below the ATP tour, where I won six tournaments in a row. That led me on to take part in the Challenger series, where players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world typically compete. Now I was coming up all the time against players who were twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four years old. I ended the year 2002, age sixteen and a half, ranked 199 in the world. Early in 2003, less than a year after my breakthrough win against Delgado, I played in two of the top ATP World Tour competitions, Monte Carlo and Hamburg. In the first I achieved an even bigger breakthrough than my victory over Delgado: I beat Albert Costa, who had won the French Open in 2002; and, in the second, my friend and mentor Carlos Moyá. Both were in the world top ten at the time, both of them Grand Slam tournament winners. In four months I climbed from 199 to 109 in the world rankings. I had a badly timed setback, a shoulder injury in training that took two weeks to cure and stopped me from making my debut at the French Open in Roland Garros, but shortly thereafter I played Wimbledon for the first time, making it to the third round. The ATP voted me 2003’s “Newcomer of the Year.” I was a teenager in a hurry, madly hyperactive, operating at a thousand revolutions a minute in training as in competition.
In 2004 my body said, “Enough!” My run was cut abruptly short by a tiny crack in a bone of my left foot that kept me out of the game from mid-April to the end of July. That meant no Roland Garros, no Wimbledon. I’d charged up to 35 in the rankings, and getting back, recovering my rhythm after such a break—the first break in my career because of injury, the first of several, as it would turn out—was not easy. At the time it was cruelly disappointing; in the long run, maybe it was no bad thing. Because the frailty of the body, in my case, has made the mind stronger. And maybe my mind needed a rest too. The wisdom and support of my family and the way Toni had programmed me to endure adversity led me not to despair but to a point where my desire to win, and my determination to do everything it would take to win, became even more clearly honed.
That period allowed me to absorb a lesson that all elite sportsmen and -women need to heed: that we are enormously privileged and fortunate, but that the price of our privilege and good fortune is that our careers end at an unnaturally young age. And, worse, that injury can cut your progress short at any time; that from one week to the next you might be forced into premature retirement. That means, first, that you must enjoy what you do; and, second, that the chances that come your way once won’t necessarily come your way again, so you squeeze the most you possibly can out of every opportunity every single time, as if it were your last. Toni had conveyed that me
ssage to me in words; now, as I recovered impatiently from my injury, I felt it in my flesh and blood. The more the years pass by, the more loudly you hear the clock ticking. I know that if I manage to keep playing at the top level at the age of twenty-nine or thirty, I’ll be a very lucky and very happy man. That first serious injury I had made me aware at an early age how quickly time passes for a professional athlete. It has served me in good stead. As my friend Tomeú Salva says, very quickly I became “an old young player.” I attach a huge value to what I have and I try to act on that understanding in every point I play.
Not that it always works. Barely a month after my return from injury in 2004 I found myself up against Andy Roddick in the second round of the US Open in New York. Roddick, who’d won the US Open the year before, is a broad-shouldered, good guy, and he was a bit too broad-shouldered and good for me on that day. I fell abruptly to earth, obliging me to remember that, for all my successes, I was still a growing boy. Much bulkier than me in those days, Roddick was world number two then, behind Federer, having been number one the year before. I was playing him on the fast courts at Flushing Meadow, a surface I was still some way from getting to grips with. I had no answer to his enormous serve and received a sound beating, worse even than the score of 6–0, 6–3, 6–4 suggested.
But my chance would come to avenge that defeat later that year.
The highlight of 2004 was representing my country in the Davis Cup, the tennis equivalent of football’s World Cup. I made my debut against the Czech Republic, when I was still seventeen, and immediately I fell in love with the competition. First, because I am proudly Spanish, which is not as trite as it sounds, because Spain is a country where a lot of people are ambiguous about their national identity and feel that their first loyalty is to their region. Mallorca is my home and always will be—I doubt very much I’ll ever leave—but Spain is my country. My father feels exactly the same way, evidence of which is supplied by the fact that we’re both passionate fans of Real Madrid, the Spanish capital’s big club. The other reason I love the Davis Cup is that it gives me the chance to recover that sense of team belonging that I lost, with a lot of regret, when I abandoned football for tennis at the age of twelve. I’m a gregarious person, I need people around me, so it’s a peculiar thing that destiny—largely in the shape of my uncle Toni—should have made me opt for a career in a game that’s so solitary. Here was my chance to share once again in the collective excitement I had felt on that unforgettable day of my childhood when our football team won the championship of the Balearic Islands.
I didn’t have the most promising start to my Davis Cup adventure, though, losing my first two games, a singles and a doubles, against the Czechs. It was the toughest possible surface for me, meaning the fastest: hard court and indoors, where the air resistance is lowest. But in the end I emerged as the hero, winning the final and decisive match. Overall, I hadn’t covered myself in glory and might very well have been singled out (“What was he doing there at that age?”) as the reason for our defeat, but when you win the game that clinches victory by the narrowest Davis Cup margin, 3–2, everything else is forgotten, luckily for me.
We then played Holland and won, but no thanks to anything I did, since the one game I played in, a doubles, we lost. But the semifinal against what was then a strong France team was something else altogether. It was my first time representing Spain in Spain, in the Mediterranean city of Alicante, with a local crowd roaring its support in a way I had never felt before. We had a strong team, led by Carlos Moyá and Juan Carlos Ferrero, who were in the top ten, and Tommy Robredo, who was number twelve in the world rankings. I won my doubles match but, in such company, was not expecting to be picked by our captains to play in the singles. I wasn’t, but Carlos suddenly felt unwell, and on his advice, they named me in his place. I won my match and I won it well, and we went through to the final against the United States.
Until then, I hadn’t felt as nervous as I should have been. If I had been older, I would have been more aware of the national weight of expectation on my shoulders. I look back on it now and I see myself playing almost recklessly, more adrenaline than brains. But I sobered up and gulped when I saw the stadium where we were going to be playing the final. It was in the beautiful city of Sevilla, but not in the most beautiful of settings. The Centre Court at Wimbledon it wasn’t, nor was I going to be hearing the echo of my shots once the hostilities began. Silence was not going to be on the agenda. Nor were we going to feel remotely cushioned or enclosed. They’d improvised a court in one half of an athletics stadium around which they were going to seat 27,000 people: the biggest audience ever to watch a game of tennis. Add to that the Sevillanos’ famed exuberance and you could well and truly forget the hushed reverence of Wimbledon, or for that matter anywhere else I’d ever played before. This was going to be tennis played before a crowd of screaming football fans. Although, going into the final, I was only down to play one doubles match, and although I was going to share the load with Tommy Robredo (who, as senior partner here, would actually be carrying a disproportionate share of the responsibility for success or failure), at my eighteen and a half years I felt more pressure and more tension than I had ever felt in my long decade of relentless competition. Our rivals were the twin brothers Bob and Mike Bryan, the world number ones and quite possibly the best doubles pairing ever. We were not expected to win, but the sense of occasion just in the buildup, the mood in the city, the excitement every time people saw us, was unlike anything I had ever imagined witnessing on the eve of a game of tennis.
I had far from given up hope, but the calculation our captains made was that we’d lose the doubles match, giving one point out of a possible total of five for the Americans, and that much would rest on Carlos Moyá, our number one, winning both his singles games. He’d beat Mardy Fish, the number two American; but beating Roddick was by no means a foregone conclusion. The advantage we had was that we were playing on clay, our favorite surface—not Roddick’s. But he was a formidable competitor, a high-voltage American, and he was world number two, ahead of Carlos, who was then number five. The betting was on Carlos, who would be playing before his own fans, but it was by no means a safe bet. Juan Carlos Ferrero, who was 25 in the rankings (but he was better than that, injuries that year had brought him down) was expected to beat Fish, but against Roddick the odds seemed fifty-fifty. The critical thing was to win both our matches against Roddick, because we really did think we had the beating of Fish, twice.
Those were the numbers, anyway. That was the logic. But what if Fish did win one of his matches? It would not have been the biggest surprise in the game’s history. We’d all suffered surprise defeats in our time (Carlos had lost to me that year, so he could certainly lose to Roddick), and complacency was far, far from our thoughts. Where we all agreed was that the first game on the first day against Roddick, our number two against their number one, would be massively important. If Carlos beat Fish and we won that one, we need not worry about Tommy and me failing to pull off our own surprise in the doubles, and we’d only have to win one of our two singles matches on the third and final day. With the pressure eased, Carlos’s chances of beating Roddick in the matchup of the number ones would surely improve. And even if Carlos were to lose, the pressure on Fish, knowing that if he lost, the U.S. was beaten, would be another major factor in our favor.
So the big game, as we saw it on the day before the matches began, was the one between our number two and Roddick. And our number two was supposed to be Juan Carlos Ferrero, French Open winner and US Open finalist in 2003. Except that he wouldn’t be our number two. It would be me; me against Roddick on day one. And not because he had an injury, but because our three captains decided I should play in his place. Instead of watching on the sidelines, giving my teammates all the energy and encouragement I could muster, I had suddenly been selected to take center stage. Our captains’ boldness, or rashness (as many people saw it), came as an enormous surprise and shock to me. Juan Carlos had r
eached number one in the world rankings while I had never advanced beyond 50. Besides, Tommy Robredo, my doubles partner, was ranked 13. The entirely natural thing would have been for Tommy to play if Juan Carlos didn’t. I was the kid in the team, there almost as much as a cheerleader as anything else, the way most people inside and outside the team saw it, for this grown-up business of a Davis Cup final against the United States of America.
Now, for all the camaraderie, tennis is an individual game, and we all want a chance to play. No one would have believed me if I’d said I preferred not to. The pressure and the responsibility excited me more than it scared me. If I’d felt any urge to run away, I might as well have quit professional tennis there and then. No, this was the biggest opportunity of my life to date and I was so thrilled at the prospect of playing I could hardly breathe. But I felt uncomfortable and apologetic. I was young and brazen enough to feel I could beat Roddick, but I was not so crass as to fail to see that pitting me against him would be a violation of the natural order of things. My family had instilled in me a reverence for people older than myself, and these two teammates I’d been selected over were not only my elders, they were also—by any objective light—my betters. It was true that I had been playing well in training that week and Ferrero had been a little below par, but we all knew well enough too that training was one thing, the heat of competition something else. In a game as big as this, experience counted as much as current form, and if Ferrero wasn’t the one, then Robredo, who was four years older than me and a winner of two ATP titles (to my zero at this point), was surely who should replace him.
