More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 10 - September 11, 2018
As Nadal, nervous, struggled to keep the ball in the court, Costa noticed that he had finally performed some grounds-keeping on his face, taking a razor to his stubble for the first time in the tournament. Costa was thrilled that Nadal would look presentable when he taped that message for the Spanish bank. Oh,
no, said Nadal, his decision to shave wasn’t based on that. Flatly and without boasting, he explained, “When you win Wimbledon, you want to look your best.”
Such is the inherent cruelty of tennis. One instant you play a well-constructed point, capped by a sensational winner. The next instant you commit a careless error, missing a shot by a few inches. And everything is offset, the score back to being tied.
“You can talk about Rafael’s tennis, his forehand, his speed on the court,” Toni would later say. “But his mental strength, his playing well when he has to battle, to me that is most important. That’s just his character.”
“If you ever throw a racket, we’re finished. They’re expensive, and when you throw a racket you don’t just disrespect the sport, you disrespect all the people who can’t afford equipment.” “Losing is part of competing. You will lose. And when you lose, it’s not going to be my fault or the fault of your racket or the balls or the courts or the weather. It is your fault, and you will accept it. Too many people in this world make excuses for their problems. You take responsibility and try and do better next time. That’s all.” “Have fun. When you stop enjoying this, it’s no good. You’ll find
...more
It was time for another Toni Nadal Life Lesson. Toni showed his nephew a list of the tournament’s past winners. “How many names do you recognize?” he asked. “Not many,” Nadal responded with a shrug. “Exactly,” said Toni, leaving it to the kid to deduce that this junior title hardly guaranteed future success.
Rafa would finish a practice and then, under his uncle’s orders, sweep the clay court himself, a job usually left to low-paid attendants. Says Toni: “Just because you [excel] at hitting a tennis ball, that makes you no better or worse than anyone else.”
As a teenager, Rafael was given free shoes by Nike and Reebok, both of them vying for his endorsement. The first time Toni caught Rafael bending the heel and wriggling his foot into the shoes, he scolded, “You untie them and put them on properly and show respect. They may not cost you anything, but that doesn’t mean they’re not expensive.”
Leavening every victory with perspective, Toni compared success to shooting a gun. Even when you hit the target, there’s that unpleasant recoil. “Everything positive in life,” he says, “also has a negative ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When Rafael began winning, Sebastian suggested that his son start to pay for his coach from his own winnings and endorsement income. Toni rejected the idea immediately. Hell, he wasn’t going to let any teenager sign his checks. “I don’t want to receive money from [Rafa] because I want to be the boss,” he says. “When I’m in business with the father, I don’t need money from the boy. When the boy pays, I’m working for him, and that’s not normal.”
The facet of his game he’d most like to upgrade? “I am trying to improve everything. It can all get better, no?” (A friend of mine surmises that Nadal’s habit of
ending responses with “no?” is another manifestation of his on-court counter-punching.)
Beijing Olympics, Federer, citing privacy concerns, stayed at a luxury hotel in the city; Nadal not only stayed in the Olympic Athletes’ Village, but other athletes nearly did a spit-take of their Gatorade when they saw him in the laundry room washing his own clothes.
A few years ago at Roland Garros, Mats Wilander practiced with Nadal. After the session he turned to see his partner, the defending French Open champion, sweeping the court, an act tantamount to Wayne Gretzky’s driving the Zamboni between periods.
Consider that during the entire 2006 World Cup soccer tournament, Betfair handled £64 million in bets. During the Nadal-Federer match alone, Betfair would put up £49,137,328 (then worth close to $100 million) in the match-odds market. For Betfair, it was a record for a single sporting event.
Against all other opponents, Federer plays with his eyes wide open, focuses straight ahead, and with his mouth turned upward. But when he faces Nadal—and only Nadal—he tends to frown and look downward. And it wasn’t just when he was losing. Braden saw that Federer assumes this facial expression even in warm-ups, before the match has started. Never mind the well-lubricated sports cliché that Nadal was “in Federer’s head.” He was in his face too.
Federer likes to change his racket at the same time the balls are replaced. (This occurs after the first seven games of play and every nine games thereafter.) Problem is, he doesn’t like to serve when he uses his new racket for the first time. He had done the math in his head and determined he’d better swap sticks now or he’d be left serv ing with a new racket. Even in the guts of a Wimbledon final, his mind is fixed on order and organization.
Nadal, for the only time in memory, betrayed outright anger in public. He reacted immediately, declaring to the tennis media in an almost impenetrable accent: “People who write lies about other people are bad people.”
Watching tennis up close, one realizes just how many body parts are involved in the physical act of hitting a ball. The
arms get the bulk of the credit, but it’s the legs that provide the thrust on the serve. It’s the core—abdomen, back, and thighs—that generates the torque when a player swings. The forearm and wrist can help dispense spin. Which is why the top players in the world can have such different body types.
Often racket reps hand a player a model that represents millions of dollars and countless hours of investment. Almost intuitively, the player either likes it or doesn’t. Pressed to articulate their likes and dislikes, the responses are often vague. It sucks. It feels weird. I’m not comfortable with it. Federer, by contrast, was “incredibly, incredibly sensitive,” says Ballon. “He’d say things like, ‘When I hit a backhand volley a little off center, it feels a bit too stiff.’”
Toni Nadal laughingly recalls Rafael’s once playing with a set of rackets that looked different from one another. To satisfy his curiosity, Toni weighed them, and he discovered that some were as much as 30 grams heavier—a variation of roughly ten percent—than others. Yet his nephew had never perceived the difference.
Bjorn Borg, for example, was known to string his rackets at such extreme tension that he was sometimes woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of his strings snapping.
He also remembered how, after the 2007 final, he walked into the locker room to see Rafa
slouched in front of his locker, crying. “Don’t cry,” Toni said sternly. “Crying because you don’t win Wimbledon? It’s like if I cry because I don’t have a Rolls-Royce.”
The real hallmark of a man is his ability to handle defeat as well as victory.
