Baloo: “What do they call you?”
Bagheera: “His name is Mowgli, and I’m taking him back to the man village.”
Baloo: “Man village? They’ll ruin him. They’ll make a man out of him.” – The
Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
When interviewing Rafael Nadal, you feel at one with the many great players
who have marched out with confidence, sure they have the measure of the
baby-faced warrior, and been thrashed. Forty-five minutes of our time
together have elapsed and I’ve been pounding him with some of the best shots
in my bag.
My acclaimed “Pistol Pete” service . . .
“How does it feel to be surrounded by people who say, ‘Yes’ to you all the
time?” I inquire.
He denies it. “I don’t feel I am surrounded by these kind of people. My family
treat me the same and will tell me if I do anything wrong. And my friends
have been my friends since I was a little kid.”
My rifle-like forehand: “How does it feel when John McEnroe compares you to
Borg?”
He ignores it with a smile. “I don’t think so, not yet. Borg won five
Wimbledons and six Roland Garros – I just have two Roland Garros. Yes, I
have had three very, very nice seasons, especially on clay, but you couldn’t
compare me to Borg.”
My acclaimed cross-court volley: “How did it feel when those drug allegations
surfaced at Wimbledon last year?”
He doesn’t blink an eye. “I was never accused,” he says. “There were no real
allegations. It was a nonserious newspaper [Le Journal du Dimanche] in
France. The person who wrote that article did not even put his name to it.
That proves two things: that he is a coward and that he is not serious.”
The ball keeps coming back. He denies that he has ever thought about the
millions he has banked, dismisses any attempt to discuss his celebrity and
practically snorts when I try to engage him in a discussion about love.
How do you interview Rafael Nadal? Where do you start with this 20-year-old
phenomenon? How do you unlock the secrets of the man-child?
A SATURDAY afternoon in December 2006. In the Majorcan town of Manacor, on the
first floor of a fashionable apartment near the Place Ramon Llull, an old
man is listening to a favourite piece of music. They call the old man Rafel
in Catalan. He is the conductor of the Manacor municipal band. A prosperous
man, Rafel owns the apartment block and a summer home on the coast in Porto
Cristo, but the twin passions of his life have always been music and his
family.
The Nadals have lived in Manacor since the 14th century. They are what you
would describe as a close family. Sebastian, the eldest of his four sons,
lives with his family in the apartment overhead; Toni, his second-born,
lives with his family on the floor above that. Rafael, the third-born, lives
just around the corner; and the twins, Miguel Angel and Marilen, are within
walking distance.
It remains a mystery to Rafel that his sons did not inherit his great passion
for music, but certain things in life are difficult to explain. Who would
have believed that Miguel Angel would play in three World Cups for Spain, or
that Toni would become one of the world’s finest tennis coaches? And does it
make sense that it was Sebastian – whose first love was always business –
who fathered Rafael, his grandson, the boy being hailed as the King of Clay?
They have all gathered upstairs this afternoon for lunch and Rafel intends to
join them presently. Emilio Perez de Rozas, a journalist from El Periodico
de Catalunya, and Andoni Zubizarreta, a friend and former teammate of Miguel
Angel’s at Barcelona, have been invited and a debate has started already
about whether his grandson’s second win at Roland Garros (when he bounced
back from an injury to beat Roger Federer) was better than his first (when
he beat Mariano Puerta).
“The second was better,” Rafa opines. “They were both satisfying in different
ways, but the second left a better taste in my mouth.”
“Not in my view. I thought the first was more exciting,” his coach, Toni,
counters. “It had been our goal since we began; the summit to scale, and
when you won it, I thought, ‘If it was to finish right now, we’ve got this
to take away: a Roland Garros. Fantastic!’ ” “I agree with Rafael,” Miguel
Angel says, “the second was much better, because when you win after
suffering so much, the victory has much more merit, especially if you beat
the best. Federer is very, very good.”
“He’s fantastic,” Rafa concurs. “But he’s your rival,” Zubizarreta says. “Why
are you singing his praises?”
“Because it’s true,” Toni says. “It’s the same as if Cannavaro, who they have
just chosen as the world player of the year, were to say Ronaldinho is the
best. That would be logical, wouldn’t it, because it’s true. That’s why we
say Federer is best – but that doesn’t mean we’re afraid of him.”
Toni is still holding court when his father arrives for lunch. The old man
pulls up a chair and smiles proudly at his family as he glances around the
room.
Toni is arguing passionately with Rafa; Miguel Angel is arguing passionately
with Toni; Sebastian listens dispassionately in the corner. “Life, who can
explain it?” he muses. “If only they were as passionate about music.”
IT IS A Tuesday morning in Hamburg and Rafael Nadal is sitting in the back of
a black, chauffeur-driven Mercedes, speeding towards the Jungfernstieg. With
his sweet, self-effacing nature and fresh, Mowgli features, his off-court
demeanour was described once (by my colleague Nick Pitt) as that of “a boy
from the village bearing flowers”, but this morning he is wearing a face
like a slapped baby’s arse.
Two days have passed since his successful march on Rome – his 13th successive
tournament win on clay – and the fatigue of life on the road is beginning to
take its toll.
He felt absolutely jaded when he opened his eyes this morning and he is
anxious to get to the practice court and a feel for the slower German clay
before his first match.
“How long will this take?” he snaps, staring out of the window.
“We should be done in half an hour,” his PR manager, Benito Perez-Barbadillo,
says. “Okay, but that’s it then,” he huffs.
“No, you’ve got the round-table stuff with the press at 4.30 and an interview
after that,” Perez-Barbadillo tells him.
“What interview?” “The guy from The Sunday Times, the one I told you about.”
“I’m not doing it.” “You’ve got to do it.” “What am I going to tell this guy,
Benito?” he pleads. “There is nothing more I can say about me.”
“I know, Rafa, but this is how the game works. You have to say it again and
again and again.” waving hand-painted banners and singing their hearts out
are waiting to greet him at the Jungfernstieg. The chant is, “Vamos Rafa,
vamos Rafa, vamos, vamos, vamos.” He retrieves a racket from the boot of the
car and shakes each of the youngsters by the hand.
A plastic net is unfurled on the pavement beside the lake and he taps with the
kids for 10 minutes. Three camera crews and 20 reporters and photographers
have abandoned the tournament site at the Rothenbaum to cover the “story”.
“How do you like Hamburg?” he is asked.
“It’s very nice,” he replies. This is how the game works. He practises for an
hour with Lleyton Hewitt in the afternoon and they arrange to play again
next month at the Stella Artois championships at Queen’s. He is 10 minutes
late for his first official press conference and after fulfilling some
sponsor commitments, he returns to his hotel for the interview with The
Sunday Times.
He was right. The guy didn’t ask anything he hadn’t been asked a thousand
times before . . . except for that one question the journalist said that
Brad Gilbert had told him to ask.
“Eyes open up. Birds singing outside window. Oh, yes, and there is the husband.
X-rated stuff happens.” – Carolyn Chute
RAFAEL NADAL has been asked to describe a perfect day in his life. He opens
his eyes, not in Manacor but at the family’s summer residence by the coast
in Porto Cristo. He’s out of bed at 6.30am with his father. After a quick
breakfast, they walk to the harbour where his father’s boat is moored at the
Club Nautico. Two of his closest friends, Miguel Cabor and Bartolome
Salva-Vidal, have already arrived and are waiting. Miguel is studying
English, but hopes to own a boat one day; Bartolome is the world’s
399th-ranked tennis player.
They spend the next five hours at sea bobbing gently on the waves and catch
some bream and a magnificent stone bass. They return to Porto Cristo, fillet
the fish for lunch, and after another heated debate with Toni and Miguel
Angelabout sport, they decide to settle their differences on the golf
course. The course at Son Servera is a 20-minute drive away. Toni hasn’t
played much since his kids were born; Miguel Angel is a bit of a bandit off
13; Rafa takes the money with a birdie on 18.
They return to Porto Cristo in time for the evening football game. He showers
and changes for dinner and is invited to a party by friends. It’s 3am when
his head hits the pillow. He’s tired. But elated. It has been a perfect day.
“What about sex?” I inquire. “No sex,” he replies. “You’re joking!” I exclaim.
“You wouldn’t have sex on a perfect day?”
He considers it for a moment. “No,” he says. “Sex is important in life, but if
you’re having a perfect day, you don’t have time for sex.”
“That’s interesting,” I observe. “So on your perfect day, you fish and play
golf, two calm and relaxing pursuits, but your favourite film is Gladiator
and you play tennis like it was war. How do I equate the fisherman and the
warrior?”
“They are not so different,” he responds. “I love competition; I want to
compete in everything and when I compete, I like to win.”
A THURSDAY morning in the players’ restaurant at the Rothenbaum in Hamburg.
Toni Nadal is telling me a story about a trip he made to Barcelona once with
his father to watch Miguel Angel play. They took their usual seats in the
Nou Camp and were deafened by the roar as the teams marched out. And then it
hit them. They had made the trip in vain. Their brother/son had been
dropped.
The old man wasn’t pleased and started ranting about the coach, but Toni
didn’t agree. “It’s not the coach’s fault, Dad; it’s your son who isn’t good
enough.” He smiles at the memory and removes the cap from his head. “I’ve
never done excuses,” he says.
He is 49 now, a year younger than Rafa’s father, Sebastian, and their
relationship has evolved over the years. “We were always close as kids,” he
says, “and always together, but I am probably closer to Miguel Angel now
because we didn’t work and played sport – I was a tennis coach, he was a
footballer – and had more time to drink coffee and play golf.”
While Sebastian inherited his father’s head for figures, Toni was the first to
display a flair for sport. He loved swimming and excelled at football and
chess. He was the Balearic Islands table tennis champion, but nothing
matched the high he got from tennis. The game suited his temperament.
“When you play ping-pong and you lead 10-2 or 14-4,” he says, “it’s a
certainty that you have won the match, but not in tennis. The scoring is
structured differently; there’s a deuce in every game and you must learn to
bear the burden of pressure. I liked that. For me, the head was always very
important.” “But you never really made it,” I point out. “The highest level
you played was the Spanish second division, but the blood in your veins is
the same as your nephew’s.”
“I don’t understand the question,” he says.
“Why weren’t you as good as him?” “It happens.” He shrugs. “But there are
reasons,” I counter. “Well, the first thing is that he had more talent, and
I never played as much as him; I only started playing when I was 14 or 15
and it was different. We played sport because it was sport, not to become
great players, and it doesn’t always work like that. My father is a
musician, I’m not; you either have an aptitude for something or you don’t,
it’s as simple as that.”
Rafa was just four when Toni noted that the kid might make a player. “I could
see he had an aptitude the first time he hit a ball,” he says, “and when he
kept making progress we thought he would make a good player, but not that
good. And then he won the under12 Balearic Islands championships; he was
eight and playing against kids who were four years older. I thought, ‘That’s
not normal. Carlos Moya never did that’. So that was really the start of
it.”
Rafa was handed some basic rules as they began their march towards the summit.
Toni didn’t tolerate bad manners. Toni didn’t tolerate that he stepped on
the back of his shoes. Toni didn’t tolerate the throwing of rackets. Toni
didn’t tolerate petulant behaviour. Toni didn’t tolerate excuses.
“We knew he had the talent,” the coach explains, “but success in sport is not
about talent, it’s about being better than everyone else. To be a good
player you need to work on your technique, but you also need to work on your
head.”
The kid’s rise through the ranks was meteoric. He won a Spanish championship
at the age of 11, a European championship a year later and his first
professional ATP match before his 16th birthday. At 17 he became the
youngest player to reach the third round at Wimbledon since Boris Becker in
1984 and had cracked the top 50 of the rankings.
Soon the people from Nike were banging on his door with plans for a makeover.
They cut the sleeves from his shirts, extended the length of his shorts and
handed him a matching bandana with a suitably placed swoosh. It was the end
for Mowgli. They had made a monster out of him. Rafa the Barbarian was born.
Nadal on court is a horrible, cruel person, and his opponents know they are
prey. Those who face Federer can expect to have winners hit past them that
will make them wince in astonishment, and may shatter illusions of reaching
the very top, but to be beaten by Nadal is to suffer a prolonged agony. For
although he can hit the pure, clean winner when he needs to, his preferred
method is prolonged torture. – Nick Pitt
RAFA THE BARBARIAN at the German Masters in Hamburg. It’s Thursday afternoon
and he comes bouncing into the arena like a boxing champion. He has not been
beaten on clay since he went down to Igor Andreev in April 2005. Today,
after 78 consecutive wins for Nadal, the wheel has come full circle and he
faces the Russian again.
Showtime. He places his bag on the seat beside the umpire’s chair and sucks
hungrily on an energy bar and begins the ritual that he repeats during every
break. He takes a sip from a bottle of water, counts the turns as he screws
back the cap and places it carefully between his feet. Then he takes a
second bottle of water, repeats the process and places it in a diagonal line
beside the first.
At the net his opponent and the umpire are waiting to toss the coin, but Rafa
the Barbarian has not quite finished. He jumps to his feet and bounces on
his toes, but never steps on the lines as he joins them on court.
“So, what’s all that about?” I ask later of Toni. “I would never have imagined
he was superstitious.”
“I don’t know,” the coach replies, clearly exasperated. “I never pay any
attention to the things that aren’t logical. I only look at the logic and
ignore all that.”
Of course most of the greats have been afflicted by nervous ticks that don’t
quite tally. Why did Nick Faldo rub his thumb against his forefinger when he
walked? Why did Jimmy Connors always tug on the sleeve of his shirt? Why did
Borg blow constantly on the tips of his fingers? And what is it about those
long Nike shorts that make Rafa the Barbarian pick constantly at his ass?
The match begins: Nadal draws blood with a break in the third game but faces
two break points in the ninth as he serves for the set.
His mental strength at moments like this is what sets him apart. He showed it
the previous week in Rome during an extraordinary match with Nikolay
Davydenko. He shows it again today with his flaying of Andreev. Nadal
doesn’t blink. The kid is never beaten.
“I like the sensation of suffering,” he says. “I suffer and fight and it makes
me feel good. In every match you have games like that. If you can play good
at these moments, you win the match. Today I played good.”
He weathers the storm, brushes the Russian aside and progresses to the next
round.
He is sitting facing the media now, answering the usual questions.
“Was it in any way special for you to beat the guy who was the last to beat
you on clay?”
“I said yesterday, it didn’t matter,” he replies. “It was a long time ago.”
“The people of Hamburg have a dream of a Federer-Nadal final. Do you feel the
same?”
“Ask me on Saturday. I have a difficult match against Gonzalez tomorrow, so
I’m thinking about tomorrow.”
“You said this was an important week for you. Did you mean as a preparation
for Roland Garros, or are you looking at the Monaco, Rome, Hamburg, triple?”
“I always say the same. For me Roland Garros is an important tournament, but
I’m not thinking about Roland Garros right now. I will think about Roland
Garros when I arrive at Roland Garros.”
“You’ve never been beaten at Roland Garros. Will you carry that pressure to
the tournament?”
“No, pressure is when you go to Roland Garros without winning in Monte Carlo
or Barcelona or Rome. If I lost Roland Garros, I'm going to be very happy
with the clay season. It’s going to be disappointing for two days, but I
will be very happy for the clay season.”
“What are your ambitions now? Can you close the gap on Federer?”
“My ambition now is that when I walk on to the court I am playing better than
last year. That’s the motivation, to improve my tennis and continue to enjoy
my time on court. I need to improve every day if I want to be No 1.”
And as you listen to his answers, the penny finally drops. There is something
about those words that rings a bell. It’s as if you are listening to Toni.
Six things you didn’t know about Rafael Nadal
1 Nadal was christened Rafael after his paternal grandfather, whose
initial ambition for the youngster was for him to play the trumpet in
Manacor’s municipal band
2 Though he plays left-handed, he eats, writes and plays golf
right-handed. He was brought up to play tennis as a southpaw because it
would give him even more of an advantage over his opponents
3 Nadal has been with his hometown girlfriend Francesca ‘Xisca’
Perello, right, for more than a year. The pair were introduced by his sister
Maria and she attended Wimbledon last year
4 He reveres his footballer uncle Miguel Angel Nadal – the Beast of
Barcelona - who played in three World Cups and won 62 caps for Spain as an
uncompromising defender. However, Rafa’s footballing support has always been
for arch- rivals Real Madrid
5 In common with many players a regular sight in the players’ lounges
of the world is Nadal comatose while listening to music through large
earphones from his iPod. His play-list features Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, U2
and Latin music by Mana (a Mexican rock band) and Alejandro Sanz
6 Despite his wealth from prize-money alone breaking through the $10m
barrier in the past month, he has no yearning to join the Ferrari or Porsche
set and instead drives a Kia Sorrento. However, this is probably sensible as
his car was reported to have run into an electricity pylon in an accident on
Majorca just a few days after last summer’s Wimbledon
