3 days ago
Why Rafael Nadal will forever remain the greatest star of French Open
When the Roland Garros, venue for the Grand Slam formerly known as the French Open, honoured Rafael Nadal earlier this week, it did so by unveiling a plaque on court with the player's footprint and signature. Court Philippe-Chatrier will bear Nadal's footprint forever, on its striking red clay, as a reminder to future generations how big these shoes are to fill.
In his new book The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and his Kingdom of Clay, Christopher Clarey reiterates that point repeatedly and with good reason. Nadal won 14 titles at this venue, a record that's widely considered unbeatable and twice the previous record number of seven by Chris Evert. During the course of these 14 titles over 20 years, he built a 112-4 win-loss record, and remained unbeaten in all 14 finals he contested.
Clarey's book therefore is not strictly a biography, which would have been expected of him after his previous work on Nadal's great rival, The Master: The Brilliant Career of Roger Federer, came out three years ago. This latest piece of work focuses on Nadal in the context of Roland-Garros, driven by the sheer magnitude of the Spaniard's achievement at this event.
Clarey, a former contributor to The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, personalises this one, unlike his previous work. Digging deep into his experience of covering sport for more than 30 years, Clarey had the fortune of watching Nadal—and following his career—from the time he started attracting attention on the senior men's tour from the early 2000s.
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While the focus may be on Nadal's dominance on the red clay, Clarey sprinkles the book with brief histories, of Nadal himself, his family, other Spanish stars who preceded him, the French tennis greats who gave the French Grand Slam its importance, of Chatrier, and of Clarey's own association with the tournament.
As evident from Nadal's speech earlier this week during his felicitation ceremony at Roland Garros, attended by his great rivals Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, he owed a lot of his career to his uncle Toni, widely considered to be the biggest reason—besides Rafa himself—why he became one of the greatest athletes of all time.
One of the sweetest stories of The Warrior is connected to Toni. When Nadal was still a boy coming up the ranks in tennis, Toni had convinced the child that his uncle had magical powers. Nadal would therefore call him Tio Mago (Uncle Magician) or Natali, because Toni had also convinced the child that he was an Italian football player for AC Milan.
In his first tournament, when a seven-year-old Nadal was to play a 11-year-old in an under-12 team competition in Mallorca, Toni told Nadal that if he started to really trail in the match, Toni would make it rain so that the match is called off. Down 0-4 at one point, Nadal, in true Rafa style, fought back to 3-4 when it started raining. The little boy immediately went up to Toni and in all earnestness said, 'Listen, Natali, I think you can stop the rain because I think I can beat this guy."
Fifteen years later, in the 2008 Wimbledon final against Federer, there was a rain delay with the 22-year-old Nadal leading two sets to love. When Toni reached Nadal in the men's locker room, his first words to his uncle were, 'Now was not the time to make it rain!"
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One of Nadal's greatest gifts, as several people point out in The Warrior, is his simplicity and humility, attributes that allowed him to connect with people across the board. Besides his enormous success, his personality also endeared him to the Parisian audience over the years, after they had started off disliking him.
Clarey remembers the crowd being totally in favour of Robin Söderling, an unheralded tennis player whose greatest claim to fame was beating Nadal at Roland Garros in 2009. It's worth noting that Söderling, who is remembered mainly for this one victory, is one of only three men to have defeated Nadal at Roland Garros. The other two are Djokovic—twice—and Alexander Zverev last year against an unfit Nadal well past his prime. As Nadal's assistant coach Francis Roig says in the book, 'Rafa is someone who is very simple, with human values that are strong and anchored but in competition he becomes superhuman."
That Söderling loss was such an aberration that it's remembered to date and gets a worthy mention in Clarey's book. Considered one of the biggest upsets in men's tennis ever, it halted a straight run of titles for Nadal starting 2005, in his first appearance at the tournament. For the author, Nadal's 14-0 record in Roland-Garros finals is the most impressive statistic, a reflection of his mastery on clay, considering he was 8-8 in other major finals.
The two other losses are significant because they were against Djokovic. Clarey argues that Nadal's greatest rivalry was against the Serbian, not Federer, though the latter was the more glamourised contest and earned more buzz. Nadal and Djokovic played each other 60 times in 18 years, with their first (2006 quarter-finals, which Nadal won) and last (Paris Olympics, which Djokovic won) competitive matches played—coincidentally—at Roland Garros. No man beat Djokovic more often; no man beat Nadal more often. They ended up finally at 31-29 in favour of Djokovic.
By 2024, when Nadal played his last match at Roland Garros (at the Grand Slam, not the Olympics later)—though he didn't declare it then—his body had pretty much given up on him. From the beginning, Nadal's bruising style of play caused sufficient wear and tear on his body, leading to frequent injuries, long recovery periods and missed events. He suffered from Mueller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative condition caused by a misshapen small bone in the top of the foot from an early age and never had surgery for it because it would have hampered his movements on court.
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He played a lot of his matches with painkiller injections and though there have been enough suspicions—given his quick recoveries and subsequent successes—Nadal has never been cited or sanctioned for failing a doping test. 'I have so many positive things in life, so many reasons to be happy and content with everything that I have. I don't need to create for myself a need or an obsession to try and get something more," says Nadal, in one of his typically philosophical pronouncements. 'There's a book in his transcripts," former French Open champion and now commentator Jim Courier tells Clarey. 'Someone could cherry-pick the Tao of Rafa in his press conferences because he simplifies things that mystify a lot of athletes."
Nadal's global appeal paled a bit in comparison to Federer not just because of the latter's elegant playing style, but also because of his ability to communicate in multiple languages. To Nadal's disadvantage, he learnt English later on as an adult, which meant that while he spoke nuanced Spanish, his English was 'clipped and caricatural". There were straight translations out of Spanish, Clarey writes, like, 'It's obvious that I started well the match" or 'Today have been a very good Test".
The other quirks which amused tennis followers always were the on-court rituals, of placing the water bottles in front of his chair, the pre-serve ticks of tucking his hair behind his ears and tugging his shorts. Nadal says that in his personal life he is disorganised, but on court he needed to be organised because routines allowed him to stay totally focussed. 'He didn't win 14 Roland Garroses with his muscles. He won them with his head," says Wojtek Fibak, an informal adviser to the Nadals and a former player.
Sprinkled with anecdotes, comments from players across generations, details of some of Nadal's greatest matches, Clarey covers a lot of ground. He keeps this distinctly different from The Master, making it more personal, with repeated references to his time at the NYT and his access to players.
By force of will and reliability, Clarey writes, Nadal became a reference point, a way of measuring time for all those associated with Roland Garros. He takes the example of Marc Maury, the master of ceremonies at Roland Garros, whose voice would be familiar to television audiences. Maury would recite all the years, one by one in French, that Nadal won the title, 'Deux mille cinq, deux mille six, deux mille sept…" before the player stepped on to the court.
'His (Maury's) long and lilting enumeration became the best testimony to the absurdity of Nadal's achievement," writes Clarey about a player who has become so emblematic with this event that this year's ongoing tournament seems incomplete without him—barring that emotional cameo at the felicitation ceremony.
Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.
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