Rafa

by Rafael Nadal

  They have not chosen these paths because they know it is the last thing in the world Rafa himself desires or needs, because they are not prey to the insecurities that Ana María believes underlie the celebrity-craving camp followers of the rich and famous, and because it is not their style. They are all from Manacor, and Manacor people by nature and culture keep themselves to themselves, are wary of strangers.

  “I’ve always been very discreet about my private things,” Ana María says. “If anything, Rafael’s fame has made me even more discreet, more protective of our life at home. I don’t like to confide in people I don’t know. There are those who crave popularity, who in my situation might love to talk and talk about their son, bask in his reflected glory. But that’s not me. Inside, I am enormously proud of him and so happy at all the success he’s had, but I don’t advertise my feelings. I don’t even talk about him to my closest friends.”

  She has had a hint in her own life, a small taste, of what it means to be famous. She is recognized sometimes on the streets of Barcelona, London, or New York by people who have glimpsed her on television watching her son at big tournaments. And not only does she feel uncomfortable when strangers approach her, she is struck by a crushingly claustrophobic sense of how relentlessly under siege her son is when he steps out into the wide world beyond Manacor.

  “The only place where anything resembling intimacy is possible while he is away on tour is inside his hotel rooms, the only hiding places he has. He can’t walk down a street without creating a commotion. The media and his sponsors make constant claims on him. And then there’s the incredible tension of competition, the insecurities and fears I know he has to battle to control during the week or two weeks that tournaments last in order to keep winning and stay at the top. He is my son, and it frightens and amazes me to see how strong he has to be, how strong he is.”

  He would not be as strong without the respite that home provides. Home is where Rafa Nadal comes up for air. And the center and symbol of home is his mother, especially following his parents’ separation, when his father moved out. Sebastián Nadal accompanies him much more frequently than Ana María does on his international campaigns, providing a pillar of support everywhere he goes. He has become as intimately associated with Rafa’s tennis life as the professional team around him. Ana María inhabits a world in which high-powered tennis competitions, and the commercial and media commitments that have gone hand-in-hand with Rafa’s standing as world number one, are marginal concerns. She barely talks to her son about his professional life, not because she is not interested but because she knows that the best favor she can do him is engage with him as any other mother would with any other son. She is not in awe of his accomplishments on the tennis court, in his guise as the globally acclaimed “Rafa Nadal,” but treats him with the easy tenderness and devotion she feels for him as the Rafael she gave birth to and fed and raised. She is his antidote to adulation, grounding him and reminding him of who he really is.

  “But the most important thing, now that I see fame has not gone to his head, and never will, is to make him feel at peace when he is home,” Ana María says. “He needs peace because that is the last thing he has when he is away on tour, but also because of the way he is, irrespective of the madness surrounding his life. He’s always had a terrible time when the people around him are angry or in a bad temper; he gets angry or bad-tempered too. Emotionally, he needs everything to be perfectly in order around him.

  “That is why I see it as my duty when we are together to do everything I can, as any other mother would, to see to it that he is happy and well and, when he is not happy and well, to be there to support him. And supporting him—for example, when he’s been injured—often means saying nothing, just making it clear that I am there for him, whatever the circumstances. It means he can feel at ease when he’s home; that he can invite his friends around any time he wants without me making any demands on him. And if he needs me to drive him somewhere, or buy him something to eat that he craves, or pack his suitcase for him before a long trip—something he is disastrously incapable of doing on his own, by the way—I’ll do it, happily.”

  Ana María’s living room is a social hub for Rafa’s friends when he is back home. Chief among his friends, ever present on nights out or on fishing trips, is his sister, Maribel. She is five years younger than he is, and he adores her and misses her badly when he is away, although they keep in constant contact by phone and the Internet. Maribel is aware of the fact that her connection with her brother is unusually close, remarking that many of her friends’ relationships with their younger siblings tend to be marked either by friction or benign neglect. “Most boys growing up see their younger sisters as irritations, especially when they are teenagers,” she says. “But that has never been the way Rafael has treated me. He’s always urged me to come along when he goes out with his friends. It’s natural to us, even if others might sometimes find it strange, and it’s part of the secret of our special bond.”

  Ana María believes that another reason why her two children are so close is that they have spent so much time away from each other ever since Rafa ventured off in his early teens to conquer the tennis world. They do not take each other for granted, and absence, she thinks, has made the heart grow fonder. This may not have been the case if Maribel had allowed his fame go to her head. Instead, she has followed her mother’s cue. “If anything, she has been even more discreet than I have,” Ana María says, pointing to the fact that it was not until two years into her university course in Barcelona, where Maribel is studying sports education, that anyone outside her closest circle of friends had any idea who her brother was. “Word only got around after one of her lecturers spotted her on TV during a tennis match Rafael was playing in Paris.”

  María Francisca has had to work harder to preserve her anonymity. Not so much because of her courtside appearances, which are infrequent (the first Grand Slam final she watched him play in was Wimbledon 2010), but because the paparazzi have not been able to resist the temptation to photograph her and Rafa together when they are on vacation, preferably on a beach. She has seen herself splashed across the pages of celebrity gossip magazines more times than she would care to count. Yet she is never quoted saying anything. As a perplexed commentator on Spanish TV observed five years into the couple’s relationship, no one had ever heard her speak. She is such an enigma that neither the TV shows nor the magazines have even been able to get her name right. She has been introduced to the public, worldwide, as Xisca (pronounced “Chisca”), yet no one she knows calls her by that name. Rafa addresses her by the nickname “Mary,” as do some of his family, but to everybody else she remains, simply, María Francisca.

  All the public know of her is that she is an elegant, seemingly demure young woman and, as a consequence, the media, for lack of anything else to go on, typically describe her as “serious,” “distant,” “modest,” and, even, “mysterious.” It would be hard to imagine anyone further removed from the brash stereotype of the celebrity-seeking WAG—a term coined in the UK for the “wives and girlfriends” of rich and famous sportsmen. The truth is that, while she is loyal to Rafa and experiences his victories and defeats as if they were her own, she treasures her independence and does not wish to be defined in terms of her relationship with him. She has a degree in business administration and has a full-time job with an insurance company in Palma, the Mallorcan capital. This means that she does not have the time to follow Rafa around the world, which she would not want to do even if she did. “Traveling together everywhere, even if I could, would not be good either for him or for me. He needs his space when he is competing, and just the idea of me hanging around waiting on his needs all day wears me out. It would asphyxiate me. And then he would have to be worrying about me . . . No. If I followed him everywhere, I think there’s a risk we might stop getting along.”

  When she does accompany him to a tournament, usually when Ana María and Maribel also go along, she goes out of her way
to be seen in public with him as little as possible. She remembers a time when they were in Paris and he had to go to a dinner hosted by one of his sponsors. “He asked me if I wanted to go, but I chose not to,” she says. “I stayed in our hotel. When Rafael got back he said, ‘Thank God you didn’t come.’ The place had been swarming with photographers. For me to have gone would have meant stepping into that celebrity world. It’s not a world I want to be part of, nor do I think Rafa would have chosen to be with a woman who looked for that in life.”

  Ana María, who approves warmly of María Francisca’s desire to carve out a separate working life of her own, agrees that Rafa could not possibly have a sustained a relationship with a woman who hungered for media attention. Nor can she imagine, she says, a woman with more equanimity and good humor, or better suited by temperament to her son. She and María Francisca are fast friends, as are Maribel and María Francisca, the three of them bonded not only by their love for Rafa, but by their shared attachment to Ana María’s normality “doctrine.” “Even if my family asks me about Rafael, I prefer not to say much,” says María Francisca, who echoes Ana María’s words, and Maribel’s sentiments, when she adds: “The fact is that I just don’t feel comfortable talking about these things, even in private. It’s what works for me, and what works for Rafael and me as a couple. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  ON TOP OF THE WORLD

  The secret lies in being able to do what you know you can do when you most need it. Djokovic is a fantastic player, but in a Grand Slam final, decided over the best of five sets, nerves and stamina count as much as talent. Any doubts I might have had before the match began had been dispelled by my performance in the first two sets. As for the stress of a US Open final, I’d won eight Grand Slams to his one, and that gave me the confidence of knowing that I could take it on at least as well as he. Another thing going for me was that his track record showed that he flagged physically in longer matches. He had never beaten me in a best-of-five match. He was, it was true, a player who had dazzling moments, but I was playing steadily, the diesel engine was purring. I sensed that if I won the third set, he’d be left feeling as if he had a mountain to climb.

  But he got right into his groove at the start of the third set, picking up where he had left off at the end of the second. The match could not have been more evenly balanced at this point, with the tide, if anything, shifting slightly his way. I shot a glance at my team and family, who were all sitting together in a clump to my left. Toni, Carlos, Titín, my father, and Tuts, and behind them my mother, my sister Maribel, and María Francisca, who looked especially nervous. This was only the second time she’d come to watch me play a Grand Slam final. Usually she watches at home, alone, as she did during Wimbledon in 2008, or with her parents. If it all gets too much for her, she’s confessed to me, she changes channels for a while or leaves the room. This time, in New York, she said she had to resist the urge at times to get up and leave. Right now was the moment in the match where her resolve was most tested.

  María Francisca has played tennis and understood as well as I did that the rain break had given Djokovic a boost. He showed it in the first point of the set, playing it impeccably, pulling me wide to the left and finishing it off with an electric backhand winner down the line to my right. He repeated the trick, with a deeper shot, after a longer rally on the second point. Too good.

  I took it well. Some players explode with anger when their opponent is dominating them. But there’s no point. It can only do you harm. You just have to think, “I can’t do anything about this, so why worry?” He was taking a lot of risks and they were paying off, for now, but I was managing to play at the level of intensity I wanted, hitting the ball hard and deep without taking risks, leaving myself more margin for error. “Weather the storm,” I said to myself. “If I can’t come back on the next point, I will on the one after that.”

  Not in this game, though. He won it, handing me just the one point with a rather inexplicable double fault—he seemed to want to go for a second-serve ace—when he was 40-love up. OK. So it goes. Bad luck. He was ahead, and I’d have to play catch-up on my serve, maybe for a long time.

  The next game was a critically important one for me to win. He’d won the previous three, if you included the last two of the second set, and I had to stop him in his tracks or risk being overrun. I played the first point intelligently, playing the ball high. If you hit it low or medium height to Djokovic, especially when his line of vision is as sharp as it was now, he strikes the ball perfectly. But if he receives the ball at shoulder height, you make him uncomfortable, you make him guess, put him off his stride. This was how I went 15–love up. Not by hitting a winner, but by bludgeoning him into making an uncharacteristic mistake. That gave me the confidence to up my game, take a risk, and win the next point with a deep forehand to the corner. He nodded, as if to say, “There was nothing I could do about that.” I don’t do that. I don’t show my appreciation of an opponent’s better shots. Not because I am impolite but because it would be too dangerous a departure from my match script. But his attitude was the correct one: bow before the inevitable and move on.

  I won the game without dropping a point and then, in an unexpected early bonus, broke his serve to go 2–1 up after playing one of my best shots of the match, a cross-court backhand on the run from two meters behind the base line. He’d gone to the net, quite sensibly, as his approach shot had gone deep to my backhand corner, but I lashed the ball past him before he could even attempt to reach for the volley. I celebrated, piston punching the air, shouting “Vamos!” to myself. “Come on!” I had broken Djokovic’s momentum, regained the initiative, and shown myself—and him—that I could hit geometrically implausible winners too.

  Feeling psychologically at my strongest in the match so far, I felt I was beginning to edge ahead in the mental battle. In our past encounters Djokovic had shown a tendency to grow frustrated as the game progressed when he saw he had to push himself to the limit on every point. He also tended to tire more quickly than I do. That’s what I had in the back of my mind. In the front, I was only thinking of the next point.

  After the flurry of the third game, it was time to consolidate, capitalize on the break of serve. I’m making calculations all the time as I play, trying to judge the best tactic considering how I am feeling at a given moment, my sense of the opponent’s morale, and how the score is going. What I had to do now, I figured, was be patient, keep the rallies going, not force things, seize my chances when they came but not go looking for them. I had to try and tire Djokovic and prey on his nerves, wait for him to make mistakes. That was precisely the pattern of the long first point of the fourth game, which I won. Here I picked up another clue as to his state of mind from his reluctance to go for winners on a couple of balls that I had dropped invitingly short. My confidence grew as his seemed, for the moment, to wane. I won the game at love on my serve to go 3–1 up, sensing I’d have a chance now to break him again.

  The chance came, when he went 15–40 down on his serve. I wasn’t doing anything special, just concentrating on returning the ball deep, varying the pace of my shots, mixing forehand top spin with backhand back spin, frustrating him, waiting for him to lose his patience. Which he was. But now, with his back against the wall, Djokovic changed tactics. He had been losing the long rallies, so he began approaching the net behind his serve. It worked the first time. He won the next point with a volley. I chose to read his newfound boldness as a sign of desperation, but a big serve brought him back to deuce. Then I got another break point, but I lost it and was angry with myself. Not because I had hit the shot wide but because I had taken too great a risk, sought out too fine an angle when the right tactic now, quite clearly, was not to force things but to keep the ball in play. I’d had a momentary loss of concentration and despised myself for it. He was showing some hesitancy now, but at any moment he could recover his best game and I was wasting my opportunity
to build an unassailable lead in the set. And I did waste it. I failed to capitalize on three break points that landed in my lap in the fifth game, while he won the first one that came his way.

  But the trend remained favorable for me. He was battling to hold his serve; I was winning mine comfortably—as I did now, at love, to go 4–2 up. Another chance to break him and what felt like another thousand game points to me, but again I failed to make the decisive breakthrough. I was playing better, undoubtedly, and he was on the ropes—but holding on. We each held serve the next two games, and I found myself serving at 5–4 for the set.

  Now I became nervous. It is when victory appears to be in sight that I so often seem to suffer an attack of vertigo. If I won the game and I went two sets to one up, I’d be two thirds of the way to winning my fourth Grand Slam. Djokovic would then have to win the next two sets, and he could see that I wouldn’t be giving him an inch. Much as I tried to banish the thought entirely from my mind, there it lurked, inhibiting me. That was why it was important to keep playing safe, sticking more than ever to my natural defensive game, hoping his nerves would be more frayed than mine.

  We started out the game with two very long rallies, more than twenty shots each. I won the first one when he hit the ball long; he, the second, with a terrific forehand winner. It was fifteen all and I felt the tension rise, yet I remained just about composed enough to register that, satisfied as he might have been at having won the point so well, he also grasped he’d have to dig very deep to get the upper hand against me. He’d have been thinking, “Oooof! What a lot of work I need to do to get a point off this guy!” What I was seeing, meanwhile, was that he was tired and panting hard, and I thought, “I doubt whether he’ll be able to pull off a shot like that in a hurry again.” Or that’s what I wanted to believe, at any rate.