Rafa Read online

  Maymó attends to Nadal’s needs of the moment, psychological as well as physical, but he knows his limitations: he sees that these end where the family begins, for they are the pillar that sustains Nadal, as a person and as an athlete. “You cannot stress too much the significance of the family on his life,” Maymó says. “Or how united he and they are. Each of Rafa’s triumphs is indivisibly a triumph of the whole family. The parents, the sister, the uncles, the aunt, the grandparents: they act on the principle of one for all and all for one. They savor his victories and suffer his defeats. They are like a part of his body, as if they were an extension of Rafa’s arm.”

  So many of them show up so often at Nadal’s matches, Maymó says, because they understand he is not 100 percent fully functional without them. “It’s not a duty. They need to be there. They see no choice in the matter. But they also feel that his chances of success will increase if, when he looks up at the crowds before a match begins, he sees them there. That is why when he wins a big victory, his instinct is to jump up into the stands to embrace them; or if any are back home watching on TV, the first thing he does back in the locker room is phone them.”

  His father, Sebastián Nadal, endured the most nerve-shredding experience of his life at the Centre Court on the day of the 2008 Wimbledon final. An image of what happened after the 2007 final, also against Federer, gnawed at Sebastián, as it did at the rest of the Nadal family. They all knew how Rafael had reacted after that five-set loss. Sebastián had described to them the scene in the Wimbledon locker room: Rafael sitting on the floor of the shower for half an hour, a picture of despair, the water that pounded his head blending with the tears that rolled down his cheeks.

  “I was so afraid of another defeat—not for me, but for Rafael,” said Sebastián, a big man who in his working life is a steady, calm entrepreneur. “I had that picture of him destroyed, utterly sunk, after the 2007 final, nailed inside my head and I did not want to have to see it again. And I thought, if he loses, what can I do—what can I possibly do—to make it less traumatic for him? That was the game of Rafael’s life; that was the biggest day. I had a terrible time. I’ve never suffered so much.”

  All those closest to Nadal shared Sebastián’s suffering that day; all saw the soft, vulnerable core hidden beneath the hard warrior shell.

  Nadal’s sister, Maribel, a lanky and good-humored college student, five years younger than he, is amused by the gap between the perception the public has of her brother and her own knowledge of him. An unusually overprotective big brother, who calls her or texts ten times a day, wherever in the world he might be, he gets into a terrible flap, she says, at the slightest suggestion that she might be falling ill. “One time when he was way in Australia my doctor ordered me to have some tests done—nothing too serious—but in all the messages I exchanged with Rafael that was the one thing I didn’t mention. It would freak him out; it would risk throwing him completely off his game,” says Maribel, whose pride in her brother’s achievements does not blind her to “the truth,” expressed with teasing affection, that he is “a bit of a scaredy cat.”

  Nadal’s mother, Ana María Parera, does not disagree. “He’s on top in the tennis world but, deep down, he is a super-sensitive human being full of fears and insecurities that people who don’t know him would scarcely imagine,” she says. “He doesn’t like the dark, for example, and he prefers to sleep with the light, or the TV, on. He is not comfortable with thunder and lightning either. When he was a child he’d hide under a cushion when that happened and, even now, when there’s a storm and you need to go outside to fetch something, he won’t let you. And then there are his eating habits, his loathing of cheese and tomato, and of ham, the national dish of Spain. I’m not as mad about ham myself as most people seem to be, but cheese? It is a bit peculiar.”

  A fussy eater, he is also fussy behind the wheel of a car. Nadal enjoys driving, but maybe more in the make-believe world of his PlayStation, a constant companion when he is on tour, than in a real car. “He’s a prudent driver,” his mother says. “He accelerates, brakes, accelerates, brakes, and he is awfully careful about overtaking, however powerful his car might be.”

  Maribel, his sister, is more blunt than his mother. She describes Rafael as “a terrible driver.” And she finds it funny too that, while loving the sea, he is also afraid of it. “He’s always talking about buying himself a boat. He loves fishing and Jet Skiing, but he won’t Jet Ski, nor will he swim, unless he can see the sand at the bottom. Nor will he ever dive off a high rock into the sea, as his friends do all the time.”

  But all these foibles are nothing compared to his most persistent anxiety: that something bad may happen to his family. Not only does he panic at the merest suggestion of ill health in the family, he is forever fretting that an accident may befall them. “I like to light up the fireplace almost every night,” says his mother, at whose large, modern seafront home he still lives, in a wing of the house with its own bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom. “If he goes out, he’ll remind me before leaving to put out the fire before I go to sleep. And then he’ll phone three times from whatever restaurant or bar he is in to make sure I’ve done so. If I take the car to drive to Palma, only an hour away, he’ll beg me, always, to drive slowly and carefully.”

  Ana María, a wise and strong Mediterranean matriarch, never ceases to be amazed by the incoherence between how brave he is on the tennis court and how fear-ridden off it. “He is a straightforward kind of person, at first sight,” she says, “and also a very good person, but he is also full of ambiguities. If you know what he is like deep down, there are things about him that don’t quite square.”

  That is why he has to arm himself with courage in the buildup to a big game, why he does what he does inside the locker room, willing himself into a personality change, bottling up his inherent fears and the nerves of the moment before releasing the gladiator within.

  To the anonymous multitudes the man who emerged from the locker room onto the Centre Court for the start of the Wimbledon 2008 final was Superman; to his intimates, he was also Clark Kent. One was quite as real as the other; it might even be that one depended on the other. Benito Pérez Barbadillo, his press chief since December 2006, is as convinced that Nadal’s insecurities are the fuel of his competitive fire as he is that his family offers him the core of affection and support necessary to keep them in check. Pérez worked in the tennis world for ten years, as an official at the Association of Tennis Professionals before becoming Nadal’s press chief, and has known, in some cases very well, most of the top players of this period. Nadal, he believes, is different from the rest, as a player and as a man. “That unique mental strength and self-confidence and warrior spirit is the reverse side of the insecurity that drives him,” he says. All his fears—be they of the dark, of thunderstorms, of the sea, or of the disastrous disruption of his family life—obey a compelling need. “He is a person who needs to be in control of everything,” Pérez says, “but since this is impossible, he invests all he has in controlling the one part of his life over which he has most command, Rafa the tennis player.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  THE DYNAMIC DUO

  The First Point is always important, more so in a Wimbledon final. I’d felt good, I’d had those good sensations all morning; now I had to prove it to myself on court. Federer got in a good first serve wide to my backhand. I clawed the return back, better than he expected, deeper. He was preparing himself to move in behind that serve, using the forward momentum of the body to add power to his shot; but my return wrong-footed him, obliged him to shuffle back a couple of steps and hit the ball uncomfortably high on his forehand, on the back foot, limiting him to the power of his arm alone. It was a better return than I might have reasonably expected to a deep and difficult serve, one that immediately got him thinking, adjusting.

  Break that easy rhythm of his, push him to the edge—that’s what I have to do against Federer, always. That’s what Toni said r
ight back the very first time I played him, in Miami, five years earlier: “You’re not going to beat him on talent, on the brilliance of your shot-making. He’ll always be more able to make a winner out of nothing than you. So you have to press him all the time, force him to play at the very limit of his abilities.” Even though I won that first match of ours in Miami 6–3, 6–3, Toni was right. His serve is better than mine, his volley too; his forehand is probably more decisive than mine, his sliced backhand definitely is, and his positioning on the court is better too. There was a reason why he had been world number one for the previous five years and I had been number two for the previous three. Besides, Federer had won Wimbledon the last five years in a row. He practically owned the place. I knew I had to beat him mentally if I was to win. The strategy with Federer is never to let up, to try and wear him down from the first point to the last.

  Federer struck that awkward first return of mine well to my backhand, and I tried to hit the ball back to his—applying the game plan right from the beginning—but he played around it, took it on the forehand. But now I had the initiative, I was in the center of the court, he’d had to push out wider. Then his forehand to my backhand, but he did not hit it too deep, allowing me to steer the ball straight and deep down the line, with no chance this time for him to play around the backhand. Federer angled the ball diagonally across to my forehand and I saw my chance to go for the winner. With him expecting to receive again on his backhand, I whipped the ball toward his forehand corner. The ball dropped just inside the baseline and spun, high and wide, beyond his reach.

  A first point like that gives you confidence. You’re feeling in tune with the surface, you feel you’re controlling the ball and not that it is controlling you. On that point I had control of the ball in every one of the seven shots I hit. That gives you peace of mind. The nerves are working for you, not against you. It’s what you need at the start of a Wimbledon final.

  A funny thing about Wimbledon: despite the grandeur of the place and the weight of expectations it generates, of all tournaments it is the one where I am able to recreate the calmest sense of home. Instead of staying in some vast hotel suite—some of the places where they put me up make me laugh, they can be so needlessly extravagant—I live in a rented house across the road from the All England Club. A normal house, nothing fancy, but big enough—three floors—for my family, my team, and friends to stay or come round for dinner. It gives this tournament a whole different feel from all the others. Instead of each of us being isolated in our hotel rooms we have a space we can all share; instead of having to drive through traffic to the courts in an official car, a two-minute walk and you’re there. Being in a house also means we have to do our own food shopping. When I can, I go to the local supermarket to buy a few of the things that I eat far too much of, like Nutella chocolate, or potato chips, or olives. I am not a model of healthy eating, not for a professional athlete anyway. I eat as normal people do. If I feel like something, I’ll have it. I’m especially mad about olives. In and of themselves they’re OK, not like chocolate or chips. But my problem is the quantities I eat. My mother often reminds me of the time when, as a small child, I hid inside a cupboard and devoured a huge jar of olives, so many I vomited and was sick for days. The experience might have changed my attitude to olives, but it didn’t and never has. I crave olives and I’m not happy when I find myself somewhere where they are hard to find.

  I found them in Wimbledon but I had to be careful over the timing of my trips to buy them. If I went when the supermarket was crowded I ran the risk of being mobbed for autographs. This is an occupational hazard that I accept and I try to take it with good grace. I can’t say “no” to people who ask me for my signature, even to the rude ones who just stick a piece of paper in front of me and don’t even say “please.” I’ll sign for them too, but what they won’t get from me is a smile. So going to the supermarket in Wimbledon, while an enjoyable distraction from the tension of competition, does have its pressures. The only place where I can go shopping in peace—where I can do anything like a normal person—is my home town of Manacor.

  The one soothing similarity between Wimbledon and Manacor is that house we all stay in and the pleasure of that short stroll to the courts, which reminds me of when I started playing tennis, at the age of four. We lived in an apartment opposite the town’s tennis club, and I’d cross the road and train with my uncle Toni, the resident coach.

  The clubhouse is what you’d expect in a town of barely forty thousand people. Medium-sized, dominated by a large restaurant with a terrace overhanging the courts, all clay. One day I joined in with a group of half a dozen children Toni was teaching. I liked it right from the start. I was already crazy about football, playing on the streets with my friends every spare moment my parents let me, and anything that involved a ball was going to be fun. I liked football best. I liked being part of a team. Toni says that at first I found tennis boring. But being in a group helped, and it’s what made possible everything that followed. If it had just been me and my uncle it would have been too suffocating. It wasn’t till I was thirteen, when I knew my future was in tennis, that he began training me on my own.

  Toni was tough on me right from the start, tougher than on the other children. He demanded a lot of me, pressured me hard. He’d use rough language, he’d shout a lot, he’d frighten me—especially when the other boys didn’t turn up and it was just the two of us. If I saw I’d be alone with him when I arrived for training, I’d get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Miguel Ángel Munar, still today one of my best friends, would come there two or three times a week; me, four or five times. We’d play between one fifteen and two thirty, during our lunch break from school. And sometimes after school too, when I didn’t have football practice. Miguel Ángel reminds me sometimes how Toni , if he saw my head was wandering, would belt the ball hard at me, not to hit me, but to scare me, to startle me to attention. At that age, as Miguel Ángel says, all our heads wandered, but mine was the one that was allowed to wander least. It was always me too that he got to pick up the balls, or more balls than the others, at the end of the training session; and it was me who had to sweep the courts when we were done for the day. Anyone who might have expected any favoritism on his part was mistaken. Quite the opposite. Miguel Ángel says he bluntly discriminated against me, knowing he could not have gotten away with it with him and the other boys but with me he could, because I was his nephew.

  On the other hand, he always encouraged me to think for myself on the tennis court. I’ve seen reports in the news media saying that Toni forced me to play left-handed, and that he did this because it would make me harder to play against. Well, it’s not true. It’s a story the newspapers have made up. The truth is that I began playing when I was very small, and because I wasn’t strong enough to hit the ball over the net, I’d hold the racket with both hands, on the forehand as well as the backhand. Then one day my uncle said, “There are no professional players who play with two hands and we’re not going to be the first ones, so you’ve got to change.” So I did, and what came naturally to me was to play left-handed. Why, I can’t tell. Because I write with my right hand, and when I play basketball or golf—or darts—I play right-handed too. But in football I play with my left; my left foot is much stronger than my right. People say this gives me an advantage on the double-handed backhand, and that may be right. Having more feeling, more control on both hands than the majority of players, has to work in my favor, especially on cross-court shots, where a little extra strength helps. But this was definitely not something that Toni, in a moment of genius, thought up. It’s dumb to imagine that he might have been able to force me to play in a way that did not come naturally to me.

  But, yes, Toni was hard on me. My mother remembers that as a small child sometimes I’d come home from training crying. She’d try to get me to tell her what the matter was, but I preferred to keep quiet. Once I confessed to her that Toni had a habit of calling me a “mummy’s boy,” which pained
her, but I begged her not to say anything to Toni, because that would only have made matters worse.

  Toni never let up. Once I started playing competitive games, when I was seven, it got tougher. One very hot day I went to a match without my bottle of water. I’d forgotten it back home. He could have gone and bought me one, but he didn’t. So that I’d learn to take responsibility, he said. Why didn’t I rebel? Because I enjoyed tennis, and enjoyed it all the more once I started winning, and because I was an obedient and docile child. My mother says I was too easy to manipulate. Maybe, but if I hadn’t loved playing the game, I wouldn’t have put up with my uncle. And I loved him too, as I still do and always will. I trusted him, and so I knew deep down that he was doing what he thought was best for me.

  I trusted him to the point that, for several years, I believed the tall stories he would tell me about his sporting prowess, winning the Tour de France, for instance, or starring as a football player in Italy. I trusted him so implicitly when I was little that I even came to believe he had supernatural powers. It wasn’t till I was nine years old that I stopped thinking he was a magician capable, among other things, of making himself invisible. During family get-togethers my father and grandfather would play along with him on this, pretend to me that they couldn’t see him. So I came to believe that I could see him but other people couldn’t. Toni even convinced me he had the power to make rain.