by Rafael Nadal
But it still came as a surprise when the sports press made me the favorite to win the 2005 tournament. I’d only played in two Grand Slam tournaments, Wimbledon and the US Open, and I had not made it to the quarterfinals in either. There was a doubt in my mind, certainly, as to whether I’d be able to breathe at such a high competitive altitude. And, besides, Federer was there, and he only needed Roland Garros to complete his tally of four Grand Slams. Exaggerated and irrational as I tried to convince myself my status as favorite was (this was the part of my brain talking that Toni had conditioned), another part of me (the madly driven and ambitious one) did retain the conviction of a year earlier that I could win this. But the expectations I had generated did weigh on me, creating an added mental burden that I struggled to shed in the early rounds. I didn’t have those good sensations I need to feel confident of winning and I felt far more nervous than usual. My body was tighter than it should have been. My legs felt heavy, my arms stiffer, and the ball didn’t come off the racket as crisply as it should have. When that happens, you become afraid to let fly, you don’t give rein to your natural game, and everything becomes much more complicated. Rivals you’ve beaten comfortably in previous weeks suddenly become giants.
My diet wouldn’t have helped either. I wasn’t as careful as I am today to temper my appetites, and I’d suddenly acquired in Paris a fierce taste for chocolate croissants. Toni saw the problem, but he had his own special way of dealing with it. When Carlos Costa said to him, “For God’s sake, don’t let him eat that!” Toni replied, “No, no. Let him eat his chocolate cakes. That way he’ll learn; that way he’ll get a stomachache.” As usual, his methods worked. I learned the hard way to avoid eating anything during a competition that could not be easily digested.
Despite the nerves and the self-imposed chocolate handicap, I managed to make it through those early rounds at the French Open. Francis Roig, my second coach, says that when I’m playing at 80 percent of my abilities, I’m better than the rest because of the mental edge I have over them. I’m not sure that is always true, but perhaps on clay it is. At my best I do have an ability to transform defense swiftly into attack, surprising, and even demoralizing, my opponent. But if the winners are not coming, if the best you can do is retrieve every shot, converting yourself into a human wall, then clay is where you want to be.
It was by grinding opponents down in this manner that I managed to make it to the semifinal against Federer, our first match on clay. It was the day of my nineteenth birthday and the best possible celebration, the best of my life, would be to win—which I did, in four sets. It was drizzling part of the time, and Federer, anxious to wrap up his Grand Slam foursome, tried to get the umpire to stop the game. It was a good sign. He said it was the rain that was getting to him, but I knew my game was too. The umpire didn’t stop play and I won the match. Then it was Mariano Puerta of Argentina in the final. The Argentines are like the Spanish, experts on clay. And Puerta played better than me for long stretches of the match. I had not yet mastered the trick of isolating myself from my environment and from my fears. You never do fully, otherwise you wouldn’t be human. But back then building the emotional defenses necessary to win consistently remained a work in progress, and the nerves tampered with my thought processes more than they would later in my career. What I didn’t lack in that final was energy. Puerta was playing well, well enough to win the first set 7–5. But I think of that game now and what comes to mind is a sense of never having paused for breath. I was fighting and running as if I could fight and run for two days without rest. I was so excited at the thought of winning that I never felt a moment’s tiredness, which in turn tired Puerta out. I held on; I was steadier on the big points, and I won every set after the first one, 6–3, 6–1, 7–5.
In the space of barely six months I’d climbed three peaks, one higher than the next. The Davis Cup, my first ATP win at Monte Carlo, and now, the headiest of all, the French Open, my first Grand Slam. The emotions I felt were indescribable. At the moment of victory I turned and saw my family going nuts, my parents hugging, my uncles screaming, and I understood immediately that, for all the years of hard work I had put in, this victory had not been mine alone. Without thinking, the first thing I did after shaking hands with Puerta was rush into the crowd and clamber up the steps to hug my family, Toni first among them. My godmother Marilén was there and she was crying. “I couldn’t believe it,” she told me later, recalling her reaction to the final point. “I looked at you there, a big, grown-up champion with his arms in the air, and suddenly my mind leapt back in time and I saw an image of a deadly serious, skinny little boy of seven training on a court back home in Manacor.”
I had similar thoughts. I had battled so hard and long to get here. But into my mind there also came images of home with my family, and more than ever before, I understood that day that, however great your dedication, you never win anything on your own. The French Open was my reward, and my family’s reward too.
I also felt relief. In winning a Grand Slam I’d taken a weight off my shoulders. Anything else that life brought now would be a welcome bonus. Not that I was going to ease up on my ambition. I had tasted victory at the highest level; I had liked it and wanted more. And I had a sense that after winning a tournament of this magnitude once, it would be less difficult to do it again. It was now, after winning at Roland Garros, that the idea began to take shape in my mind that I would win Wimbledon one day.
Needless to say, that was not Toni’s thinking, or at least not the message he sought to transmit to me. With his usual bluntness, he told me he thought Puerta had played better than me, that he had made me run a lot more than I had him, and that I had been lucky to win the decisive points. He claims now—though honestly I don’t remember this—that before heading back home before the rest of us the next day, he left a handwritten note for me with a list of all the aspects of my game I had to correct if I were to have any chance of winning a tournament this big again.
He was right as far as the year’s two remaining Grand Slam tournaments were concerned. At Wimbledon I fell in the second round; at the US Open I fell in the third. Those defeats brought me down to earth and gave me a measure of the work still ahead if I was to avoid remaining just one more name in history’s list of one-Slam wonders, or yet another Spanish player incapable of adapting successfully to any surface that wasn’t clay. The judgment of most experts after I won the French Open was that, while I might win this tournament again, I’d never win one of the other three Grand Slam tournaments, Wimbledon, the US Open, and Australia. They had history to back them. We’d had one Spanish champion after another at Roland Garros over the previous two decades but no victories in the other big ones. In 2005 I had continued the trend, reinforcing the prejudice.
But I was only nineteen, and whatever the future might hold, it had been a spectacular year. I won a major tournament in Canada, the Montreal Masters, beating André Agassi in straight sets in the final, and then, at the end of the year, I won the Madrid Masters, a tougher challenge on the fast surface that least suits my game: hard court and indoors. Madrid was, in that respect, a watershed, a mightily encouraging sign that I did have it in me to adapt my game to all conditions. In the final, I came back from two sets down to win against a big-serving rival, Ivan Ljubicic of Croatia, whose game was as naturally suited to playing indoors as mine was to clay.
All in all I won eleven tournaments in 2005, as many as Federer that year, and I rose to number two in the world rankings. I was starting to become well known beyond Spain and seemed poised to take my game to another level. The year 2006 beckoned bright. Or so I thought. Because after Madrid, calamity struck. I suffered an injury to the same small bone in my foot that had obliged me to miss the entire clay court season the year before. But this time it was far more serious, turning out to be the most frightening episode by far in my professional career.
It was during the game against Ljubicic in Madrid on October 17 that I felt the first twinge. I didn’t
take it all that seriously at the time, and accustomed as I was to competing in pain, I kept playing. That night it began to hurt a lot more, but I still wasn’t alarmed. I thought it was the inevitable consequence of having played a hard five-set match and that the next day it would pass. But I woke up next morning and discovered the foot was more swollen than it had been the night before. I got out of bed, and placing the full weight of my body on the foot was impossible. Limping badly, I pulled out of the next tournament I was due to play, in Switzerland, and flew straight home to see my doctor, Ángel Cotorro. He didn’t see anything especially serious, reckoning it was just a matter of time before the bone healed. Sure enough, a few days later I stopped limping and flew halfway across the world to Shanghai to take part in the year’s big Masters tournament. But soon after I began training again the pain came back, so much so I had to withdraw from the tournament before it began. I flew back home and rested for two weeks, unable to do exercise of any kind. I resumed training, but on the second day I felt the flash of pain again and realized, with a despairing cry, that I simply couldn’t go on.
I trust Dr. Cotorro with my life. He was my doctor then, he remains my doctor today, and if I have anything to do with it, he will remain my doctor till the day I retire. But he was unable to come up with a diagnosis, or with any advice beyond more rest. So that’s what I did, for two more weeks. This was November, stretching now into December. I began to get nervous, because the doctor was trying everything yet couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong. The foot remained swollen and it was hurting more, not less. So then, at the suggestion of my uncle Miguel Ángel, we went to a foot specialist he had known during his time playing for Barcelona Football Club. The specialist carried out some resonance tests but had to admit that, for all his experience, the injury defeated him too. The last hope, as far as he could see, was that I should go and see an expert in Madrid who happened to have done a doctorate on the bone of the foot that was giving me the problem. I went along with my father, Toni, Joan Forcades, and Juan Antonio Martorell, my physical therapist prior to Titín. My left foot, or rather the little bone where the swelling was, had become the center of my anguished universe, and my family’s too.
It was in a mood of rising alarm that in mid-December, two months after I had played my last competitive match, we fetched up at the consulting room of the Madrid doctor, who finally identified the problem. It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. The prognosis was so bleak that I sunk into the deepest, blackest hole of my life.
It was a congenital problem, a very rare disease of the foot, even more rare among men than women, in which the doctor happened to be a world specialist. He’d written a doctorate on the subject. The bone in question was called the tarsal scaphoid, located in the bridge of the foot, above the instep. If the tarsal scaphoid fails to ossify, or harden, as it should in early childhood, painful sequels are felt in adulthood, all the more so if the foot is submitted to repetitive stress of the kind that is inevitable if you are a professional tennis player. The danger is all the greater if, as was patently true in my case, you submit the foot to unusually intense activity during those early years when the bone is not yet fully formed. The consequence is that the bone becomes slightly deformed, bigger than it should be, and more liable to splinter, which was what had happened to me the year before. I had recovered from that but, being unaware of the problem, did not pay much attention to it, and now things had become a lot more complicated.
This defective tarsal scaphoid, a bone I’d never even known existed, turned out to be my own unique version of the Achilles’ heel: the most vulnerable point of my body, the most potentially destructive. Having diagnosed the problem, the specialist delivered his verdict. It could be, he pronounced, that I’d never be able to play competitive tennis again. I might be obliged to retire, at the age of nineteen, from the game in which I had invested my life’s dreams. I broke down and wept; we all wept. But it was my father who gathered his wits first and sought to take control of the situation. While the rest of us stared helplessly at the floor, he sought out a plan. He is a practical man, my father, and he has the leader’s instinct to appear calm and composed the more dire the circumstances become. By temperament cheerful, he has an attitude that sees no problem as insuperable. He’s no athlete, but he has the mentality of a winner. That’s why the rest of the family says that as a competitor I take after him. Maybe, but that day, as far away from a tennis court as I felt I had ever been, I felt neither cheerful nor practical. I was devastated. Everything I’d been building toward all my life was crumbling before my very eyes.
Amid the gloom, my father provided a tiny glimmer of light. He said two things: first, that he was confident we’d find a solution—the doctor’s precise words, he reminded us, had been that the injury “might” be career threatening; second, and if all else failed, I could dedicate myself successfully to my new and growing passion, the game of golf. “With all that talent you have and all those guts,” he said, “I see no reason why you couldn’t turn yourself into a professional golfer.”
That rather distant possibility would have to wait for now, and hopefully forever. The immediate question for the doctor was, might there be a solution, then? And if so, what? Short of surgery, a dicey and largely untested proposition, he said that there was one possibility. A rather banal, unmedical one. We could try adjusting the soles of my tennis shoes and, by a process of millimetric trial and error, see if we hit upon a shape that would provide the bone with the cushioning necessary to ease the pressure I had always put on the tarsal scaphoid. If that worked there was, he warned, a further risk: the subtle displacement of my body’s weight caused by the refurbished soles might have a crippling impact on some other part of my body, such as my knees or my back.
My father lit up, said we’d cross that bridge when we came to it and immediately suggested a plan of action. We’d contact the foot specialist we had seen in Barcelona and get him to work right away with me and Dr. Cotorro on constructing the new soles. That said, my father, all brisk cheer, went off to a scheduled business dinner that very same night, leaving the rest of us in a mood that blended vague hope with funereal paralysis. After all the disappointments of the previous two months and the consistent failure of the bone to heal, there seemed to me to be little reason to believe the magical shoe solution would work. The foot hurt as much as it ever had, and, as I saw it, there was at most a faint chance the plan would work, but not enough to prevent me from going back home in a state of deepest gloom, preparing to spend what indeed turned out to be the bleakest Christmas ever.
I felt as if my life had been cut in half. When my family recall that period, they say I was completely transformed, unrecognizable. At home I’m normally in high spirits, laughing and joking a lot, especially with my sister. Now I became irritable, distant, dark. I didn’t talk about the injury even to my closest friends; at first I couldn’t bear even to open up about it with my girlfriend, María Francisca, who was growing baffled and alarmed by the change she saw in me. We’d just started going out a few months earlier, and here I was, a misery day and night, hardly an attractive proposition for a girl of seventeen eager to enjoy life. Typically so hyperactive, I couldn’t even rest my foot on the ground, let alone think of playing tennis, and I’d lie for hours on end on the sofa staring into space, or sit in the bathroom, or on the stairs, weeping. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t smile, I didn’t want to talk. I lost all appetite for life.
Thank God for my parents. Their response was just right. Making it plain that they were there for whatever I needed, they did not smother me. They didn’t try to shake me out of my dark mood, they didn’t bombard me with questions, they didn’t try to get me to talk when I didn’t want to. They ferried me here and there, to the doctor’s or wherever, with the same uncomplaining cheerfulness my father had shown during the days when he had served as my untiring trans-Mallorcan chauffeur. They were sensitive and they were kind, and they made clear to me that they would stand b
y me in good times or bad, whether I ever got to play again or whether I’d have to find something else to do with my life.
Toni played his part too. It was he who shook me up, told me not to be so self-pitying. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go out and train.” It sounded like madness, but he had a plan, even if it was not one exactly designed to win Wimbledon, or even the under-12s Balearic Islands championship. Following his instructions, I went out on court, hopping on crutches, sat down on a chair (a normal club chair—nothing specially designed), took a racket in my hand, and started hitting balls. So I wouldn’t lose the habit, as Toni said. It was a psychological thing more than anything else. A way to pass the time, to stop dwelling on gloomy thoughts and try to build a little hope. Toni hit balls to me, from close up at first, then, as I got the hang of it, from the other side of the net; from my sitting position I’d hit back volleys, backhands, forehands. We varied the exercises as much as you could, in the circumstances, which was not much. But, as planned, it was good for my morale even if it didn’t exactly improve my game, or do much good to my arms, either. We stuck at this curious regime, provoking a number of baffled looks from onlookers, for forty-five minutes a day over three weeks, and I’d always end up with my forearms stiff and sore. I did some swimming too, the one exercise I could do that involved my legs. But I’m not a good swimmer, and while it was good to be moving again, it was not a pastime that filled me with joy.
Resting the foot, resting it entirely, worked. The pain ebbed away. The tarsal scaphoid specialist in Madrid, whose diagnosis had initially been like a shot to the head, had turned out to be my salvation. After a lot of experimenting, we got the soles of the shoe right, or right enough to be getting along with. It wasn’t the ideal solution for my body as a whole (we knew there would be consequences), but it did ease the problem of the scaphoid bone. The main thrust of the body’s weight now fell on the other bones of my foot, relieving the pressure on the damaged one. Nike devised a shoe for me that was wider and higher than the one I used before. I needed a bigger shoe because the sole was now much thicker, more elevated, particularly in the area that now acted as a cushion for the scaphoid bone. Adapting to the new sole at first was uncomfortable, because by altering the region of the foot where the weight naturally falls, the shoe impaired my balance. And then, as the specialist had predicted, I started suffering muscle strains where I’d never had any problems before, in the back and thighs.
