Rafa

by Rafael Nadal

  But these were my reflections after it was all over. Moaning and griping was not what defined my time in Beijing. What stays with me, above all, was the camaraderie between the athletes and the chance I had to learn about so many different new sports and discover how much we all had in common. Just to be able to participate, and to have access to a world I never thought I’d get to know, was uplifting enough. Then to win gold in the men’s singles, after beating Djokovic in the semis and Fernando Gonzalez of Chile in the final, and to see the Spanish flag being raised to the accompaniment of the national anthem as I stood on the winner’s podium: well, it was one of my life’s proudest moments. People don’t usually associate the Olympic Games with tennis. I certainly didn’t when I was growing up. The game only reappeared as an Olympic sport in 1988, after a sixty-four-year absence. But in tennis players’ minds Olympic gold has become something to covet. After a Grand Slam, it’s now the prize we most cherish.

  The first Grand Slam of the year is the Australian Open, held in Melbourne. It’s a nice tournament, less raucous than the US Open, more easygoing than Wimbledon, less grand than Paris—though they put me up in a hotel suite so huge I could almost play a game of five-a-side football in it. I enjoy the food in Melbourne. There’s another great Japanese place downstairs from the hotel. I also appreciate the quick, five-minute drive through lush green parkland to Melbourne Park, the club where the competition is held. And it’s hot, coming straight from the European winter. I usually arrive a week before the tournament begins in order to adapt to the ten-hour time difference with Spain. The effort to adjust is complicated, in my case, by the fact that January is an important month in the football calendar back home, and I find myself having to get up at odd hours of the morning to watch Real Madrid play. If they are playing very early, what I’ll do is set the alarm clock, see how the match is going, and decide then whether to stay up or remain in bed. If they’re winning 3–0 with half an hour to go, I’ll turn over and go back to sleep. If it’s 0–0, the suspense will be too much for me and I’ll have to stay up to watch to the end. But I won’t get up outrageously early, however big the football game might be, if I’m competing myself that day. The job comes first.

  Going into the Australian Open in 2009, I felt my chances of winning were as good as they had been at Wimbledon six months earlier. I had, in other words, a good fighting chance. The surface of the courts was hard, but less complicated for my game than Flushing Meadow. The ball bounces higher than it does at the US Open, so it doesn’t fly so fast and it takes my topspin well. What I hadn’t reckoned on was a semifinal like the one I had against my friend and fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco. I won, in the end, but I had to battle so hard and was left so physically destroyed by the end of it. For most of the one and a half days of preparation I had for the final against Federer, I was convinced I had absolutely no chance of winning. The only time I’d felt like that before a Grand Slam final was at Wimbledon in 2006, but that was because I did not believe, in my heart of hearts, that winning was an option. Before the Australian final in 2009 it was my body that rebelled, begging me to call a halt. It didn’t cross my mind to pull out of the match—short of imminent collapse, you can’t do that in a Grand Slam final—but the result I anticipated, and for which I strove mentally to prepare myself, was a 6–1, 6–2, 6–2 defeat.

  The semifinal I played against Verdasco was the longest match in Australian Open history. It was incredibly tight every step of the way, with him playing spectacularly, hitting an extraordinarily high percentage of outright winners. But I somehow held on, on the defense but making few errors, and after five hours and fourteen minutes, I won 6–7, 6–4, 7–6, 6–7, 6–4. It was so hot on court that the two of us rushed to drape ice packs around our necks and shoulders in the breaks between games. In the very last game, just before the very last point, my eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t crying because I sensed defeat, or even victory, but as a response to the sheer excruciating tension of it all. I had lost the fourth set on a tie break, and that, in a game so tense and in such conditions, would have been devastating had I not been able to call on every last reserve of mental strength I’d accumulated over fifteen years of relentless competition. I was able to put that blow behind me and begin the fifth believing I still had it in me to win.

  The chance finally arrived with me 5–4 and 0–40 up on Verdasco’s serve. That should have been it, with three match points, but it wasn’t quite. I lost both the first and the second points. That was when it all got too much for me and I broke down; that was where the armor plating fell away and the warrior Rafa Nadal, who tennis fans think they know, lay revealed as the vulnerable, human Rafael. The one person who didn’t see it was Verdasco. Either that or he was in even worse shape than I was. Because his nerves got the better of him too. In a moment of incredible good luck for me (and terrible luck for him), he double faulted, handing me victory without me having to hit a shot. Both of us fell flat on our backs, ready to expire of physical and nervous exhaustion, but it was me who made it up first, stumbling forward and stepping over the net to embrace Fernando and tell him it was a match neither of us had deserved to lose. Toni, who had not failed to notice the quivering wreck I’d been reduced to in the final game, remarked later that had Verdasco not double faulted, the semifinal would probably have been his. I tend to agree.

  The match ended at one in the morning, and I did not go to sleep till after five. First I had to do the obligatory post-match press conference, plus interviews with individual journalists. My legs could hardly carry me, and God knows what I said. Back, at last, in my hotel room, I had some food brought up. Sleep would have to wait. I ate, replenishing my empty batteries, and then I abandoned myself to Titín, whose task it was to bring my battered body back to life and start preparing me for the match against Federer. Tuts saw me in the locker room after the Verdasco match, dead to the world, and his first thought was “My God! Titín’s got the job of his life here!” Tuts was right.

  Fortunately, Titín was calm and collected as usual. He did what he always does in difficult circumstances, he enlisted the help of Joan Forcades, my physical trainer, whom he reached in Mallorca with a Skype call from his computer. Forcades and Titín are friends and allies, their shared mission to attend to the needs of my body, to prevent injuries, maximize my fitness levels, and help me recover in time for my next match when my body’s taken a beating. Right now I was more exhausted than I had ever been at any point in my life. The challenge they faced—the three of us faced—required, it seemed to me, a miracle. But Joan was not downhearted.

  Joan has known me since I was nine or ten years old, and he has more faith in me than I have in myself. He is fantastic at his job and is a very, very important member of my team, but he operates more in the shadows than the rest. He used to travel with me, but now he does so very rarely, preferring to stay at home in Mallorca, away from the fame and far from the media. He’s a special guy who has a day job that he loves—as a schoolteacher in a public school in Mallorca—and he doesn’t work with me for the money but because he enjoys it and cares for me as if I were family.

  I overheard his conversation with Titín. Lots of ice was what was needed, they agreed, and lots of massage, to get the blood pumping through the system again. Joan, who had been analyzing the situation with Dr. Cotorro, was adamant that I’d have to take a good dose of protein and vitamin supplements, but most of all, he said, the important thing was to get the body moving again. He recommended that next day we do some stretching exercises to stir the muscles back into life, then some pedaling on the exercise bicycle, followed by a practice session on court. Joan was optimistic, reminding Titín that in our pre-season training over the Christmas period we had been preparing for this, training hard in the morning for three or four hours, then again in the afternoons for an hour and a half. “The most important thing is that we get his body in action again,” Joan said.

  I heard that, and I saw his logic, but at the time, three in th
e morning Australian time, all I was in any fit state for was submitting passively, immobile on a couch, to Titín’s therapeutic skills. The first thing he did after hanging up with Joan was to fill the bathtub with ice and make me sit in it, as a first step to activate the blood flow in my aching thighs. Then massages, first with a bag of ice, then using a bar of soap. Usually the day before a final I’ll train in the morning. This time I slept all morning, waking up in the early afternoon to discover, aghast, that I felt stiffer than the night before. Still, I pedaled away at the bike, smoothly, Titín said, just to get the blood circulating, and then I went out on court, with Carlos Costa on the other side of the net. I lasted barely twenty minutes. It was Carlos who saw I couldn’t go on. “It’s no good. You can’t move,” he said. “We’ve got to stop.” Dizzy, utterly drained, my calves feeling like lead, I hobbled off court and drove back to the hotel and straight into the ice bath. Titín was working overtime to get me ready for the next day’s final, but at that moment, crushed by my breakdown on court, I felt as if there could be no force on earth or heaven capable of accomplishing the task.

  I went to sleep that night in the grimmest of moods and woke up the next morning feeling only marginally less stiff. When I went out on the practice court for my last training session at five in the afternoon, two and a half hours before the match was due to start, I hardly felt any better. Again, I felt dizzy; again, my leg muscles felt heavy and hard—so much so that I suddenly had an attack of cramps in one of my calves. Toni was there, and after half an hour struggling to get some rhythm going, I told him I couldn’t go on. I must have looked terrible because he said, “OK. Stop. Let’s go back to the locker room.” And there it was that Toni rose to the occasion.

  My uncle’s power has always come from the word, from what he says to motivate me. He tells me these days that the most valuable training we did when I was a kid was not on the court but during the sessions we had in the car going to and from games on the fifty-kilometer drive to Palma, planning beforehand what we would do or analyzing afterward what we had done wrong. I remember he used examples from football, from Real Madrid, to catch my attention and ram home his thoughts. And Toni is right. His words taught me to think for myself on court and they taught me to be a fighter. He likes to quote some Spanish writer who said that the people who start wars are always poets. Well, poetry, of sorts, was what he used on me now, at this seemingly hopeless moment when battle had not even been engaged but, in my mind, I had already lost.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s five thirty now, and when you go on court at seven thirty I assure you you won’t be feeling any better. You’ll probably be feeling worse. So it’s up to you whether you rise above the pain and the exhaustion and summon up the desire you need to win.” I replied, “Toni, I’m sorry. I can’t see it. I just can’t.” “Don’t say you can’t,” he said. “Because anybody who digs deep enough can always find the motivation they need for anything. In war, people do things that appear to be impossible. Just imagine if there were a guy sitting behind you in the stadium pointing a gun at you, telling you that if you didn’t run, and keep running, he’d shoot you. I bet you’d run then. So, come on! It’s up to you to find the motivation to win. This is your big chance. Bad as you might be feeling now, it’s likely that you’ll never have as good a chance of winning the Australian Open as you do today. And even if there’s only a one percent chance of you winning this match, well, then, you have to squeeze every last drop out of that one percent.” Toni saw me hesitate, saw me listening, so he pressed on. “Remember that phrase of Barack Obama’s, ‘Yes, we can!’ At every changeover repeat it to yourself, because, you know what? The truth is you can do it. What you can never allow is to fail because of a loss of will. You can lose because your rival played better, but you can’t lose because you failed to give it your best. That would be a crime. But you won’t do that, I know it. Because you always do give your best and today will be no exception. You can, Rafael! You really can!”

  I was listening. It was as stirring a speech as Toni had ever given me. Whether my body was paying much attention was another matter. That was where Joan Forcades came in again. Titín remained in constant communication with him via Skype. Joan, who has a habit of peppering his conversation with complicated scientific jargon, stressed the need to play the match “ergonomically,” by which he meant I needed to adjust my game to the realities of the physical condition I was in. This meant pacing myself more than I usually would, saving my body’s reserves of energy for the more critical points, not fighting for every single point as if it were my last. And also trying to make the points shorter, which meant taking more risks.

  Armed with a plan, I took my usual cold shower, after which I did feel better, and performed my sequence of pre-match rituals in the locker room with a sense of growing conviction. And when I went out on court, I wasn’t hobbling anymore. The aches were still there and I felt a little sluggish during the warm-up with Federer. Sure enough, my left foot—that tarsal scaphoid bone—began bothering me again. But I’d been here before, and I hoped that the adrenaline and my powers of concentration would triumph over the pain one more time. I still wondered whether my body would hold up, but the good news was that, overall, I was feeling sharper than I had two hours earlier and a lot more so than when I had woken up after sleeping all morning the day before. Most important of all, the defeatism I’d felt earlier on had gone. I’d recovered the will to win and the belief that I could do so. Suddenly the challenge of overcoming the predicament I was in became something not to fear, but to relish. Toni’s words, Titín’s work, and Joan’s advice had done their magic.

  No sooner had the match got under way than the aches began to recede. So much so that I won the first game, breaking Federer’s serve. Then he broke me back, but as the games unfolded I found, to my great relief, that I wasn’t panting and out of breath, and while my calves still felt heavy, there were no signs of the muscle cramps I had feared. And none materialized, despite the match going to five sets. In the end, as Titín says, pain is in the mind. If you can control the mind, you can control the body. I lost the fourth set, as I had done against Verdasco, after going two sets to one up, but I came back, my determination bolstered and my spirit enhanced by the surprise and delight I felt at having made it as far as I had without falling apart. At 2–0 up in the fifth set I turned to where Toni, Carlos, Tuts, and Titín were sitting and said, just loud enough so they could hear, in Mallorquín, “I’m going to win.” And I did. Toni had been right. Yes, I could. I won 7–5, 3–6, 7–6, 3–6, 6–2, and I was Australian Open champion; to my astonishment I had come back to life, and there it was, my third of the four Grand Slam titles, now my sixth in all.

  Roger Federer was as mentally broken after the match was over as I had been physically before it. I’d have felt the same way in his place. He’d played a bad final set, and by beating him I had consolidated my standing as world number one. Yet those who started writing him off after that defeat, and there were a few, proved to be wrong. He had plenty of fire left in him. This had been his chance to match Pete Sampras’s record of fourteen Grand Slams and he’d failed, at least for now. To me, he was still the best of all time, as I reminded people when my time came to be interviewed, and he showed it to the world over the next couple of years, adding more major trophies to his cabinet and beating Sampras’s record.

  As for me, I took a big lesson from that victory. It was a lesson Toni had been drumming into me for years, but never had I discovered how true it was until now. I learned that you always have to hang in there, that however remote your chances of winning might seem, you have to push yourself to the very limit of your abilities and try your luck. That day in Melbourne I saw, more clearly than ever before, that the key to this game resides in the mind, and if the mind is clear and strong, you can overcome almost any obstacle, including pain. Mind can triumph over matter.

  A year and a half later, before the final of the 2010 US Open, it seemed not to be me but
my rival Novak Djokovic who’d have to overcome the pain barrier. He was in the position I had been in approaching the Australian Open final. In Flushing Meadow, I was the one who was relatively fresh, having made it to the final without dropping a set, whereas Djokovic was coming straight from that five-set semifinal against Federer, in which he had saved two match points before winning. But he was luckier than I had been in Melbourne. The day’s delay because of the rain in New York was a blessing for him, and by the time we got out on court on Monday, September 13, we were on equal terms physically.