by Rafael Nadal
I lost the next point with a reckless forehand but bounced back to 30–30 with a great serve high and wide. Typically, I would have played safe on the serve. I’d have concentrated on getting the first one in, sparing myself the prospect of handing him the possible gift of a hesitant second serve. But I’d never been more confident in my serve than in this tournament, and I felt the moment had come to go for broke. It was the correct decision. My next serve was an ace, which gave me set point, and the one after that was just as good—wide, hard, and unreturnable on his backhand side. I had won the set 6–4.
Here was crystal clear vindication of the philosophy of hard work that had guided me in my twenty years of tennis life. Here was compelling cause-and-effect evidence that the will to win and the will to prepare are one and the same. I had worked long and hard before the US Open on my serve. And here it was, paying off when I most needed it, saving me at just the moment when my nerves threatened to undermine the rest of my game. I was on the brink of something truly great. The fact that I had got to this point was the culmination of long years of sacrifice and dedication, all based on the unbreakable premise that there are no shortcuts to sustained success. You can’t cheat in elite sports. Talent alone won’t get you through. That’s just the first building block, on top of which you must pile relentlessly repetitive work in the gym, work on the courts, work studying videos of yourself and your opponents in action, always striving to get fitter, better, cleverer. I made a choice to become a professional tennis player, and the result of that choice could only be unflagging discipline and a continual desire to improve.
Had I sat back after winning the French Open, or Wimbledon, believing my game to be complete enough to guarantee further success, I would not have been here now at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York with a chance of adding the US Open to my list of conquests. I’d made it as far as I had because I had never lost sight of my priorities. The real test comes on those mornings when you wake up after a late night out and the very last thing you want to do is get up and train, knowing you’re going to work furiously hard and you’re going to sweat buckets. There might be a moment’s debate in your mind. “Should I skip it today, just this once?” But you don’t listen to your mind’s siren songs because you know that they will lead you down a dangerously steep and slippery slope. If you flag once, you’ll flag again.
Occasionally, deeper doubts have assailed me. After spending Christmas with my family in Mallorca, when I take a month off from competition, I find myself contemplating the start of the new year in a contradictory frame of mind. The enthusiasm I feel is undercut by a sense of gloom. I want to climb new mountains, but they remain mountains. I know only too well how remorselessly, grindingly demanding the year ahead is going to be. On all fronts: training, travel, competition, the requests from the media, the sponsors, the fans. And the majority of my time will be spent so far from home, the place where I always want to be. It is with a heavy heart, often, that I board my first flight of the year, heading east, en route to Australia. Once we’ve taken off, the gloom lifts and I turn my attention fully, with mounting excitement, to the task at hand. But I have a personal life beyond tennis, and winning the battle between my private needs and the demands of my profession is another element of success on the court. But sometimes it is a battle I wish I didn’t have to fight.
My sister, Maribel, remembers a time three or four years ago when she came into our home and found me sitting on the stairs weeping. I was in the last stages of recovery from an injury and preparing to rejoin the tennis tour. She asked me what the matter was, and I told her that all of a sudden I’d been filled with a terrible sense of regret at having denied myself the opportunity to spend more time playing with my friends when I was a child. My sister was surprised. Ninety percent of the time at home, save for that period after our parents’ separation, we laugh and joke together. And never had I expressed such a thought to her before. But that moment of despondency revealed, however fleetingly, my understanding that I had indeed made a lot of sacrifices to get where I am today, that there had been a cost.
Yet there had never really been any choice in the matter. The dominant part of my nature had been revealed in that other episode years earlier when, at the age of ten, I had wept bitterly in the back of my father’s car. Maribel and I never forget that time when I told him that the fun I’d had with my friends during a carefree August could never compensate for the pain I’d felt at losing a match against a player I should have beaten. The pain came from the knowledge that I had given less than my best, that if I’d trained instead of played that August, I would have won my match. That was the day I defined my priorities and, without quite realizing it at the time, made my life’s big choice. Having made it, there could be no going back. Not then, not now. The path was set, and while there have been moments of doubt and weakness, I have never deviated from it. Not even when temptation was strongest.
One such moment came on a vacation I went on to Thailand with a group of childhood friends from Manacor. It was a chance to make up for lost time, but my competitive nature rebelled.
A tournament was coming up in Bangkok, and before heading there I decided to take a week off on a beach. There were ten of us, including my oldest friend, Miguel Ángel Munar, with whom I’d trained under Toni as a small boy. As we prepared to leave home, I had my doubts about the benefits of going all the way to Bangkok, fighting jet lag to compete in a tournament that was not especially high in my list of priorities to win. But I had made a commitment to take part eight months earlier and I could not, at this late hour, let the organizers down.
We had a great time on our vacation. We went Jet Skiing and played golf. But I remember what struck Miguel Ángel, who had never spent night and day with me in the week prior to a tournament before, was that no sooner had we landed, after a trip that had included three flight changes, than I headed straight to a tennis court in the hotel complex for an hour’s training. He was even more taken aback to discover that, even if we had gone to bed at five in the morning, I’d be up punctually every morning at nine to train—and again for another hour every afternoon.
What Miguel Ángel didn’t know was that, fine a time as we were all having, something was bothering me. I was putting in the hours, but I wasn’t training as thoroughly as I knew I ought to with a tournament around the corner. We were in the deepest tropics, and the weather was too hot and humid to allow me to exert myself the way I needed to. So I took a decision that did not particularly please my friends, nor did it particularly please me. But it had to be taken. We were scheduled to head back to Bangkok on a Tuesday evening, but I left on the Monday morning. This was not going to be the most important tournament of my career, but having decided to take part, I was not going to give it anything less than my best. If I had kept to the original schedule, I’d have missed out on two days of proper preparation. And that was something I felt I could not afford to do. As it was, I lost in the semifinals, knowing that if I’d had less fun on the beach, on court I would have had more joy.
One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.
Novak Djokovic is one of the contemporary greats, no doubt about it, but, with darkness falling in New York, I was beating him two sets to one. It was nine fifteen when he served at the start of the fourth set. He was playing well, but I was playing very well. I knew he had to be feeling under a lot of strain, having been obliged to play from behind right from the start, at no point finding himself in the lead in the match. And now he was falling further behind. If I went ahead in this set, it was
going to be very hard for him mentally. The pressure was on me too, but I had sufficient experience of Grand Slam finals to be confident my game would hold up.
In the very first point of the set I got a lucky break. He delivered a good first serve, putting me on the defensive immediately, then we exchanged a couple of shots and he rushed the net. I tried a cross-court cut on the backhand, but I struck the ball badly, and it turned into an accidental lob. He thought of going for the smash but left it, thinking it was sailing out, but he misjudged the backspin and the ball dropped just inside the baseline. It was a good point to win but, more than that, a telling reflection of Djokovic’s state of mind. He had confirmed my impression that his confidence was fading and he was running out of ideas. Otherwise, he might have hit the smash, and in any case, he would not have been in such a hurry to try and finish the rally quickly by going to the net, something he does as rarely as I do. He was taking more and more risks, and my intuition told me that if I continued to plug away as I was, I’d push him to the edge of despondency.
He won the next point after again rushing the net, this time with a finely angled, cut volley. I sprinted like hell, diagonally the whole length of the court, and almost got to it. It was good he saw me try; that would make him think twice the next time he tried a volley. It might force him to try too hard and make a mistake. At 15–15 we sparred from the baselines for a good while, until he lost his composure and made an unwise attempt to hit a forehand winner, and it went wide. He won the next one after I hit the ball long, but then, after he missed another forehand, I had break point, 30–40. For the first time in the match he let out a loud curse. Maybe he needed to do that; maybe it did him good. But for me it was another encouraging sign.
My main problem right now was that one very important weapon, his serve, was continuing to work well. He had not missed one since the start of the game. And he didn’t miss his next three either. He went 1–0 up, but I still had the feeling that he did not have too many bullets left.
Serving well and playing well, I leveled the score on the next game. He won one point, ripping a forehand down the line about as hard as any human being can, but he lost the other four, one to a backhand that he struck well wide, after which he emitted another of those encouraging howls of pain. Then I finished him off with two big serves.
At 1–1, on his serve, I smelled blood. The momentum had been with me since the beginning of the third set, and I was not going to let it go. My legs were fresh and I felt a surge of confidence. He, on the other hand, was tiring in both mind and body, and it showed in the first two points of the game, which he lost badly, with the lamest of shots. His first serve kept working, throwing him a lifeline, but after I ripped a forehand winner past his defenses, he surrendered the game at thirty. I had my break and I served to go 3–1 up.
My tendency when I am ahead is to play defensively, but it was a measure of how well I felt that as the set progressed I was going more and more on the attack, seizing the initiative in one point after another. That was what I did in the first point of the fourth game, moving Djokovic right and left and right again, pounding him, until he had no strength left but to hit a forehand weakly into the net. I won the game at love, two aces included. Having consolidated my break of Djokovic’s serve by holding my own, I felt—at 3–1—in command of the match.
An unspoken rule of tennis is that if you are tired you try not to show it. He’d given up trying. His body language reflected resignation, as if he had run out of answers to my challenges. Now was the moment to go for the double break and clinch the match. My instinct again was to play it safe, but my judgment told me the time was ripe for aggression. I didn’t want to let up the pressure on Djokovic for one second. I knew how mercurial he was, and the one thing I had to avoid at all costs was giving him a window of opportunity to recover his self-belief and rediscover his best form. I glanced up at my corner, where my team and family were sitting, and saw Tuts smiling broadly, Toni looking as serious and concentrated as usual. I caught his eye, and he muttered to me, so I could just hear above the din, that the moment had come to really go for it. I wanted to hear that. My sternest judge was confirming my own perception of the way the match was going.
I didn’t have to push myself as hard as I’d expected to break Djokovic’s serve a second time. He flailed at a forehand on the first point, hitting it long, and I hammered home the advantage by winning the next one with a forehand drive that caught him way out of position. Then he double faulted to go 0–40 down. I missed my first chance, looping a forehand long, but then he as much as surrendered the match, yelling in despair after he mishit a simple forehand into the net. I was winning 4–1, two sets to one up and about to serve.
When you are serving as well as I was, you eliminate a whole dimension of anxiety from your game. You’re not thinking, as you shape up to serve at the start of a game, “Please, please don’t let me down.” The rhythm of your serve becomes automated, and your body does its job almost on its own. Mentally, this is of incredible value. You feel a lot calmer, freed up to concentrate on the other aspects of your game.
This was the theory, and should have been so in practice. But no. Because at this point my mind began to play its strange tricks. There I was, about to serve to go 5–1 up, with my opponent clearly on his last legs, and yet I became suddenly possessed by fear, just as at that critical moment in the fourth set at Wimbledon two years earlier. As then, it was the fear of winning that got to me. Every last bit of logic pointed to me having the match wrapped up. How many times in my career had I lost in these circumstances after going a double break ahead? Four, maybe? No, more likely two. Clearly, short of some utterly unexpected catastrophe, the set and the match had to be mine.
But following this train of thought was not, at this stage, the right thing to do. I tried to push away the thoughts of victory that flooded my mind; tried to do what I knew was right, which was to think only of the next point, in isolation from everything else. But I could not, entirely, and as I lined up to deliver my first serve of the game, I felt, quite simply, afraid.
The effect on my serve was immediate. Having worked like clockwork until now, it suddenly started to jam up. My confidence in my ground strokes collapsed, and my movement was all wrong. I started playing much more defensively, and I was scrambling thoughtlessly around the court. My body tensed up, my arm tightened. The knowledge that if I won this game I’d be 5–1 up and the US Open would be practically mine was not useful. The enormity of what I was on the brink of achieving now made me feel as if I were face-to-face with a giant monster about to swallow me up. And I froze. Or almost froze.
I did get the first serve of the first point in. It was a percentage serve, safe, no sting in it, but enough to get the rally going, banishing the risk of a double fault, which was an achievement in itself. Luckily, Djokovic’s morale was shot, and the rally ended with him hitting the ball needlessly wide. Then I lost the next point going for a forehand winner down the line. I had been holding my service games comfortably all set until now. This one was torture. We got to deuce. We got back to deuce twice more. I saved one break point. Then he suddenly conjured a couple of devastating winners. But he was being erratic: for each thunderous drive, an unforced error. I was still holding the line, not making any unforced errors. On the third deuce, he rushed to the net behind a powerful forehand to my backhand corner. I almost had to kneel to dig it out, but I managed to get all the strength of my arms behind the ball and whipped it cross-court for a winner. Somehow, instinct had kicked in, beating the nerves, and I had pulled off one of my best shots of the match.
My serve was too much for him on the next point. He hit the return long and it was over. I was 5–1 up.
The tension washed off. He was serving now, and I was not expecting to win this game. I was expecting to win the next one. I had a sensation of calm after the storm, and yes, I played the game as if I were half-asleep. I am not proud of that. He won the game at thirty with an angled drop volle
y that I didn’t even try to run for.
Serving for the match at 5–2, the nerves returned. They are always there. As difficult to conquer as your opponent across the net, and, like your opponent, sometimes they are up, sometimes they are down. Right now they were the biggest remaining obstacle between me and victory. I looked up at my corner, saw the old familiar faces, elated, shouting encouragement. Inside I wanted so much to win this for them, for all of us, but my face—a good face—betrayed nothing.
The nerves were getting to everybody. Djokovic hit his return of serve long on the first point, and then the line judge declared one of his balls out that had clearly hit the line. We had to replay the point. Everything was life-and-death now, and this changed call was a blow. I had to put it out of my mind immediately and keep reminding myself to play steadily, nothing clever, give him plenty of room to make mistakes.
On the second point he went for another drop. This time I did run for it, and made it. He reached the volley, and I, my nose almost touching the net, volleyed the ball right back to win the point, 30–0. The crowd, unable to stay quiet during this point, as in many previous points, went nuts—Toni more so than anyone. I looked up and saw him over to my left. He was on his feet, fists clenched, trying not to cry. I did cry. With the towel I wiped the tears away from my eyes. Through the blur, I saw it; I saw victory now. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did.
Not quite yet, though. He got a lucky net cord on the next point, and the ball dribbled over my side of the net. Inwardly, I cursed. I could have been 40–0 up and in a position to play the next point calmly, knowing it was all over. Instead, more stress. And then he made it to thirty all after I hurried my shot too much, missing an attempt at a forehand winner. My heart was racing, nerves battling with elation. Just two more points and I’d make it. I tried hard to stay focused, saying to myself, “Play easy, no risks, just keep the ball in.”
