Chapter List
Friday Night, Part 1
It’s July 13th, 2018, a little after 11pm, and I’m slouched on a child’s beanbag on the floor, five feet from the television screen in our front room. The TV is not one of those ultra-HD behemoths that can dominate any room in any house. It’s small and it’s borrowed, but from five feet away it’s done the trick tonight, as it’s done the trick all summer.
I’m watching tennis, the Wimbledon men’s semi-finals. Novak Djokovic, the Serbian all-time great, who has by this time won 12 Grand Slam tournaments and on three occasions been a Wimbledon champion, is playing Rafael Nadal, the Spanish all-time great, winner of 17 Grand Slams and twice champ at Wimbledon. Both men are now in their 30s. Their bodies have entered that phase of a sportsman’s life where they are no longer capable of sustaining over an entire season the level of performance they may once have done. For these two—two-thirds of a triumvirate, alongside maybe the best of them all, the Swiss Roger Federer—reaching and sustaining their greatness even for the full duration of a Grand Slam fortnight is all but impossible now. They have reached the down days of careers in which their bodies have been fed through the mill several times more than is good for long-term health. (It’s the paradox of the competitive sportsperson: exercise and nutrition are key components in optimal physical and mental health for the rest of us, but for the pros, the search for glory comes at the grave expense of their long-term wellbeing, and often the glory is elusive too.)
Their greatness—the greatness of reputation, of garlands, of silverware and money and all the trappings of success—is assured. But you suspect that for Nadal and Djokovic, such a definition is either too narrow, or too broad. That if you take away all the outcomes, and they are left just with the elongated moment of peak performance, still they’d be happy and content.
For most matches in most tournaments, that greatness may elude them these days.
For one match, though, it could still be within their grasp.
For one match.
For this match.
For this match, played beneath closed roof and floodlights, the midsummer sun long gone down and a snakeline of eager spectators creeping along the footpaths outside south London’s Centre Court, optimistically awaiting “one out, one in” access whenever someone who had been inside makes a late-evening decision, however incomprehensible, that they have someplace better they need to be.
That they are even here at this time, past Wimbledon’s 11pm curfew, is an occasion in itself. Late evening play at Wimbledon has traditionally been prompted only by weather delays, but no such impediments presented themselves today, for men’s semi-finals day, when play started on time at 1pm and progressed uninterrupted from there, the sun shining as it had done every day in this already long dry summer.
Djokovic and Nadal had been tentatively pencilled in for 3.45pm, although the start times for anything beyond the first match of the day can never be set in stone in Grand Slam tennis, when men’s singles matches over best of five sets can typically take anywhere from two hours to five, or beyond.
Sometimes well beyond.
In 2010, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a first round men’s singles match at Wimbledon which sprawled out endlessly over three days. By the time the last ball had been hit, the match clock stopped at eleven hours and five minutes. Back then, Isner, the lanky American, won the 138th game of the fifth set to finally nose those two games in front of Frenchman Mahut, on a frankly ludicrous winning score of 6–4, 3–6, 6–7, 7–6, 70–68. The US Open ended the possibility of such chaos by changing its rules so that the final set would go to a tiebreak at 12-12, and by 2019 Wimbledon—largely because of the two matches mentioned here—would go the same way.
Eight years later, hours before Djokovic-Nadal 2018, Isner was at the centre of things once again. He had won through to his first Wimbledon semi-final and his match against Kevin Anderson, a similarly tall, similarly torpedo-serving South African, eventually finished more than six and a half hours after it started. This time Isner was on the wrong end of it, losing 26-24 in the fifth. The time was almost 7.45pm on a Friday evening.
Through it all, Djokovic and Nadal had waited, presumably patiently, presumably in or near their shared locker-room just off Wimbledon’s Centre Court. They could do nothing but wait. Today or tonight or tomorrow, their turn to walk the walk onto the world’s most famous tennis arena—second nature to them, alien to the rest of us—would come, eventually.
If Nadal and Djokovic were presumably patient, as the evening wore on there was considerably less of that virtue detectable among the gathered hordes. The general restlessness as Anderson and Isner smashed down serve after serve was perhaps not audible amongst the polite attendees at the All-England Club, but it was certainly so among casual watchers from afar. Twitter, routinely the angriest of angry rooms, lamented that a match between two giant grunts was delaying what was seen as the main event. The warm-up act had long since outlived its purpose, and now they had eaten gravely into the time of Sammy Davis and Sinatra. The main event was so tantalising that when Isner and Anderson eventually hauled their weary bodies off the stage few were unhappy to see them go.
*******
Television
I come from the sports TV generation. A child of 1977, I grew up alongside the explosion in live televised sport. Amongst the typical childhood memories—the first day at school, my mother at work in the kitchen with Gay Byrne on the radio, sand between my toes on a day at the beach—are an almost unlimited flow of memories of sport, and not just sport but the experience of watching it.
Said Aouita in the 5000 metres at the Los Angeles Olympics is a memory every bit as vivid as John Treacy’s silver in the marathon that same week; strange, perhaps, as Olympic medals of any colour were rare events for Irish athletes. I recall Norman Whiteside’s curling extra-time winner in the FA Cup final in 1985, but it’s with some bitterness: I loved Everton, and was an aspiring goalkeeper, so shots of a beaten, prone Neville Southall gave me no joy at all. I kept an Irish Independent Mexico 86 wall-chart slid beneath my uncle’s couch, and made the short walk across the field every evening to watch a game and fill it in. Diego Maradona was the face and the star of that World Cup, never more than in his cunning-and-charm performance for the ages against England in the quarter-finals, but Preben Elkjaer, Emilio Butragueno, Igor Belanov, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Michel Platini and Zico are immortal in my mind, not to mention the spider-shadow on the pitch at the Azteca Stadium and the deep square nets that hung from the goalposts and seemed to make every goal more beautiful a sight. Deaths at Heysel and Hillsborough did little to diminish the appeal of these far-off fields beamed live into my sitting room. When Mike Powell long-jumped eight metres and 91 centimetres, I was watching, home alone in an aunt’s house in Dublin for reasons that have long since become unknowable. I was there when Shane Warne first-balled Mike Gatting, when Boris Becker dived full length on the grass, and when Ayrton Senna crashed. In 1990, when it seemed like the entire country headed for Dublin to welcome the Irish team home from Italia ‘90, I saw off the rest of the family and settled in alone for England 3-2 Cameroon.
Spectator sport is nothing without at least one of three things: skin in the game, context and back-story, and something real and tangible at stake. I generally resisted the skin in the game. At 21, I drank pints at a bar counter and celebrated Manchester United’s unlikely injury time rise from the ashes to beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, and immediately felt sullied, a feeling which persisted for decades. Partisanship was an insult to the art I was fortunate enough to observe.
But those other two—context and back-story on the one hand, and something real and tangible at stake on the other—if those two are present it’s possible to enjoy, more than enjoy, to be fully and hopelessly invested in, any sporting occasion, irrespective of the standard or grade.
Too often in modern professional sport, both the context and the stakes are blurred entirely by relentless repetition and persistent prostitution before the altar of commerce. Take a game between Real Madrid and Barcelona, for example. It is a monumental occasion, enough to be dubbed El Clásico, but in each of the past two completed seasons, from 2017-19, these two giants of Spanish football met eight times. In the previous ten years, they met 34 times. Such repetitiveness, played out against the backdrop hum of the hype machine, dilutes the beauty so much that everything ultimately becomes forgettable. Much professional sport, therefore, has been reduced to the equivalent of momentarily diverting wallpaper rather than the heroic battleground-by-proxy I had grown to love, brought to life with colour and depth and tone and everything on the line. When participants generally seem more interested in riches beyond their wildest dreams than a glorious moment of true grace, the division of the spoils seems trite and insignificant and devoid of any honour. When there is always another battle, a few weeks or months down the line, the present one ceases to have much meaning.
Frequent repetition alone would be enough to chip away at the importance of such occasions.
The trouble is that the erosion is magnified, speeded up, by other forces. It’s a case of frequency squared, with each contest spun into further nauseating irrelevance by the endless hyperbole of rolling news channels and dedicated sports papers and websites, each seeking to exploit or contrive the most tenuous angle in a bid to provide their own outlet or masthead with the momentary oxygen of some precious attention from the perpetually distracted masses. But ultimately the attention is short-lived and the oxygen runs out, and the whole media survival circus is compelled to crank things up again, seeking the next hit.
In so much pro sport now, this hype/frequency matrix has each slider cranked perilously close to the max—but not at the max yet. No, the max is still to come, awaiting us on the far side of sport’s black hole of final irrelevance.
Such a situation is repeated virtually the world over, and like just about everything, it’s hard to argue that the Internet isn’t a contributing factor. The nature of our all-things-on-demand-at-all-times culture has elevated the significance of the few moments in the collective life of humans that are not on-demand.
In the past everything happened on a schedule, with the unavoidable wait time that a schedule incurs. If you’re of a certain age you might remember discussing the latest developments in a hit TV series—The Sopranos or The Wire, say—at an office watercooler or bar counter or in a long email thread with friends. How quaint that all seems now.
Now, with millions of hours—All Episodes Available Now!, scream the promos—available at any given second, when Netflix and YouTube and Spotify and Amazon give us almost everything we could ever want to watch, listen to or read, whenever we want it, when almost everything is ours at any moment we choose, we find ourselves reduced to cast-off consumers of entertainment, lost in an endless sea of freedom of choice.
The global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 brought the essential moments and privileges—of health, food, family, community, and freedom of movement—into sharp focus, and further cast a light on the “Everything Now” environment we had created and contributed to, and the habits forged by such an environment. Sporting competition ceased overnight, and the lasting appeal of such competition was rendered clear by its very absence. Pandemics apart, only a handful of occasions truly captivate the simultaneous attention of even a segment of humanity: presidential elections or social revolutions or major sporting occasions happen in a particular place, at a particular time. Even tragedies are tragically dispensable, pawed at and quickly kicked aside for the next news item in the vicious, voracious and never-ending 24-hour cycle.
It is difficult to escape the feeling that we’re being herded like sheep in a pen, and our pen is surrounded by wall-to-wall HD screens and bright yellow tickers yelling “EXCLUSIVE” or “JUST IN” or “BREAKING”. The most important thing that’s breaking, though, is not the latest sound bite from a heavily sanctioned press conference, but our collective connection to things that were once so vital. All is illuminated and all is choreographed, and we are at once the customer and the product: we are the customer because we pay with our monthly subscriptions and our pay-per-views and the daily frittering away of our time and attention; and we are the product because the attention we offer up so routinely is bought for obscenely big bucks by YouTube pre-roll ad auctions and television rights highest bidders.
This reality is everywhere we look.
But every once in a while something new and strange occurs, some restoration of natural order amid the artifice and the fake importance of man-made intensity. Like every act of God, this shift is always unexpected. Against the reality of authentic high stakes, the manufactured drama so regularly served up becomes laughable. As though we were witnessing nature in all its force and glory, authentic high stakes pin us down and force us to sit quiet and wide-eyed and gawp with wonder at the majesty of what we’re witnessing.
Sport has the power to do this to large tranches of humanity, and because by definition it happens on a schedule—the fixtures at least, if not always the drama—it shouldn’t be surprising that big business would try to harness that power and bask in its reflected glory in the form of sponsorships and endorsements and advertising.
Yet the power of authentic high stakes and deep-rooted context—combining to create an occasion where everything is on the line—cannot be artificially manufactured. The weight of tradition alone takes decades to create and attempts to stimulate it artificially are almost certain to end in failure. The rest—the indescribable sorcery of a Leo Messi sprint-speed two-touch control, one-touch finish against Nigeria in the 2018 World Cup, or a Joe Canning sideline cut, or a Rafa Nadal backhand drop-shot from the baseline at match-point down—is rare to witness and utterly impossible to cultivate, like the gossamer blossom of a flower that blooms for one week every year and grows only above the tree line on Kilimanjaro.
By some strange unknown alchemy, and usually when least expected, things come together to produce moments of inexpressible drama. The bare minimum requirements are: first, the awareness of everyone involved—participants, adjudicators and spectators alike—of the context, tradition and history against which the occasion is being played out; and second, high stakes borne out of so much more than mere money, its importance resting more on glory and honour, authentic glory and honour, truly precious and wonderful human intangibles in a world where their manufactured equivalents lay claim to our senses everywhere we look.
A bonus extra ingredient can take things to another level entirely: that the occasion is rare or even unique and never to be repeated in precisely the way that it is unfolding here and now before our eyes.
As Wimbledon’s Centre Court roof slid closed and the lights came on and play continued late into the night, it became clear that this semi-final between Nadal and Djokovic was one such occasion.
*******
Friday Night, Part 2
While most people with an interest in the goings-on at Wimbledon on that Friday evening in July 2018 had been hoping for several hours that the two unattractive sluggers would get it over with, I, for one, watching on from afar and never even having been in the vicinity of SW19 in south London, was one of the few who was happy Anderson and Isner had taken so long to sort things out.
The beanbag had been stationed on the floor of the front room, three feet from the TV, for about a month. I had found myself absent-mindedly setting down there for Uruguay v Egypt in the second game of the FIFA World Cup at lunchtime on June 15th, and it became my home whenever possible for the next four weeks.
Three-match World Cup days came and went. Initially motivated by and soon discouraged by events on the football fields in Russia, I regularly found myself lying flat out and full-length, misshapen beanbag morphed into makeshift pillow. Though I was fortunate to ship no damage to my spinal cord, all those hours passed in passive attention to the movements of 22 men and a ball 3,500 kilometres away did little to lift my spirits.
Fortuitously, I found that I picked my battles well. In need to get some real work done, I gave France-Denmark a miss and the only 0-0 draw of the tournament passed uneventfully without me. I was travelling across country on the night England were due to face Belgium in the group stages, but prior results had rendered the match meaningless so it wasn’t at all dispiriting to miss it. On another day my schedule allowed me to bolt for the beanbag in time for the second half of Korea-Germany, a game not highly anticipated, to put it charitably, but which resulted in some of the tournament’s highest drama. Cho, the unheralded, unknown Korean goalkeeper, produced the performance of his and several other lifetimes. At the other end, his superstar opposite number Neuer ended the game mobbed and dispossessed in the opposing half of the field and Son sprinted through, unopposed, to stroke the ball to an empty net and dump Germany, the World Cup’s defending champions, out after the first round.
World Cups, in spite of corruption at the governing body, offer a saving grace amid the remarkable ascent of football’s riches and the corresponding decline in its general appeal. For one thing, the absence of a marketplace where everything has a price and today’s obscene sums become tomorrow’s baselines, ensures the tournament can be reduced to which team has the best coach, the sturdiest systems, the greater talent or the most luck. For another, the four-year rhythm layers on some of the ingredients that are essential for unforgettable drama: the fear, anxiety and wonder engendered by the knowledge that this one time in history will never been repeated.
As so often happens in World Cups, though, the novelty wore off after the first couple of weeks. It was generally heralded as a fine tournament and there were several memorable match-ups: Belgium’s recovery from two goals down to master Japan deep into injury time; France’s 4-3 win over Argentina which signalled the arrival on the world stage of Kylian Mbappé, soccer’s newest superstar; Belgium, again, holding out against Brazil in arguably the one true heavyweight showdown of the tournament. The soundtrack of England’s stroll to the semi-finals was a social media refrain of “It’s coming home”, a grandstand, bandstand and sidestreet renewal of the Baddiel, Skinner and Lightning Seeds song of 1996 that started out in 2018 as a self-deprecating irony (England were, after all, without a win in knock-out tournament football in 12 years) but somehow became transformed, or was seen to transform, into a show of English arrogance. But overall, by the time the World Cup finalists had been decided—Mbappé and France to meet the surprise packages Croatia—the whole thing had the feel of the dawn hours following a heady party where for a short while everything was possible, but where now humdrum reality had settled in and almost everyone had gone home apart from a couple of tired revellers trying to hide their fatigue and console themselves with a little razzmatazz for their own enjoyment.
The summer had also seen heatwaves and hosepipe bans, and it was against this backdrop of endless sport and endless sun that the Wimbledon men’s semi-finals were taking place. The Friday before the World Cup final was a day free from World Cup action and, on its third to last day, the old Wimbledon tournament had finally been given the chance to walk into the spotlight. It was Isner-Anderson then Djokovic-Nadal and Centre Court was full, collectively keen to give the combatants in the first match a couple of hours of respectful attention before settling in for the main event.
My Friday had started with a 90-minute train journey from Drogheda in the east of Ireland to Belfast in the north for a business meeting. A second appointment pencilled in for later the same day—in my first year as a freelancer, I had become acutely aware of the need to maximise efficiency of time by organising at least two meetings for work trips—was cancelled at short notice, and my return train was due in at 3.45pm. With the rational brain at work, the schedule for the day had been mapped out with creative and business projects in mind, but as the hours passed and the end-of-week feeling took over on the train journey home, the ungovernable heart took charge and my thoughts turned repeatedly to the unexpected chance of settling in to watch two of the world’s greatest ever sportsmen engage in a duel to the bitter end.
I visualised the green sward of Wimbledon scuffed brown at either end by two weeks of battle, and I allowed myself to imagine the commentary of Andrew Castle, Boris Becker and John McEnroe in my eardrums. (Castle on his own is hardly an elixir; take Becker and McEnroe and plonk them down anywhere else on earth and they will not be long to reassume the mantle of their outsized egos; but place all three in a commentary box at Wimbledon, and something warm and soothing happens.)
I could feel the comfort of a beanbag on the sitting room floor.
I opened my phone and searched Google for “Wimbledon” to check the status of Isner-Anderson, for no other reason but to gauge the potential start time of the second semi-final. I checked in throughout the train journey, the little flickering green light indicating that the match was still in play.
One set all.
Two sets to one, Isner.
Two sets all, the fourth set the first so far to have been decided without requiring a tiebreak.
As the fifth and final set was starting I made it home, but there was a commitment to an under-7 soccer team at 6. Two small-sided matches. There and back: 90 minutes total, home by 7.15pm. While trying to remain steadfast for the under-7 boys, I stole occasional peeks at my phone.
Isner-Anderson 16-16 in the fifth.
After the boys finished their game, I paced quickly to the car and headed for the house, a small part of me holding out hope that one of the two giant servers would wilt and I might see an hour of Nadal and Djokovic before darkness settled in.
Isner-Anderson 24-24 in the fifth.
I reached the beanbag at 7.45pm.
Five minutes later, Anderson had match point, and converted.
The concept of preordained fate had never made much sense to me, but in that moment something stirred inside. The events of this day, which had started with a train departure 12 hours earlier and no plans for this moment, seemed meant to be.
Friday Night, Part 3
For all their regular meetings on the ATP tour—prior to this game, they had played one another 51 times—most matches between Djokovic and Nadal had taken place in the inescapably lukewarm atmosphere of smaller events, a long sequence of hors-d’oeuvres for the occasional main course.
This was just their third meeting at Wimbledon and their first in seven years, and their first in any Grand Slam in more than three. At the time of the 2011 Wimbledon final—Djokovic’s first Wimbledon title—the Serb was 24 years old, the Spaniard 25. Both were at, or close to, their peak years. In 2018, though, they had crested the mountain and were unavoidably grasping onto the far side, fighting the futile fight of trying to still time. At best they might delay their descent from the peak, but as usual with these two, the paradox was that best was still the baseline for what they could achieve.
Djokovic, a world number one for 223 weeks between 2011 and 2016, had suffered from injuries and loss of form which saw him drop out of the world’s top 20 just before Wimbledon, his lowest ranking in a dozen years. Nadal had somehow returned to world number one despite a list of injuries—mostly brought on by a combination of his uncompromising, squeeze-every-drop style of play and the punishing workload that made such a style of play possible—that have seen him “living with pain and painkillers since 2005”, as his uncle and once-ever-present courtside aide Toni once revealed. If life is a series of fleeting moments of beauty and wonder amid pain and suffering and struggle, then Nadal embodies both ends of the spectrum perhaps like no-one else.
The court cleared, the lights came on, Djokovic and Nadal walked out, settled themselves and their coterie of equipment in their courtside chairs and jogged out to warm up.
Shortly before 8.10pm, Damian Steiner, the Argentine chair umpire, leaned slightly towards his microphone and said, “Play.”
Greatness
To try to understand Rafa Nadal, we must first try to understand the history and context into which he is placed.
There’s a bit of dusty old tennis history here, but let us hold it up to scrutiny and get through it as quickly as we can.
Underlining the significance of the present era, the one that runs loosely from Roger Federer’s first Wimbledon title in 2003 to the present day, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have shared 56 of the 67 Grand Slam tournaments between them. Dominance by any single entity is tiresome. Adversity is the breeding ground for esteem. Even casual sports watchers might admire the Tiger Woods of 2000 to 2006, but it was only really in the course of his battles, embodied less by a single opponent and more by the array of physical health and personality defects overcome or pushed aside for his late-career flowering, that we could really get behind his brilliance. Head-to-head rivalries elevate any competition: think of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost in Formula 1 of the early 1990s, or Arkle and Mill House in 1960s horse racing, or Ryder Cup golf, where musty old me-against-the-course stroke play is ditched for mano-a-mano conflict that can border on the tribal and the bloodthirsty.
Perhaps never in the history of any sport, though, has there been a three-way rivalry of the class and prowess and power and durability as that which has persisted between the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic triumvirate. As of today, during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown of 2020, a time when nobody really knows when the next major tournament might take place, Nadal stands second in the all-time list of Grand Slam winners with 19, one behind Federer and two ahead of Djokovic. Pete Sampras, whose dominance in the 1990s was akin to that of Woods in golf a few years later—so imperious it was predictable, so predictable it was devoid of any drama, so cold and clinical that audiences were tempted to switch off—is next on the list with 14. Next are Roy Emerson (12) and Rod Laver (11), who dominated the 1960s; and Bjorn Borg, with 11 between 1974 and ‘81. Of those four, Sampras never made it to a French Open final and all of Borg’s wins came at either the French or Wimbledon. In contrast, Nadal, Federer and Djokovic have all won the “Career Grand Slam”, champions of all four Majors. Just five other men in the history of the game managed that, and only Andre Agassi in the half century preceding our current trio.
Will one of the three eventually separate himself from the rest?
Nadal could end up winning the most Slams. In 2019, he won two of the four Majors, and his record at the French Open, where he has won 12 times and lost just two matches, ever, suggests he could add at least a couple more there alone. That would take him past Federer who—39 in August, with no wins in his last seven Majors and just one appearance in a Grand Slam final in that time—appears vulnerable in ways he rarely looked before. But equally, Nadal could easily end up in third place when the dust finally settles. Djokovic is, after all, the youngest of the three, the current World Number 1, winner of the other two Slams in 2019, ahead by a wide margin of both his rivals in all-time career tournament earnings and the only one of them to have held all four Grand Slams at the same time, which he managed in 2015-16.
But all of this, all this talk of numbers and records, is sorely incomplete, because when one tries to understand Rafa Nadal, history and context goes only so far.
All of the above are just numbers, and records, and statistics, and anyone who watches Nadal, who really watches him, who pays attention to him and observes what he does and how he does it, will soon understand that all the numbers and stats and records, all the history and context, offer just a pale facsimile of the full story.
In his book Rafa: My Story, Nadal described Federer as one of those “blessed freaks of nature”, someone whose “physique, his DNA, seems perfectly adapted to tennis, rendering him immune to the injuries the rest of us are doomed to put up with.” Full of grace, Federer resembles one of those cloud-dwelling divine beings so fond of Renaissance artists, right down to the slight smile, the heavenly nonchalance and the baked-onto-canvas unflappability.
Djokovic, on the other hand, is the personification of perfect physiological architecture and design. He appears as a finely calibrated machine, delivering groundstrokes that seem to emanate from the exquisitely engineered mechanical processes of a manufacturing assembly line, whirring away with a scowling, ruthless output that makes comparisons with the potential of mere humans ridiculous. Like Federer, he occasionally smiles on court—Nadal almost never does, not until the last ball is dead—but the Djokovic smile seems almost cartoon-villain, messianic.
If the tree of life can symbolise the human condition—reaching down into the earth and rooted and therefore by definition limited in scope, and at the same time reaching for the sky in a multitude of directions at once, a glorious amalgam of ambition and potential—then Nadal is perhaps the best human example of the frailty and glory that is uniquely a representation of what it is to be human. The concept of the flawed genius is a familiar trope: the master let down by a single fatal weakness. But that is not easily borne out by reality. Reality, the real lived experience of what it is to be human, is different. Reality is less the genius with the fatal flaw, and more the absolute unavoidability of all our flaws, out of which occasionally, with work and luck and the relentlessness of just showing up day by day, we might sometimes rise to the level of what the flippant might call genius. Reality is to experience both suffering and wonder in all their endlessly recurring cycles. We are on one day a spirit animal, guided by an unseen hand, experiencing elevated planes of existence and possibility, and the next we spill coffee down our shirt and shout at the stupid fucking idiot driver in the next lane.
The endless supply of Nike gear means Nadal might never have to expose a coffee stain to the world, but you feel his imperfections and weaknesses are always bubbling just below the surface. So much so that he has created elaborate routines to try to stave off disorder, leading to foibles and habits that are legendary—or occasionally, to some, laughable.
He carries one racquet onto court before play, and always in his left hand. He takes one sip each from two water bottles, then places them on the ground beside his chair, labels diagonally facing the side of the court he is about to play from. Before serving, he slides his right foot along the baseline (twice), tugs his shirt at each shoulder, rubs his nose twice, tucks his hair behind each ear. He adjusts his underwear, front, then back. He avoids touching the lines of the court between points, and steps over them right foot first.
He described these moments revealingly in his book: ”Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” While the court is the environment in which he is most powerful, he still appears to be at war with himself there, playing out these endless routines to try to sweep uncertainty and fear from his mind.
Nor are these insecurities newly developed as vulnerabilities emerged. Rafa: My Story was published in 2011. The insecurities have always been there. They are not just part of the story; they are the foundation on which the story is built. He arrived on the scene as a 17-year-old with an upper body like a modern Adonis, an image underscored by his choice of sleeveless shirts which showcased the sculpted upper arm musculature. If that suggested warrior credentials, his style of play over the following 15 years confirmed it, but it also showed something else too. Here was a player whose unspoken essence—almost silent but for the deep-in-the-belly grunts that greeted every forehand—informed anyone watching that he was not just some wildly gifted kid who found the gilded highway to superstar status and followed the road all the way here. It was clear, too, in everything about the way he carried himself, that he valued substance over style, endurance over panache, and the habit of hard work itself over the outcomes that the work might bring. Rarely does he demonstrate an attitude or appearance or stride that might hint at anything even close to conceit or even self-regard, but in everything he does, he embodies a wide spectrum of fear and anxiety and imagination and desire.
In the way he approaches tennis, recognising the limitations and standing up to them with a mix of anxiety and steadfastness, he shows us one way we might approach life.
Between Federer the god-like, and Djokovic the devilish, Nadal might be the essence of what it is to be human.
*******
Art
In the pantheon of great Wimbledon classics, even focusing solely on the men’s game, the Djokovic-Nadal semi-final of 2018 might not make the top 10.
The archetype might be the Bjorn Borg-John McEnroe final of 1980, a match remembered as Superbrat’s first Wimbledon final, Borg’s fourth and last title, and for a 22-minute fourth set tiebreaker. Goran Ivanisevic’s Monday breakthrough in 2001 will be remembered by many. Between 2007 and 2009 there were three great five-setters in a row (Nadal v Federer twice, with one win apiece, including the 2008 match regarded by many as the greatest ever; and 2009’s Federer-Andy Roddick, which ended 16-14 in the fifth). In 2019, Federer was again involved in a go-the-distance behemoth, going down 13-12 to Djokovic in the first ever fifth set tiebreaker at Wimbledon (introduced to prevent the type of encounters that can sometimes go to 100+ games over three days, and mercilessly coming a year after Anderson-Isner started the domino fall that led here).
If it’s possible that you can have too much of a good thing, that’s what tennis has given. Even looking at the last dozen years, there are so many delicacies on the table that it’s understandable if we don’t fully appreciate the quality of each dish set before us, or just forget all about it when the next mouthwatering course arrives.
TV sport is always duller, paler when not watched live, but on the chance that you are someday locked up at home with a decent Internet connection and nothing much to do for six hours or so then the 2018 semi-final awaits you, complete and unabridged, on YouTube. If time is pressing and you just want the highlights, skip forward to the third set tiebreak, taking place as the clock ticks towards 11pm on Friday night and the mandatory close of play under the licence to operate the venue. The pair of them hit four point-winning drop shots in the course of eight points, three by Nadal, all perfectly executed from the back of the court.
Or just take in the last few games from the Saturday afternoon, when you might get to experience even a taste of the bewilderment that comes from witnessing Nadal execute a sliced backhand drop shot from the baseline at 8-7 down, 30-40 down, match-point down.
From the beanbag, as the minutes and then the hours passed, as Friday night gave way to Saturday lunchtime, the magnitude and magnificence and dignity of what was happening became clear.
Life is at once a relentless search for the dramatic, the uncertain, the chaotic, the unpredictable, and at the same time a gnawing fear that we might find it and not know what to do with it. Nothing is so unerring in its delivery of unpredictability as live top-level sport when everything is on the line, so much so that when we witness it—when we become a fully integral party to it, as the involved observer always is—we find ourselves afterwards empty, bereft, quietly grieving in a surreal and absurd way we can never justifiably speak of. Even as I was wallowing in the glory of Nadal-Djokovic 2018, I was grieving the end of it.
When it eventually was over, following an overnight break and 19 hours after it started, it was galling, perhaps, but somehow fitting that Nadal would lose and go out, beaten 10-8 in the final set. Beaten finalists are rarely recalled, and only the nerds remember the losing semi-finalists, but Nadal’s all-encompassing greatness owes something to the fact that where he’s concerned, the outcome is never the most important thing. Judging a Nadal match on its ending is like stripping away all but the last lines of a Dostoevsky novel or seeing only the final dark daub on a Goya painting. The art exists only in the whole, and in the appreciation of the whole, from whichever angle we happen to view it, whether that’s amongst a crowd in a city museum, or lying prone on the floor, before a borrowed TV and with a beanbag for a pillow.
In morphing from street game for everyone to global multi-billionaire business in half a century or so, in lavishly rewarding artifice and posturing and style over substance, football has built its own tower bang in the centre of Dante’s circles of hell. If football, with its beautiful game traditions, is a warning of all that can go wrong when there is too much worship at the altar of commercialism and globalism and the bottom line, tennis has in some way picked up the mantle of beauty and grace.
The game has had its bad-boys and its boredoms and even its base criminality. However, rising above the John McEnroe spoilt-child rants and the very public manifestation of Nick Kyrgios’s personal battles, above the clownish in-match entertainment offered up by Henri Laconte and Ilie Nastase, above the metronomic supremacy of Sampras and the soporific slam-serves of Kevin Anderson and Mark Philipoussis, and rising above the sordid affairs of the game’s present-day lower tiers, where some players opt to supplement meagre tournament earnings by becoming willing participants in shadowy betting conspiracies, rising above all of this is the present moment, its glory only truly apparent as we think of a time after this, when the mastery of Federer and Djokovic and Nadal slips finally and fatefully into the past.
It is perhaps the very definition of hubris to assume that our own days are always the heydays, but if there may come a time that eventually eclipses the present one, that should not diminish just what we’ve been so fortunate to be a part of. The days when Federer, Djokovic and Nadal no longer grace Wimbledon’s Centre Court and Flushing Meadows and Roland Garros, days not far away now, will see all observers silently grieve, many of us without knowing the reason for our despondency.
Federer the genius artist, who seems to glide instead of run, to caress the ball instead of hit it, who forces you to hold your breath in wonder, who is a racquet-and-ball manifestation of Michelangelo at work. Djokovic the scowling artisan, generally devoid of warmth and maybe even happiness, reserving his rare smiles for the fleeting moment of outright victory before the scowl returns again for the next challenge, because always there is a next challenge, coming from outside or from within. You appreciate Federer as something unreachable, unattainable, halfway to heaven. You sense that Djokovic could be reached, with the right blend of talent and will and perseverance, but such is his cold and callous intensity that there might be no good in it at all.
And then there’s Nadal.
The youthful specimen of male physical perfection as he was, the balding, grizzled veteran as he is now, his best days never to be recovered but who remains at or near the top through force of perseverance and does so with a humility we can all aim for in our best moments.
The loyal and grounded Mallorcan, who still lives in Manacor, around the corner from his birthplace, where he is at home amongst family, and his mostly Mallorcan team, with work to be done.
The philanthropist, whose foundation—Mallorca-based, naturally—helps disadvantaged children in Spain, the US and India achieve personal development through sport.
The sweat-dripping warrior. The uncertain obsessive-compulsive, with his array of predilections designed to create order in his own head. The kindly empath, running quickly to kiss the forehead of the ball-girl who has just ricocheted a fizzing ball into Row Z. The occasional protestor, taking a defiant stand against an umpire when he deems himself to have been wronged.
Above all the quiet sportsman, unexpressed and inexpressible; exceptional in performance and endurance and skill, but also exceptional in remaining tied to the glory and legitimacy of the everyday away from the cash-strewn world of the big-time.
Sitting here now, in the locked down spring of 2020, trying to consider not so much the meaning of life but how to live it in a way that is truthful and honest, with integrity and without artifice, with warmth and loyalty and a desire to leave some tangible positive impact on a small corner of the world, when I grapple with all the challenges and all the opportunities and all the pressures and all the expectations on me as a man, when I think about all that, I think of Rafa Nadal.
The Rafa Nadal I think about is not the real Rafa Nadal. It is an abstract persona, drawn from parts of the real man and parts that have been concocted up from elsewhere, and it exists only in my mind.
But still, this abstract persona encourages me to accept what I must accept, and change what I must change.
It makes me think about casting down roots in the soil where I stand, and reaching for what I must reach for, irrespective of whether I can ever get there.
It makes me think about the need to work, to work fully and deeply on the few precious vital things there are, and, so that this work can be done, to strip away all the lustrous, perilous, ego-temptations of the world.
It makes me think about the neverending task of picking the right thing and doing it, because we can never make a better choice than to do the right thing right now.
It makes me think about toughness and tenderness, and how to mould those two together.
It makes me think about the global village that seems to need chiefs, and whether I can be one of those.
The abstract persona of Rafa Nadal that exists only in my mind makes me think of all these grim glories of being alive, and sometimes, it tells me to go to the beach with my children, and get down on my knees, and build volcanoes in the sand.