Rafa

by Rafael Nadal

  Two things did change after Wimbledon, though. Nadal bought himself the sports car he coveted. Despite his misgivings, his father could raise no objections. And Nadal had a new trophy to place alongside the countless others he had won. His godfather, with him sometime later in the sitting room at home where he displays his abundant collection of trophies, asked him which one he valued most. Without a second’s hesitation, Nadal pointed to his gold Wimbledon cup and replied, “This one.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  MIND OVER MATTER

  If silence is what defines the Centre Court at Wimbledon, Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, where I played the final of the US Open in 2010, is defined by noise. Elsewhere, breaks between games are times for quiet pause, but here the show never stops. Hard, pumping music blasts the eardrums, prizes are drawn— with breathless suspense—over the loudspeaker system and Jumbotron. TV screens carry replays of the latest exchanges on court or, to even greater excitement, capture scenes from the crowd: couples kissing, cute kids smiling, celebrities posing, prizewinners celebrating, and, every now and then, New Yorkers fighting. The noise never entirely ceases, fading to a low but constant murmur when the game is on. In theory, as everywhere else in the world, the spectators are asked to remain in their places until play stops and the contestants take their chairs. But Arthur Ashe Stadium is so vast—it’s the biggest tennis venue in the world, with a capacity of 23,000—that those sitting in the lower levels are the only ones that pay any heed. Higher up, not only do the fans bustle about at all times, the rule against talking during points seems to exist only to be broken. Not that there would be all that much purpose in enforcing it anyway, given there is no rule against airplanes flying overhead. The tennis complex in Flushing Meadow Park where the US Open is staged is on the flight path to LaGuardia Airport, which means you can be in the middle of a big point, or about to hit a nervous second serve, when the amphitheater is suddenly drowned by the almighty whine of a low-flying jet.

  Wimbledon it is not.

  The energy, the irreverence, and the relentless din set the US Open apart, as a spectacle, from the other three Grand Slam tournaments. It’s pure America—pure New York—and I love it. The noise and the general frenzy test my powers of concentration, certainly, but I’m good at that. By and large, I manage to isolate myself as effectively from my environment at Flushing Meadow as I do at stately Wimbledon. New York is about as far from Manacor as it is possible to imagine, but the presence of my team makes everywhere I go feel a little like home.

  The great thing about the professionals who accompany me on the tennis tour is that they make my job feel less like a job, and they give me friendship when the alternative—if they were not so close and loyal, and easy to be with—would be to lead a strangely solitary, nomadic sort of life, jumping from airport to airport, from anonymous hotel room to anonymous hotel room, from players’ lounges to restaurants, most of which tend to feel and look exactly the same, wherever in the world I may happen to be.

  Jordi Robert, who’s always with me in New York, works for Nike, my first ever sponsor, but first and foremost he is a friend. I hope the company values him as much as I do. If a rival to Nike came along and made me a better offer, I’d think long and hard about leaving, simply because of my relationship with Tuts. He’s worth gold to them. By virtue of his job description alone, he would not necessarily be expected to be on such intimate terms with me, but he has become an indispensable member of my team. He accompanies me to training, eats at the table with me before and after matches, sits around chatting in my hotel rooms, stays with me in the house we rent at Wimbledon. Tuts is about ten years older than me, but with the stylish glasses he wears and his sassy, brightly colored clothes, you might think I was the older man, for I’m a much more conventional dresser. What I esteem most about Tuts, beyond what he brings to my relationship with Nike, is that he is always smiling, always in a good mood. He is kind and loyal and a comfort to have around. He makes me work, sometimes when—quite honestly—I’d rather be doing something else, but most important of all he is just an incredibly nice guy whose presence helps create the atmosphere of trust and of calm that I need to perform at my best on the tennis court.

  Carlos Costa, like Tuts, is not employed directly by me. He works for the big international sports agency, IMG, but he’s been by my side since I was fourteen. Carlos negotiates the contracts and makes the first judgments on the requests for sponsorship deals that regularly come our way. But he is also a great friend, and should a problem arise, he is a person I turn to with absolute confidence. His advice is tremendously valuable to me, all the more so because I have learned that the business recommendations he makes are determined not, in the first instance, by the imperative to make money, but by the need to do what’s best for my game. It’s very hard to find an agent like that. It would be even harder to find one who, like him, has played tennis at the highest level and made it to number ten in the world rankings. As a sporting mentor, he complements Toni very well. He’s technically astute and knows the qualities of my rivals. When the tension—the usually valuable tension—that Toni creates becomes too great, Carlos knows how to defuse it. For example, we’ll be in a hotel room in Paris during the French Open and things with Toni suddenly get a bit heated. Carlos will say, “Rafa, let’s go for a walk.” And the two of us will set off for a stroll around Paris, talk things through, put things in perspective, and I’ll return to the hotel in a much better frame of mind. Carlos brings order and stability to our team. Not being family means he is able to make decisions more with his head than with his heart. It would be good to continue in a professional relationship with him beyond my tennis career. Should I set up a business, he is someone I’d want to take with me. Tuts too. Because we’d work well together, but we’d also have a good time.

  A big part of the job, in New York as well as anywhere else, is dealing with the media, which is why it’s so important for me to have a great professional as my head of communications. Benito Pérez Barbadillo is the most cosmopolitan member of our group. He speaks four languages perfectly, an enormous advantage in a job that requires him to deal with journalists from all over the world, and he has the tough task, which I know he struggles with, of having to play the bad guy for me, turning down journalists constantly, shielding me from the countless requests I get for interviews. If I said yes to them all, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. He understands, as Carlos Costa does, my need to have time not just to train but also to lead a quiet and ordered life on my own, to have the peace necessary to carve out that closed mental space that’s essential to my success on the court. When Benito’s not around, I miss him. He’s irreverent, quick-witted, always cracking jokes. He’s informed on what’s happening in politics and global affairs generally: in the bubble our team inhabits, he’s our connection to the wider world, as he is to the media, and he knows how to administer the news he gives us in just the right measures, and always with a lot of humor and plenty of provocative opinions. But he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and we’ve learned to take much of what he says with a pinch of salt, as he likes to be deliberately outrageous. He’s our court jester, the one who lightens the mood in an environment where it’s easy to lose perspective and allow things to become too serious and tense.

  Francis Roig, my second coach, is a similarly soothing presence, but in a more low-key sort of way. A former pro, like Carlos Costa, he is sharp in his reading of my opponents and an enormously experienced student of the finer points of tennis. He has enormous faith in my abilities and transmits a lot of confidence to me, having added a lot to my understanding of the game. Like Carlos, he is easygoing, a pleasure—as well as an education—to have around ever since we first teamed up on a South American tour in 2005. He is by my side when Toni isn’t, which is to say for forty percent or so of the matches on the tour.

  Ángel Ruiz Cotorro has been my doctor since I was fourteen years old. He’s been by my side during the reall
y tough injuries I’ve had to endure, providing not just wise medical advice but also the reassurance I’ve needed to keep fighting, encouraging me to believe in my powers of recovery. He is always available to me, wherever in the world I might be, responding to emergencies large or small. And he has a keen understanding of my particular needs as an athlete, having been the chief medical officer of the Spanish Tennis Federation, dealing regularly with Spain’s top players, since before we first met. He is part of the team at many of the top tennis tournaments, but even when he is not around, he is with me in spirit, as is Joan Forcades, my physical trainer, with whom he liaises constantly to assess the condition I am in before conveying long distance instructions to Titín, who is always with me.

  Take Titín away from my team and I’d be forlorn. I don’t know how his absence would affect my game, but it certainly would my happiness. Always by my side during tournaments, he is the first person I turn to when I have a problem. He’s my physical therapist, and he is excellent at what he does, but I value his personal role even more than his professional role, because there are lots of physical therapists in the world, but, were he to move on filling the void of friendship he’d leave behind would be almost impossible. Not only is he a very good person, he is unfailingly honest. If he needs to say something to you, he’ll tell it to you straight.

  I’d struggle with my tennis if I were one of those players, of whom there are plenty, who is forever changing the members of his team. My principal need for them is at a personal level because tennis is a game in which your emotional state is paramount to success. The better you are within yourself, the better your chances of playing well. I talk a lot about the importance of the word “endurance,” but another big word in my vocabulary is “continuity.” I simply don’t contemplate the notion of changing my team around. I’ve always had, and hope always to have, the same team around me. Toni, who’s been with me forever, established the pattern, and I don’t ever want to see it broken.

  We have a pattern when we’re in New York for the US Open too. We always stay in hotels within the same mid-Manhattan neighborhoods, near Central Park, and after driving to and from Flushing Meadow during the day, we go in the evening to one of the four or five restaurants that we always go to, within walking distance of the hotel, usually to eat Japanese food, because there is nothing better than the quality of fish you’ll get at a good Japanese restaurant. The rest of the time we’ll hang around a lot in my hotel room, chatting or watching movies or a football game. We also watch plenty of videos of matches I’ve played in, with Toni and me watching closely, drawing lessons from my mistakes but also from my better moments of play. It’s good for morale to watch myself playing a great point or strike a winning forehand drive, but more important, it helps me visualize the finer aspects of my game, allowing me to record a mental picture in my head that I then use when I go out on court, in order to recapture that fluent feeling of control I need to strike the ball well. It’s hard to explain, but it works.

  When I am in Manhattan, I’d love to be able to walk around more and absorb the energy of the place, see the sights, but people don’t tend to hold back when they catch sight of sports stars, and trying to behave like a normal person and pass by unperceived on a stroll down Fifth Avenue is, as I know from experience, mission impossible. It’s no use complaining about this, any more than there’s any point in getting irritated when rain stops play. It goes with the job and you accept it. That means the only times I might wander far from the vicinity of my hotel will be when one of my sponsors asks me to take part in some promotional event they might be staging in a downtown warehouse or, as in the case of an extravaganza Nike organized, on the wharf on the Hudson River where the Titanic would have docked had it completed its maiden voyage. Again, everyone will come along. Not just Tuts, but Titín, Carlos, Benito, and whoever else might be around. Whatever we do, we’re all in it together.

  This year, the 2010 US Open was incredibly hot the first week, but then it cooled down and, on the day of the final, it rained so much that the match had to be postponed by twenty-four hours. This was not a bad thing for my opponent, Novak Djokovic, who had had a much longer, tougher semifinal than I’d had, beating Roger Federer in five sets. In his place, I’d have welcomed the extra day’s rest.

  A strong and fit Djokovic was a formidable opponent. Our match didn’t have quite the same aura as another Federer-Nadal battle, at least as far as the crowds were concerned, but for me the challenge was quite daunting enough. He is a very complete player—more complete, Toni says, than I am—without any obvious weak points, and on hard surfaces, such as the ones at Flushing Meadow, he’d beaten me more times than I had beaten him. His greatest strengths are his excellent sense of positioning on the court and his ability to hit the ball early, on the rise. He is as good on the backhand as on the forehand, and his vision of the ball is so sharp that he plays with time to spare, more often than not inside the court, narrowing the angles for his opponents, making the game a lot easier for himself.

  With Federer, the rule is always to keep patiently plugging away, knowing you’ll force him sooner or later to make mistakes. With Djokovic, there is no clear tactical plan. It is simply a question of playing at your very best, with maximum intensity and aggression, seeking to retain control of the point, because the moment you let him get the upper hand, he is unstoppable.

  My impressions were confirmed as I watched his semifinal against Federer on TV, which Djokovic won after saving two match points. I thought, not for the first time, “What an incredibly tough and talented guy!” I also thought how hard it was going to be to beat him. When I watch the top players on video, I often have the feeling that they’re better than me. It was not a very logical thing to be thinking during the US Open, given that I was world number one by now and had been for most of the previous two years. I’d also beaten both of them more times than they had beaten me. Neither am I at all sure this is the way most champion athletes regard their rivals. I expect it’s the other way around. In my case it’s probably got a lot to do with Toni, who’s conditioned me to believe from childhood that every match is going to be an uphill battle. I am not sure this is always the healthiest frame of mind in which to enter a match, because sometimes it puts a check on my confidence, leading me to play with less aggression than I might. But, on the plus side, it means that I treat everyone I play with respect and never succumb to complacency. It may be the reason why I rarely lose against players who, by their position in the rankings, I should beat.

  Yet I wasn’t especially nervous—not in the light of the challenge that lay ahead of me, at any rate—before the 2010 final against Djokovic. I was certainly a lot less wound up than before the 2008 Wimbledon final. I slept well, a good eight hours, on both nights before. There were two because of the day’s rain delay. Each time I put on a movie in my hotel room and, instead of tossing and turning and imagining the worst, went straight to sleep. Partly it was that my mind wasn’t haunted, as it had been at Wimbledon, by the memory of past traumas. Partly it was my greater experience and maturity, the number of Grand Slam finals I’d played in; but partly too it was that my expectations were not so high. Images of winning Wimbledon had played in my mind since my teens; the US Open had always felt like a dream too far.

  This is not to say that I went into the match against Djokovic in a defeatist frame of mind. Obviously I felt I could win, but I had the sense that if I did, it would be a happy and unexpected plus in my career, rather than something I had to achieve or live the rest of my life ridden by a sense of failure.

  I’d always regarded the US Open as the most difficult tournament for me to win. At Wimbledon I’d played very well even when I hadn’t won; at the US Open I had never really played my best. Twice before I’d made it to the semifinals, but in neither case did I feel entirely comfortable on court. It has to do with the exceptionally fast surface but also with the balls they use at the US Open, which are softer than the ones used elsewhere, preventing
me from applying as much heavy topspin, and therefore as much height, to my shots as I usually do. That’s the aspect of my game that gives my opponents the most trouble, and where I have an edge over most of them. There’s another factor too: the US Open is the last of the four Grand Slams, coming toward the end of the long, hard summer season, and I tend to arrive in New York tired, both physically and mentally.

  I had arrived more than usually wiped out for the 2008 tournament, in which I lost in the semifinals to Andy Murray, and not just because of the nervous energy I’d invested in winning Wimbledon. In between the two competitions I’d traveled halfway around the world to play in the Beijing Olympic Games, my first experience of taking part in the biggest sports show on earth. I enjoyed it immensely and it taught me a lot—most of all, how lucky I am.

  I stayed in the Olympic village with all the other athletes, and once again, as in the Davis Cup, I had a taste of that team spirit that I loved so much when I played football as a kid. Living with my Spanish teammates, in the same residential compound, meeting and making friends with the Spanish basketball team and track athletes (some of whom, a little embarrassingly, would stop me in the corridors, or in the communal laundry room where we all washed our clothes, to ask me for my autograph) and stepping out in uniform alongside them all for the opening ceremony—these were unforgettable experiences. But my sense of good fortune came accompanied by a strong dose of indignation.

  I understood better than ever just how privileged we professional tennis players are, and how unjust is the predicament of so many Olympic athletes. They train incredibly hard, at least as hard as we do, yet the rewards tend to be far smaller. A tennis player ranked number eighty in the world has economic benefits, social privileges, and a degree of recognition beyond the dreams of someone who is number one in track and field, swimming, or gymnastics. On the tennis circuit everything is laid on for us all year round, and the money we receive allows us the chance to save for our futures. These people train with the discipline of monks over a period of four years in preparation for the one competition that stands out above all others, the Olympics, yet the vast majority of them receive very little support relative to the effort they invest. It’s admirable that they should prepare so rigorously, at so much personal sacrifice, for the mere satisfaction of competing and because of the passion they feel for their sports. That has a value beyond price. But that shouldn’t have to be enough. With all the income the International Olympic Committee generates from the Games—an event that depends for its success on the commitment of the athletes—you’d think they might be able to share the cash a little more fairly. In my case, I have no need to be paid, luckily, but an athlete who runs in the 400 meters or the marathon needs a lot of financial backing just to be able to train at the level required to make it to the Olympics and then compete for the top prizes. I understand that tennis has broader public appeal, at least over the course of a calendar year, but I think it’s unjust that more of an effort is not made to allow these incredibly dedicated people to live more decently and train in better conditions.