Rafa

by Rafael Nadal

  My parents were the pillar of my life and that pillar had crumbled. The continuity I so valued in my life had been cut in half, and the emotional order I depend on had been dealt a shocking blow. Another family with grown-up children (I was twenty-two and my sister, eighteen) might have taken a marital separation more in its stride. But this was not possible in a family as close and united as ours, where there had been no conflict visible, where all we had ever seen was harmony and good cheer. Assimilating the news that my parents had been going through such a crisis after nearly thirty years of marriage was heartbreaking. My family had always been the holy, untouchable core of my life, my center of stability and a living album of my wonderful childhood memories. Suddenly, and utterly without warning, the happy family portrait had cracked. I suffered on behalf of my father, my mother, and my sister, who were all having a terrible time. But everybody was affected: my uncles and aunt, my grandparents, my nephews and nieces. Our whole world was destabilized, and contact between members of the family became, for the first time that I had been aware of, awkward and unnatural; no one knew at first how to react. Returning back home had always been a joy; now it became uncomfortable and strange.

  Through all these years of constant travel and ever more frenzied claims on my time as my fame had grown, Manacor and our neighboring seaside resort of Porto Cristo was a bubble of peace and sanity, a private world where I could isolate myself from the celebrity madness and be entirely myself again. Fishing, golf, friends, the old routine of family lunches and dinners—all that had changed. My father had moved out of our Porto Cristo home, and now when we sat down to eat or watch TV, he wasn’t there. Where there had been laughter and jokes, a heavy silence hung. Paradise had become paradise lost.

  Strangely, the effect on my game was not immediate. I was on a winning streak, and the positive momentum carried me through for a couple of months. I won in Monte Carlo, Barcelona, and Rome, and more surprisingly, I won on the hard surface of Indian Wells. I felt no elation at the moment of victory, but my body somehow kept going through the motions. My attitude was bad. I was depressed, lacking in enthusiasm. On the surface I remained a tennis-playing automaton, but the man inside had lost all love of life.

  My team members were at a loss how to react to the gloom that descended on me. For Carlos, Titín, Joan, and Francis Roig, who was with me at Indian Wells instead of Toni, I became a different person, distant and cold; short and sharp in conversation. They worried about me, and they worried about the impact of my parents’ separation on my game. They knew I couldn’t keep winning; they knew something had to give. And it did. First it was my knees that went. I felt the first twinges in Miami, at the end of March. The pain got worse week by week, but I managed to keep playing through it until early May, in Madrid, when I couldn’t keep going anymore. Mind could no longer overcome matter and I took a break.

  I came back a couple of weeks later for the French Open. Maybe I should not have competed in Roland Garros, but I had won the championship the previous four years and I felt a duty to defend my crown, however unlikely the prospect of victory felt. Sure enough, I lost in the fourth round to Robin Soderling of Sweden, my first ever defeat in that tournament. This finally pushed me over the edge. I’d made a huge effort to be in shape for Roland Garros, battling to overcome both my parents’ separation and the pain in my knees, but now I knew that, debilitated in mind and body, I could no longer keep going. Terribly sad, I pulled out of Wimbledon, giving up on the chance to defend a title that had been so hard-won, the year before and meant so much to me. My knees were the immediate reason, but I knew that the root cause was my state of mind. My competitive zeal had waned, the adrenaline had dried up. Joan Forcades says there is a “holistic” cause-and-effect connection between emotional distress and physical collapse. He says that if your head is in permanent stress, you sleep little and your mind is distracted—exactly the symptoms I was showing at that time—the impact on your body is devastating. Messages are relayed to the muscles that under the pressure of competition, lead to injuries. I am sure Joan is right.

  Being at Wimbledon instead of at home reminded me every minute of how dramatically our lives had been altered, which only deepened my introspection and grief. And while I carried on training with Joan in the gym, gearing the exercises to help my knees recover, the intensity was not there, because the will wasn’t. Federer won Wimbledon that year, having won the French Open for the first time a month before, and snatched back the world number one spot from me almost exactly a year after I had taken it away from him. It was a blow, but it would have hurt a lot more under ordinary circumstances. My sense of loss remained centered on what had happened at home.

  But I am not a malingerer. If I felt healthy, I would never play truant from the tour. After the Wimbledon break, in early August, I rejoined the circuit in North America, playing first in Toronto and then in Cincinnati. My knees were just about holding up, though I failed to win either tournament, but in Cincinnati I suffered yet another setback. I tore an abdominal muscle. That’s not an unusual injury among tennis players. It affects your serve, in particular, as you stretch and twist to strike the ball, but it’s something you can play through if you are feeling otherwise well. Next up was the US Open, and this time I didn’t pull out. I advanced further, under the circumstances, than I might have expected, falling in the semifinals to Juan del Potro of Argentina, who beat me comfortably—6–2, 6–2, 6–2—and went on to win the tournament. But that was enough. It was time to call a halt, allow myself time off to face up to the new reality at home, try and learn how to deal with it, take my mind off tennis a little and give my body time to recover.

  I’ve never reached the point of hating tennis, as some professional players say they have. You can’t hate something, I don’t think, that puts the food on the table and has given you almost everything you have in life. There can come a time, though, when you grow weary and a part of that fanatical enthusiasm you need to keep competing at the highest level begins to ebb. I’ve always believed, as Toni has, that to keep competing you must never break your established patterns. You have to carry on training hard, long hours whether you feel like it or not, because any slack in intensity will be reflected in your results on court. But a point comes when you just cannot keep going at a hundred percent, mind and body, every single day, and the best thing to do is pause and wait for the desire to return.

  By Christmas 2009, eleven months after first learning of the problems in my parents’ marriage, we had begun learning to adapt to the new family dynamic. My mother—who’d had a miserable 2009—was recovering her old zest, and I made up my mind that the moment had come to turn over a new leaf. The media were full of stories questioning whether I’d ever return to my best, with some experts even wondering whether my hard physical game had taken a toll from which I’d never fully recover, and this only sharpened my desire to get back and prove the skeptics wrong. Toni, himself not immune to the family traumas, had been sympathetic, for the most part. But now, as my annus horribilis approached its end, he said that enough was enough. It was time to buck up and return to work. “There are a lot of people who have problems in life but keep going,” he said. “What makes you so special that you should be the exception?” While blunt, as usual, he had a point. The soreness in my knees never entirely went away, but I resumed full training. As 2010 approached, I battled hard to be in shape for the Australian Open.

  I didn’t expect to win, but I was bitterly disappointed at the manner of my exit, in the quarter finals, against Andy Murray. I had to pull out halfway through the third set because of my knees. Murray had won the first two sets, and in the spirit of honest competition, I would have liked to keep going to the end, even if it was obvious that victory would be his. But the pain was so bad, and the potential damage to the knees so great, that I had to call a halt. It was another blow after all the hard work I’d done to prepare for Australia, and all the more so when my doctor told me I’d need two weeks of rest and the
n two weeks of rehabilitation before I could compete again, further evidence that the life you lead as an elite athlete is not good for your health—a point on which Joan Forcades, who in my view is a world expert on the subject, entirely agrees.

  The doubters had more ammunition than ever now, but I refused to believe I was down and out. I did not become despondent the way I had five years earlier, when the problem in my tarsal scaphoid bone laid me low. I was able to walk, if not to sprint. I wasn’t limping on crutches or hitting balls sitting on a chair.

  A month passed and I was back to reasonable fitness, feeling well enough to compete in March in Indian Wells and Miami, where I reached the semifinals both times. And then, once again, it was at Monte Carlo where the breakthrough came. Back on clay, I recovered my old self. I lost only fourteen games in all five matches and beat Fernando Verdasco (who had driven me to tears of despair during that five-hour five set match in the Australian Open), 6–0, 6–1 in the final, making it six Monte Carlo victories in a row. I had another reason to be cheerful. My father and Dr. Cotorro had been hunting for a solution to my knee problems, and it seemed that finally they might have had some luck. I had scheduled a visit straight after Monte Carlo to a medical center in Vitoria, the capital of Spain’s Basque Country, where they had a treatment doctors believed could cure me once and for all. It would involve injections without anesthetics to the knees, a prospect that hardly filled me with joy, but I’d do whatever it took to recover full fitness. I’d had this problem for a year now and I wanted it to go away.

  Getting to Vitoria, where I had my doctor’s appointment on the Monday after the Sunday of the Monte Carlo final, proved to be more of a challenge than my two companions on the trip, my father and Titín, and I might at first have imagined. The normal thing would have been to go by plane from Nice, via Barcelona. The problem was that practically the whole of Europe’s airspace had been closed off due to the eruption of a volcano in Iceland. The prevailing winds were carrying a gigantic ash cloud south, all the way to Spain, and the aviation authorities had canceled all flights due to the risk of the cloud’s gritty little particles causing airplane engines to seize up in the air. So we had to travel from Monte Carlo to Victoria by road, a trip of about one thousand three hundred kilometers. Our appointment being at noon on Monday, we’d have to drive all through the night. But there was an additional complication. Real Madrid had a big match that Sunday night, and there was simply no question of missing it. So we went to Benito’s home (he lives in Monte Carlo), ordered in some pizzas and watched the game, which Real won, and then set off just before midnight, my father at the wheel.

  We hadn’t been on the road long when we realized we were all too tired to drive the whole way without a break. So we phoned Benito and asked him to try and find us a place where we could stop and snatch a few hours of sleep. Benito got on the case, calling a modest roadside hotel in Narbonne, in southern France, about a third of the way along our route. Benito is a persuasive man, but he had a struggle convincing the night receptionist that this wasn’t a crank call, that—yes, no kidding—Rafa Nadal and party would indeed be needing rooms there at three thirty in the morning.

  We got up a few hours later, having slept too little and hardly in the mood for the remaining seven hours of driving that still lay ahead. Luckily, we were able to push back the appointment with the doctor to the afternoon, which allowed us to break up the journey a little. The injections, without anesthetic, were as painful as I had expected them to be. As the doctor jabbed me, I bit a towel, needing to believe that the treatment would achieve its objective: to allow the knee’s tendons to regenerate and strengthen to such a degree that the problem would not just go away now, it would never come back.

  After another obligatory period of rest, I was back two weeks later for the Rome Masters tournament. I felt distinctly better, despite the knowledge that I’d have to return to Vitoria for another round of injections in July. I won in Rome and then I won in Madrid, silencing quite a lot of the talk of my imminent tennis death en route to the big test of whether my resurrection was complete: the French Open. I had not won a Grand Slam tournament since Melbourne, nearly a year and a half earlier, but I entered this one as the favorite.

  This worried Toni, who never stopped fretting about the prospect of success going to my head. This has become a reflex for him, taken sometimes to ludicrous extremes. One day early on in the French Open he and I were strolling side by side with Carlos Costa down a wide Paris sidewalk. I was walking in the middle, with Toni and Carlos on either side. Suddenly Toni stopped, “Wait a minute. We can’t have this.” Carlos and I looked at him, puzzled and mildly irritated, as if to say, “What now?” “We can’t have this!” he said. “Can’t have what?” “You, Rafael, walking in the middle like that.” In Toni’s mind we were conveying the message to passersby that I was the special one of the three, as if he and Carlos were my bodyguards, or courtiers. Carlos, who is less patient with Toni than I am, began to remonstrate. “For heaven’s sake, Toni . . .” But my attitude in moments like these is “anything for a bit of peace.” So I succumbed to Toni’s whim and took my place on the outside of our threesome, as he wished.

  The more important objective I achieved in Paris was to silence the doomsday critics once and for all. I lived up to my billing as favorite, not dropping a set on the way to the final, where I met Robin Soderling, who had knocked me out of the French Open the year before. Soderling had beaten Federer in the quarter finals, and this meant that if I beat Soderling I’d have gathered sufficient points to reclaim the number one spot in the world rankings. And I did, winning the final in straight sets, 6–4, 6–2, 6–4, and notching my seventh Grand Slam.

  Wimbledon was the next big one, a month later. Having not even taken part the year before, having felt so miserable then, I had a special desire to get back and win my second victory. I felt confident I would. Carlos Costa says I am like a diesel engine. I don’t always set off very fast, but once I get going, I’m unstoppable. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it was true that right now, June 2010, the momentum was with me again.

  The fact that things had settled on the parental front, freeing my head to concentrate on my tennis once again, had made all the difference. The devastating impact the separation had had on me demonstrated, conclusively, the umbilical connection between stability in my family circle and stability in my tennis game. The circuits were too intimately interconnected for one not to affect the other. But time had passed—nearly a year and a half now since my father had broken the news to me on the way back from Melbourne—and I had reprogrammed myself to adjust to the new realities. Thanks to my parents, these had not turned out to be as destructive as I might initially have feared. They remained apart, but they had handled things well, making the continued well-being of my sister and me paramount. Some couples who separate try to use their children as instruments of vengeance on each other. It was quite the opposite in my parents’ case. They each did what they could to soften the blow for Maribel and me. After the inevitable initial acrimony, there had been no nastiness, and in time, they even became friends again, to the extent that they started coming along together again to tournaments to watch me play. There are civilized and uncivilized separations. This one has been civilized, and I admire and love them for that.

  And so it was that on the morning after winning the French Open, in a cheerful frame of mind after a night of celebration at a party with Beyoncé and other celebrities, I found myself heading to Disneyland Paris with my father, Titín, Benito, and Tuts. We had a prearranged photo shoot there. Despite the lack of sleep, it was a professional obligation I had no problem fulfilling. I’d been to Disneyland Paris before, and I’d always had a great time there. I love being in the company of children; I connect with them naturally and well.

  The bad news was that we went by helicopter, a form of transport I have to take sometimes but which always terrifies me. We survived the ride, which added to my enjoyment of the rides I t
ook on some of the attractions, and allowed me to smile easily for the cameras when the time came to pose alongside Goofy and Mr. and Mrs. Incredible with my French Open trophy. And then it was straight back to central Paris to catch the train to London.

  The Queen’s Tournament, the prelude to Wimbledon, is played on grass. It began in a week, and I wanted to get in some practice on this surface as soon as possible. So after we emerged from under the English Channel and arrived, an hour or so later, at the railway station in London, we headed straight for Queen’s Club instead of the hotel. It was raining, as it so often is in London, and so I had to wait in the locker room along with some other players, among them Andy Roddick, for the sun to return. There wasn’t much to do there except stare at a TV screen where, as it happened, they were showing a rerun of my 2008 Wimbledon final against Roger Federer. The rest of the players were as engrossed as I was, but we hadn’t got far into the match before I realized that the rain had stopped. I jumped up. “God! Come on! Let’s go out and train!” I said to Titín. My companions in the locker room, who were still watching my match, looked at me in amazement, as if they thought I should be sitting down and savoring my famous victory instead of showing such eagerness to get out on court. But, for me, there was not a second to waste. After nearly two years away, I had to get back the feel of playing on grass right away.

  I had won Queen’s in 2008 but lost in the quarterfinals this time around. This was no catastrophe as it gave me more time to prepare at my own pace for Wimbledon. I moved out of my hotel in London and returned to our English home away from home, the rental house next door to the All England Club. It was good to be back. Just as my absence from Wimbledon 2009 had signified how shaken up I was by the disruption in my family life, so my coming back in 2010 meant a return to calm.