I find sports more of an intellectual pursuit than an emotional investment.
There aren’t any other leisure pastimes that come with an unending spreadsheet of data to prove or disprove things that you thought you knew. To watch sports with an understanding of the game as an algorithm is to try to figure out why inefficiencies still exist and to try to figure out the next game design foible can be exploited.
It is, admittedly, a bloodless way to watch.
There is only one athlete who breaks that mold for me.
Rafael Nadal just won his 14th French Open and his 22nd slam, both men’s records. Nadal’s dominance on clay is impossible to translate to any other sports achievement. If he never played a match on any other surface, he’d still have 14 slams (tied for 3rd all time behind Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer) and 69 titles (more than Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, and Andre Agassi). His record in best of five on clay now sits at 137-3.
He wins French Opens at the same success rate as Jayson Tatum makes free throws.
By the time Nadal lost his first best of five match on clay, he had won the French 4 times (Bjorn Bjorg is the only other man to have won the French more than thrice), was 10-0 in Davis Cup matches for Spain, and had won 21 other clay court titles.
He already had one of the greatest clay court careers of all time before he lost his first best of five match on clay to Robin Soderling. In 2009. 13 years ago.
He was only 22 years old.
He was the same age as Ja Morant is now, younger than Trae Young (23), and younger than Joe Burrow (now 25) was before he was even drafted and was already a legend.
You can still find highlights of Baby Rafa’s first match against Roger Federer (Rafa won 6-3, 6-3) when Nadal was just 15. Nadal dismantled Federer then, but it took a helluva lot of work to do it. Nothing ever looks “easy” for Nadal, especially then, when his serve was toothless and his backhand was more hypothetical than material.
Watching Nadal during his ascent and then his peak was to constantly ask the question “does anything ever get to this guy?”
He would grind out 40-shot rallies and sprint from alley to alley, net to back wall, and chalk forehands hit at 9,000 mph on a dead sprint, and fist pump, and scream, and it was clear that nothing that was going on was easy. But then he’d do it on the next point, and then do it two points later, and then he’d keep doing it over, and over, and over, and over until he won 6-3, 7-5, 6-0. Maybe it wasn’t easy, but Nadal’s tank never seemed to empty.
That’s not true anymore.
Watching Nadal on his descent is to constantly ask the question “how much more can this guy take?”
He’s no longer impenetrable. You can tell even by looking at his ever thinning hairline. Nadal spent the run-up to the French losing to no-names like Denis Shapovalov and Taylor Fritz and suggesting to the press that this, at age 36, could be his last ever French Open. It felt like gamesmanship and expectations-setting from a champion looking for an edge, but it turns out Nadal’s injured foot is fucked up to the point of needing injections that numbed it up entirely while he was on the court.
On the court, he can get to most of the same positions he could get to a decade ago, but it’s harder, and it wears on him more, and his level drops more than it used to, and he has to use weirder shots now that he can’t hit through the court the same way he could. The strain looks less like someone who is incapable of fatigue and more like someone who has been redlining his engine for too long.
Nadal’s body is finally breaking down to the point of potentially pushing him out of the sport for good, and yet there he is, crying and holding the champion’s trophy for the 14th time.
Nadal will always be tied to his greatest contemporary, Roger Federer. Nadal vs. Federer has been so commoditized at this point (the documentaries, the charity tours, the Laver Cup, etc.) that it’s lost punch as a Great Sports Metaphor, but now, perhaps more than ever with Federer entering graceful retirement and Nadal raging against the end of his career, it matters again.
Nadal has been the perfect foil for Federer, on the court as well as off.
Roger Federer at full flow does not look like he is trying. He never looked hurried or hassled, he was simply just flowing through a tennis match at a level no one else could ever touch. Now, as a Former Great who is waiting for his last hurrah, Federer is similarly unbothered, showing up at black tie events and F1 pit walls looking like a Normal Guy. He seems like someone to split a glass of red wine with and talk about a book, or a concert, and, maybe, he’ll dispense some pearl of wisdom about how balance in life is important.
Greatness, true greatness, doesn’t work like that. Not usually.
It is oppressive, and it is uncomfortable, and it is scary to be around. Greatness does not look like Roger Federer. It looks like Rafael Nadal. It requires commitment past the point of reason to become one of the best at what you do. To be around someone with that drive isn’t especially enjoyable.
Both Federer and Nadal, of course, live this and know this, but it’s Nadal who makes that visible. Everything from the way he trains and plays, down to the completely insane way he organizes his water bottles in the same precise way every time tells his opponent the same story: if you give 99% of yourself to tennis, I am giving more than you, and I will beat you.
Nadal is anachronistic in that way. The modern champion is Naomi Osaka: singularly talented with an endless sea of potential but unwilling to sacrifice her mental health in the pursuit of on-the-court greatness. Osaka is already a historically good player, but when her career ends, it will be a fair question to ask how many titles were left on the table. For her fans, that question is immaterial. She is giving as much of herself to tennis as she wants to, and it is not only irrelevant but unfair to ask that she give any more.
The Culture has evolved past athletes like Nadal, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or Kobe Bryant. The lingering takeaways of The Last Dance or of the hagiographies about Tiger Woods is that these are broken men, driven past a point where anything resembling normalcy can survive.
Balance, now, is a virtue that holds far more weight than drive, and perhaps for good reason. But it’s hard not to find yourself rooting for someone who observably wants it more, who is willing to grind their body into powder in pursuit of being the best.
Rafael Nadal will not win very many more titles. Maybe this 14th French Open will be his last one, maybe he’ll use duct tape to keep his body together for a few more runs. The question that lingers is was it worth it? Was the winning worth all this immense suffering, all these hours, all these sacrifices made? Would you do it again?
There seems to be only one person on earth who would say that the answer to those questions is yes. And he just won Roland Garros.
You are speaking volumes for Nadal and professional athletes.I have always enjoyed and respected the two extremely different styles of tennis by Federer and Nadal,but could not deny my allegiance to the tenacity of Nadal’s court presence and his cockeyed scowl,sometimes smirk …he sports during the match,it’s been a great ride and I’m grateful to have been forwarded your article and shall do the same.