Rafa Read online

  Just as well, because the next thing I had to do was not something that, in ordinary circumstances, I would accept with calm. I went downstairs to a small medical room to have my doctor give me a painkilling injection in the sole of my left foot. I’d had a blister and a swelling around one of the tiny metatarsal bones down there since the third round. That part of the foot had to be put to sleep, otherwise I simply couldn’t have played—the pain would have been too great.

  Then it was up to the locker room again and back to my ritual. I put on my earphones and listened to music. It sharpens that sense of flow, removes me further from my surroundings. Then Titín bandaged my left foot. While he did that, I put the grips on my rackets, all six I’d be taking on court. I always do this. They come with a black pre-grip. I roll a white tape over the black one, spinning the tape around and around, working diagonally up the shaft. I don’t need to think about it, I just do it. As if in a trance.

  Next I lay down on a massage table and Titín wrapped a couple of straps of bandage around my legs, just below the knees. I’d had aches there too, and the straps helped prevent soreness, or eased the pain if it came.

  Playing sports is a good thing for ordinary people; sport played at the professional level is not good for your health. It pushes your body to limits that human beings are not naturally equipped to handle. That’s why just about every top professional athlete has been laid low by injury, sometimes a career-ending injury. There was a moment in my career when I seriously wondered whether I’d be able to continue competing at the top level. I play through pain much of the time, but I think all elite sports people do. All except Federer, at any rate. I’ve had to push and mold my body to adapt it to cope with the repetitive muscular stress that tennis forces on you, but he just seems to have been born to play the game. His physique—his DNA—seems perfectly adapted to tennis, rendering him immune to the injuries the rest of us are doomed to put up with. They tell me he doesn’t train as hard as I do. I don’t know if it’s true, but it would figure. You get these blessed freaks of nature in other sports too. The rest of us just have to learn to live with pain, and long breaks from the game, because a foot, a shoulder, or a leg has sent a cry for help to the brain, asking it to stop. That’s why I need to have so much bandaging done before a match; that’s why it’s such a critical part of my preparations.

  After Titín had done my knees, I stood up, got dressed, went to a basin, and ran water through my hair. Then I put on my bandanna. It’s another maneuver that requires no thought, but I do it slowly, carefully, tying it tightly and very deliberately behind the back of my head. There’s a practical point to it: keeping my hair from falling over my eyes. But it’s also another moment in the ritual, another decisive moment of no return, like the cold shower, when my sense is sharpened that very soon I’ll be entering battle.

  It was nearly time to go on court. The adrenaline rush, creeping up on me all day, flooded my nervous system. I was breathing hard, bursting to release energy. But I had to sit still a moment longer as Titín bandaged the fingers of my left hand, my playing hand, his moves as mechanical and silent as mine when I wrap the grips around my rackets. There’s nothing cosmetic about this. Without the bandages, the skin would stretch and tear during the game.

  I stood up and began exercising, violently—activating my explosiveness, as Titín calls it. Toni was on hand, watching me, not saying much. I didn’t know whether Federer was watching me too. I just know he’s not as busy as I am in the locker room before a match. I jumped up and down, ran in short bursts from one end of the cramped space to the other—no more than six meters or so. I stopped short, rotated my neck, my shoulders, my wrists, crouched down and bent my knees. Then more jumps, more mini sprints, as if I were alone in my gym back home. Always with my earphones on, the music pumping inside my head. I went to take a pee. (I find myself taking a lot of pees—nervous pees—just before a game, sometimes five or six in that final hour.) Then I came back, swung my arms high and round my shoulders, hard.

  Toni gestured, I took off the earphones. He said there was a rain delay, but for no more than fifteen minutes, they thought. I wasn’t fazed. I was ready for this. Rain would have the same effect on Federer as it would on me. No need to be thrown off balance. I sat down and checked my rackets, felt the balance, the weight; pulled up my socks, checked that both were exactly the same height on my calves. Toni leaned close to me. “Don’t lose sight of the game plan. Do what you have to do.” I was listening but I was not listening. I know at these moments what I have to do. I think my concentration is good. My endurance too. Endurance: that’s a big word. Keeping going physically, never letting up, and putting up with everything that comes my way, not allowing the good or the bad—the great shots or the weak ones, the good luck or the bad—to put me off track. I have to be centered, no distractions, do what I have to do in each moment. If I have to hit the ball twenty times to Federer’s backhand, I’ll hit it twenty times, not nineteen. If I have to wait for the rally to stretch to ten shots or twelve or fifteen to bide my chance to hit a winner, I’ll wait. There are moments when you have a chance to go for a winning drive, but you have a 70 percent chance of succeeding; you wait five shots more and your odds will have improved to 85 percent. So be alert, be patient, don’t be rash.

  If I go up to the net, I hit it to his backhand, not to his drive, his strongest shot. Losing your concentration means going to the net and hitting the ball to his forehand, or omitting in a rush of blood to serve to his backhand—always to his backhand—or going for a winner when it’s not time. Being concentrated means keeping doing what you know you have to do, never changing your plan, unless the circumstances of a rally or of the game change exceptionally enough to warrant springing a surprise. It means discipline, it means holding back when the temptation arises to go for broke. Fighting that temptation means keeping your impatience or frustration in check.

  Even if you see what seems like a chance to put the pressure on and seize the initiative, keep hitting to the backhand, because in the long run, over the course of the whole game, that is what’s wisest and best. That’s the plan. It’s not a complicated plan. You can’t even call it a tactic, it’s so simple. I play the shot that’s easier for me and he plays the one that’s harder for him—I mean, my left-handed drive against his right-handed backhand. It’s just a question of sticking to it. With Federer what you have to do is keep applying pressure to the backhand, make him play the ball high, strike with the racket up where his neck is, put him under pressure, wear him down. Probe chinks that way in his game and his morale. Frustrate him, drive him close to despair, if you can. And when he is striking the ball well, as he most surely will, for you won’t have him in trouble the whole time, not by any means, chase down every attempted winner of his, hit it back deep, make him feel he has to win the point two, three, four times to get to 15–love.

  That’s all I was thinking, in so far as you can say I was thinking at all, as I sat there fiddling with my rackets and socks and the bandages on my fingers, music filling my head, waiting for the rain to pass. Until an official with a blazer walked in and told us it was time. I sprang up, swung my shoulders, rolled my neck from side to side, did a couple more bursts up and down the locker room.

  Now I was supposed to hand over my bag to a court attendant for him to carry it to my chair. It’s part of Wimbledon protocol on Final Day. It doesn’t happen anywhere else. I don’t like it. It’s a break from my routine. I handed over my bag but took out one racket. I led the way out of the locker room clutching the racket hard, along corridors with photographs of past champions and trophies behind glass frames, down some stairs and left and out into the cool English July air and the magical green of the Centre Court.

  I sat down, took off my white track suit top, and took a sip from a bottle of water. Then from a second bottle. I repeat the sequence, every time, before a match begins, and at every break between games, until a match is over. A sip from one bottle, and then from another
. And then I put the two bottles down at my feet, in front of my chair to my left, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court. 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.

  Federer and the umpire were standing at the foot of the umpire’s chair, waiting for the coin toss. I leapt up, stood across the net from Federer, and began to run in place, to jump energetically up and down. Federer stood still, always so much more relaxed than me, in appearance anyway.

  The last part of the ritual, as important as all the preparations that went before, was to look up, scan the perimeter of the stadium, and search for my family members among the blur of the Centre Court crowd, locking their exact coordinates inside my head. At the other end of the court to my left, are my father and mother and my uncle Toni; and diagonally across from them, behind my right shoulder, my sister, three of my grandparents and my godfather and godmother, who are also my uncle and aunt, plus another uncle. I don’t let them intrude on my thoughts during a match—I don’t ever let myself smile during a match—but knowing they are there, as they always have been, gives me the peace of mind on which my success as a player rests. I build a wall around myself when I play, but my family is the cement that holds the wall together.

  I also looked in the crowd for the members of my team, the professionals I employ. Sitting alongside my parents and Toni, Carlos Costa, my agent and great friend, was there; and Benito Pérez Barbadillo, my press chief; and Jordi Robert—I call him “Tuts”—who is my handler at Nike; and Titín, who knows me most intimately of all and is like a brother to me. I could also see, in my mind’s eye, my paternal grandfather and my girfriend, María Francisca, whom I call Mary, watching me on television back home in Manacor, and the two other members of my team who were also absent, but not for that any less critical to my success: Francis Roig, my second coach, as clever a tennis man as Toni, but more easygoing, and my smart, intense physical trainer Joan Forcades who, like Titín, ministers as much to my mind as he does to my body.

  My immediate family, my extended family, and my professional team (all of whom are practically family themselves) stand in three concentric rings around me. Not only do they cocoon me from the dangerously distracting hurly-burly that comes with money and fame, together they create the environment of affection and trust I need to allow my talent to flower. Each individual member of the group complements the other; each plays his or her role in fortifying me where I am weak, boosting me where I am strong. To imagine my good fortune and success in their absence is to imagine the impossible.

  Roger won the toss. He chose to serve. I didn’t mind. I like my rival to start serving at the beginning of a match. If my head is strong, if his nerves are getting to him, I know I have a good chance of breaking him. I thrive on the pressure. I don’t buckle; I grow stronger on it. The closer to the precipice I am, the more elated I feel. Of course I feel nerves, and of course the adrenaline and the blood are pumping so hard I can feel them from my temples to my legs. It’s an extreme state of physical alertness, but conquerable. I did conquer it. The adrenaline beat the nerves. My legs didn’t give way. They felt strong, ready to run all day. I was bristling. I was locked away in my solitary tennis world but I’d never felt more alive.

  We took our positions on the baselines and started warming up. That echoing silence again: clack, clack; clack, clack. Somewhere in my mind I took note, not for the first time, of just how fluent and easy Roger was in his movements; how poised. I’m more of a scrapper. More defensive, scrambling, recovering, on the brink. I know that’s my image; I’ve watched myself often enough on videos. And it’s a fair reflection of how I’ve played most of my career—especially when Federer has been my rival. But the good sensations remained. My preparations had worked well. The emotions that would assail and overwhelm me if I hadn’t performed my ritual, if I hadn’t systematically willed myself into shedding the stage fright the Centre Court would ordinarily induce, were under control, if not altogether gone. The wall I’d built around myself stood solid and tall. I’d achieved the right balance between tension and control, between nerves and the conviction I could win. And I was striking the ball hard and true: the ground strokes, the volleys, the smashes, and then the serves with which we wrapped up the sparring session before the real battle began. I went back to my chair, toweled my arms, my face, sipped from each of my two bottles of water. I had a flashback to this stage in last year’s final, just before play started. I said to myself one more time that I was ready to accept whatever problems came my way and that I would overcome them. Because winning this match was the dream of my life and I’d never been closer to reaching it and I might not have another chance again. Something else might fail me, my knee or my foot, my backhand or my serve, but my head would not. I might feel fear, the nerves might get the better of me at some point, but over the long haul my head, this time, was not going to let me down.

  * * *

  “Clark Kent and Superman”

  The Rafa Nadal the world saw as he stormed onto the Centre Court lawn for the start of the 2008 Wimbledon final was a warrior, eyes glazed in murderous concentration, clutching his racket like a Viking his axe. A glance at Federer revealed a striking contrast in styles: the younger player in sleeveless shirt and pirate’s pantaloons, the older one in a cream, gold-embossed cardigan and classic Fred Perry shirt; one playing the part of the street-fighting underdog, the other suave and effortlessly superior.

  If Nadal, veined biceps bulging, was a picture of elemental brute force, Federer—lean and lithe, five years older at twenty-seven—was all natural grace. If Nadal, who had just turned twenty-two, was the head-down assassin, Federer was the aristocrat who strolled on court waving airily to the multitudes as if he owned Wimbledon, as if he were welcoming guests to a private garden party.

  Federer’s absent-minded, almost supercilious demeanor during the pre-match warm-up hardly hinted at the game’s billing as a clash of titans; Nadal’s thunderous intensity was a grunting caricature of a PlayStation action hero. Nadal hits his forehands as if he were firing a rifle. He cocks an imaginary gun, eyes the target, and pulls the trigger. With Federer—whose name means “trader in feathers” in old German—there is no sense of pause, no visible mechanism. He is all unforced liquidity. Nadal (the name means “Christmas” in Catalan or Mallorcan, a word with altogether more exuberant associations than “feather trader”), was the super fit, self-built sportsman of the modern era; Federer belonged to a type one might have seen in the 1920s, when tennis was an upper-crust pastime, a gentlemen’s spirited exercise following afternoon tea.

  That was what the world saw. What Federer saw was a snarling young pretender who threatened to usurp his tennis kingdom, stop his quest for a record of six consecutive Wimbledon victories, and displace him from the position he had held for four years as world number one. The effect Nadal had on Federer in the locker room before the match began had to be intimidating, otherwise, in the view of Francis Roig, Nadal’s second coach, “Federer would have had to be made of stone.”

  “It’s the moment he gets up from the massage table, after Maymó has finished putting on his bandages, that he becomes scary for his rivals,” says Roig, himself a former tennis professional. “The simple action of wrapping on his bandanna is so frighteningly intense; his eyes, far away, seem to see nothing that’s around him. Then, suddenly, he’ll breathe deep and kick into life, pumping his legs up and down and then, as if oblivious to the fact that his rival is just a few paces away across the room, he’ll let out a cry of ‘Vamos! Vamos!’ [‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’]. There’s something animal about it. The other player may be thinking his own thoughts but he won’t be able to help casting him a wary sideways glance—I’ve seen it again and again—and he’ll be thinking, ‘Oh, my God! This is Nadal, who fights for every point as if it were his
last. Today I’m going to have to be at the very top of my game, I’m going to have to have the day of my life. And not to win, just to have a chance.’ ”

  The performance is all the more dramatic in Roig’s eyes for the chasm that separates Nadal the competitor “with that extra something real champions have” from Nadal the private man. “You know that a part of him is wracked by nerves, you know that in everyday life he is an ordinary guy—an unfailingly decent and nice guy—who can be unsure of himself and full of anxieties, but you see him there in the locker room and suddenly he is transforming himself before your very eyes into a conqueror.”

  But the Rafael his family saw emerge from the locker room onto the Centre Court was neither a conqueror nor an axe-wielding gladiator, nor a fighting bull. They were terrified for him. They knew he was brilliant and they knew he was brave and, while they would never let on, they were a little in awe of him, but what they were seeing now, as the contest was about to begin, was something altogether more humanly fragile.

  Rafael Maymó is Nadal’s shadow, his most intimate companion on the grindingly long global tennis circuit. Trim, neat, towered over by his six-foot-one friend and employer, the thirty-three-year-old Maymó is a discreet, shrewd, serene Mallorcan from Nadal’s hometown of Manacor. Since he started working as Nadal’s physical therapist in September 2006, the two have developed a relationship that is practically telepathic. They barely need to talk to understand each other, but Maymó—or Titín, as Nadal affectionately calls him, though the nickname has no meaning—has learned to tell when the mood is ripe for him to speak up, when to lend an ear. His role is not unlike that of a groom with a purebred racehorse. He rubs Nadal’s muscles, tapes his joints, soothes his electric temperament. Maymó is Nadal’s horse whisperer.