Rafa
Page 15
Calm as I thought I was, given that the nerves were obviously there, I did not cover myself in glory on the very first point, on Federer’s serve. After a sharp exchange of shots, I forced him into a fluffed backhand that just made it over the net off the frame of his racket. Instead of going for the winner, I opted for a drop shot. You try a drop when there is no alternative, the ball landing too far away from you to do otherwise, or when you see that your opponent has been driven deep and will have little chance of reaching it. But sometimes you do it because the nerves get to you, the ball feels a little too hot to handle and you don’t dare hit it hard. That was what I did. There was a little bit of cowardice behind that shot. He got to it sharply enough, lobbed me on the backhand side, I strained up to reach it, and I hit it wide. A bad start.
It was important not to reinforce what might have been the gathering impression in Federer’s mind that I was weakening, that I was going to keep on missing the chances that came my way. So I thought, “You’re feeling good despite that momentary loss of nerve; next chance you get, next half chance, go for a hard return.” That was exactly what I did on his wide second serve. I lashed back a cross-court forehand, way beyond his reach. I actually didn’t mean to hit it quite so well, so close to the line, but no complaints about the outcome.
He won the next point on a powerful serve, and then he succumbed to exactly the same loss of nerve as I had on the first point. He delivered another strong first serve that I returned weakly, but instead of thumping it away, he tried a drop. Except that this time it didn’t even make it over the net. Having aimed at this stage of the set merely to hold serve, I saw an unexpected opportunity suddenly loom at 30–all, but he got two powerful first services in and the game was his. Then I lost the first point on my first service game, hitting a forehand just wide. It’s never good to go love–15 down on your serve, but it was even less so now, when every single point was critical; I was fighting to hold my serve, and the crowd, whose energy levels only grew the longer the match went on, knew it. I stayed composed and poker faced. I won the next point, and then Federer let slip to me how anxious he had become when he issued a challenge on a high topspin forehand of mine that landed square on the line. Our game was not on the same level as it had been in the fourth set. We were sounding each other out nervily. The difference between us was that my first serves were not going in, while his were, but, after mistakes on both sides, I won the game at 30. I made my right hand into a fist. I glanced up at my sister and my uncles and aunt. They nodded encouragement. Serious nods. Some of the other fans might be smiling; not my family.
Federer served at 1–1, his first serve reliably going in every single time, it seemed. But that was the only part of his game that was working well. Whenever I managed to gain just a little of the initiative, he was missing simple shots. Then, very unexpectedly, he double faulted, bringing the game to deuce. Neither of us was at his best, but I was playing less badly. He seemed to have lost the winning momentum of the fourth set. The tide was inching slightly toward me. Then I hit a forehand needlessly long and shook my head. I didn’t shout with rage, which was what I felt like doing, but I was upset with myself for gifting him a point when all the pressure should have been on him. On the next point I played another drop, but this time an attacking one, which he was too good even for him to make an effort to reach. But then he won the next two points and the game.
Once again I had to hold my serve to stop him pulling away. But I was quietly growing in confidence, sensing that the huge effort he’d made in coming back from two sets down was beginning to sap his energy. We’d have to see whether he would be able to sustain the level he’d shown in the third and fourth sets, each of which he’d won by the very tightest of margins. That was maybe an optimistic interpretation of how things were right then, but the alternative, to allow negative thoughts to enter my head, would have been suicide.
I held my serve comfortably, far more so than he had held his the game before, thanks in part to an awful error on his part. I hit a poor drop shot once again—my mind seized up for a split second—but he, going for what was a clear chance of a winner, mishit the ball horribly long, the way an ordinary club player might. It was not all pretty at this stage of the match, but we were 2–2 and I had won several more points in the set so far than he had, which counted for nothing in the score, but placed more of a weight on his mind than mine.
The wind picked up; I looked up at the sky. It was darkening fast and it was getting harder for the line judges to do their job. We made a challenge each in the fifth game, on his serve, and both went my way. The score reached deuce, and then the rain came. Federer signaled he wanted to go off, and the umpire agreed. This was not, on the face of it, good news for me. I had been in the lead by two sets when the first rain break came, and then he had come back to win the next two; both of us were playing more poorly at the start of the fifth than at any point in the match, but he was playing more poorly than I was, his serve proving to be his best, and almost only, weapon. And, despite that, I was not the one who had been struggling to hold my serve, he was. I think I was in better shape, and on balance, it would have been best for me not to stop now. He needed a breather more badly than I did.
That was also what Toni seemed to be thinking, judging from his appearance when he and Titín joined me in the dressing room. And, as I found out when we talked about the game much later, that was certainly what was on the minds of the rest of the family, who felt the fates were conspiring against me. My father said the two rain interruptions, but in particular the second one, had been pure torture for him. Logic told him that it would have suited me more for the game to continue, because he felt it cost me more to get back my rhythm than Federer. “In my mind, the rain meant you were condemned to lose,” my father confessed later. As for my mother, she could see I was playing better than Federer at that moment, and she was sure that the rain, interrupting as it was my momentum, acted in Federer’s favor. The rest of the family there at the Centre Court all saw it the same way. Wondering what they might have done wrong in their lives to have to put up with so much torment, they could hardly bear to watch. And each of them thought, “If I’m feeling like this, how must Rafael be?”
Toni’s face in the locker room showed the strain, Titín, who came in with him, was more impassive, giving nothing away, waiting for me to set the mood. He told me later he had been a nervous wreck but had disguised his feelings behind the mask of his professional duties, changing my bandages, taking a good look at my left foot, the troublesome one, which luckily remained numb, not bothering me at all. Titín put his head down and quietly got on with his tasks. Toni’s job was, as it had been all our lives, to find the right words for the occasion. But he was struggling this time. He later admitted that after the rain came in that fifth set he had resigned himself to me losing. He tried to put a brave face on it, tried to suppress what he was really feeling, and began a little speech that I’d heard before and which, I could tell, his heart was not really in. As I sat on the bench, he stood over me and said, “Look, however small the possibility might be of victory, fight to the very end. The reward is too great for you not to make the effort. So many times, due to dismay or exhaustion, players don’t put up the battle circumstances demand, but if there is one chance, just one, you must fight on until all is lost. If you can get to 4–4, it won’t be the best player who’ll win, it’ll be the one who has better control of his nerves.”
Toni had obviously entered the locker room supposing that I would be devastated by the opportunities I had lost in the third and fourth sets, imagining that I had convinced myself they would not come back again, and that therefore he now faced the mission impossible of trying to lift my crushed spirits. He’d misread me. He was operating on the previous year’s script, obviously as haunted as the rest of the family was by the state I’d been in after I lost. I was operating on a different script. He was surprised by my reply. “Relax. Don’t worry. I’m calm. I can do it. I’m no
t going to lose.” Toni was taken aback, did not know what to say. “Well,” I continued, “maybe he ends up winning it, but I won’t lose as I did last year.” I meant that, whatever happened, I wasn’t going to hand him victory on a plate. I wasn’t going to lower my guard and I wasn’t going to let myself down. He was going to have to fight every inch of the way too, and I would not be ceding any ground. This time in the locker room, by contrast to what had happened during the first rain interruption, it was Federer who was quiet, I who was chattering. Once Toni recovered from the surprise of seeing that he had no need to buck me up, we talked about the game in more clinical terms. I mentioned a couple of the errors I’d made in the fourth set, but not to beat myself up. I thought that by speaking about them I’d make sure I remembered those lapses and did not repeat them again. I recalled my failures in the tiebreak of the fourth when I went 5–2 up and my two missed match points, not so much as opportunities missed, as Toni saw them, but as evidence of how close I’d been to winning, of how up against the ropes I’d put Federer, of how—should those chances come again—I would not fail. Also, as I reminded Toni, I had not lost my serve once, while Federer had lost his twice, despite so far having served about five times as many aces as I had. And, besides, if I’d won two sets already, why shouldn’t I win a third?
My father, my mother, everybody confessed later that when Toni got back from the locker room, they were amazed to hear from him how sunny and constructive my mood had been. Some of them wondered if I was just putting it on, either to deceive myself or to calm their nerves. Toni told them he’d wondered the same thing but had heard something in my tone of voice and seen something in my eyes that told him I was for real. I was. I knew this was my moment.
Titín knew it too. We’ve talked about that moment quite a few times since. He had expected something else, as Toni had, but discovered that now, in the last throes of the match, I looked more confident and more at ease than I had done the night before at dinner or when we’d been playing darts, or that morning during training, or over lunch. After half an hour, when the rain stopped, Titín left the locker room believing, as I did, that my time had finally come to win Wimbledon.
It was 2–2 and deuce, with Federer serving. He banged down two aces and won the game. Nothing I could do about that. Aces are like rain. You accept them and move on. I replied with a great forehand winner at the start of my service game, which I won at 15, and then he held serve easily at love, wrapping up the game with yet another ace. In the next game, with me serving at 4–3 down, he had his chance. He won the first point after I hit a forehand just wide. I challenged it, but more in hope than expectation. Love–15. We got to 30–30, and then, suddenly, he hit a perfect forehand winner down the line, wrong-footing me when I had expected the ball to come to my backhand, and I was 30–40 down. It was the first break point of the set and one of the biggest points of my life. I did not think of the consequences. I did not think that if I lost this one, he’d go 5–3 up and, the way he was serving, the match would surely be his. I just thought: “Concentrate every gram of energy and every cell in your brain and everything you’ve ever done in your life into holding this next point.” I had the sense then that he was going to try and hit the ball hard, go for a quick winner, so I had to stop him from getting the opportunity to do so, and the way to do that was by going on the attack first. The moment had come to vary the game plan, take him by surprise, do the unexpected. Instead of angling the first serve wide to his backhand, as I was doing on 90 percent of my serves, I hit it straight at his body, forcing him into an awkward forehand return that arrived back mid-court. I knew he’d thought I’d drive the ball high to his backhand, but I surprised him again. This was no time for half measures. I had overcome my fears, and the moment had come to attack, and so I opened up my chest and drove a forehand deep and hard into his forehand corner. All he could do was stretch and reply with a lob that went into orbit but landed close to the net. I finished off the point pounding the ball hard into the grass and high up into the Centre Court seats. I pumped my fist. Never had I played a point so pressured so bravely, intelligently, and well. I won the next point and then the game, wrong-footing him with a clean, looping forehand winner to his backhand corner.
The score was 4–4. I was where I wanted to be; and now the moment had come to fight, play aggressively, go for broke on every point, wait for my chance to pounce. If you’ve made it to the fifth set of a match like this, it means you’re playing well enough to risk going on the attack. Besides, there was no option now. Toni had said that if we got to 4–4, the winner would be the player better able to control his nerves. I felt I had control of mine. I also felt the Centre Court crowd was swinging toward me. In the previous set they’d been rooting more for Federer because they wanted the match to go to five sets, but now I heard more cries of “Rafa! Rafa!” than “Roger! Roger!” I like to have the crowd behind me, of course, but I savor it more after the game is over, or when I watch the match again on video, than at the time. When I am playing I cannot allow anything to distract me, not even the support of the fans.
Maybe they were with me because they thought I was playing better and deserved victory more. That was how I felt now as the match neared its close. He wasn’t hitting the ball as cleanly as I was and was even mis-hitting some forehands, usually the strongest part of his game. I sensed I was winning the battle of nerves, and I also sensed he was more tired than I was. The difference remained that he had a weapon I lacked: the big serve. That kept getting him out of trouble, and that won him the next game, putting him 5–4 ahead. Now I was going to have to serve not just to avoid the break, but to save the match.
I couldn’t match him for power on the service, but I could try and outwit him. I did, sending down an ace after going 15–0 up on the first point. I aced him not because I hit the ball hard but because he was expecting it on his backhand and I bent the ball wide to his right. I felt confident and I was letting him know it. I won the game, pretty comfortably, at 30. And then it was he who found himself in deep trouble. I went 15–40 up on his serve after hitting a curling forehand down the line from deep in the left-hand baseline corner. Two break points and I was flying, but then, bang! An ace. And then another big serve. He won the game to go up 6–5. My consolation was knowing that, unlike the time in the third set when I had lost a chance to break him at love–40, this had been no fault of my own. I had another kind of mental battle to contend with now, fighting my growing frustration at the mechanical effectiveness of his serve. I knew once a point got under way, I was getting the upper hand, but he just wasn’t allowing me the chance to play my game.
Again I had to serve to save the match, and again I did it with relative ease, winning it at 15. Federer had little answer to my aggression once a rally got under way, though I’m not sure that was the way my father was seeing it at the time. I glanced up at him after I’d won that game to make it 6-6 and he was going berserk, on his feet, applauding, his face urging me on with rage and elation, contorted in a way I’d never seen it before. Going berserk was not an option for me right now. I had the feeling that if I kept my head, victory was mine. Federer’s groundstrokes were falling apart. In the first point at 6–6—no tiebreak now as it was the final set—he mishit a simple forehand terribly. Then I won the next point after the first long rally on his serve that I could remember. Then three more pounding serves and he was up 40–30. I could see for sure now that he was more tired than I was and more uncertain of his shots, so I was getting more and more frustrated at the unflagging consistency of his serve, which was proving to be his only escape route. I thought, “I’m definitely playing better, but what more can I do . . . ?”
I leveled at deuce, and then I saw my chance when, at last, he missed his first serve. But no: I returned his second serve hard and long. About half a meter long. Now, that might have looked like a very poor mistake, but in a way it wasn’t. Because it meant I remained committed to attack, that I was playing all-or-nothing tenn
is. If I’d lost the point hitting the ball short, into the net, that would have been a sign that my head was failing me. But that was a shot struck with conviction. Messing up is part of the game, but sometimes it’s more productive to lose a point through an error of your own than because the other guy has hit a winner.
All points are important, but some are more important than others. Now every single one was worth gold. My uncle Rafael, who was there at the Centre Court, told me afterward that in my place he simply could not have withstood the pressure, that his legs would have given way, that he would simply have run off, got on a flight somewhere far away, and never come back. The difference between me and him, and other spectators who might have had similar thoughts, was that I had trained for this moment all my life. Not just hitting balls, but training my mind. Toni’s harsh training regime—thwacking balls at me when I was a little kid to keep me alert, never allowing me to make excuses or succumb to complacency—was reaping its reward. Plus I do have a quality—whether innate or taught, I don’t know—that champions must have: pressure elates me. Yes, I buckle sometimes, but more often I raise my game.