Rafa: My Story

by Rafael Nadal

And of one thing I have no doubt: the more you train, the better your feeling. Tennis is, more than most sports, a sport of the mind; it is the player who has those good sensations on the most days, who manages to isolate himself best from his fears and from the ups and downs in morale a match inevitably brings, who ends up being world number one.

He always stressed the importance of endurance. “Endure, put up with whatever comes your way, learn to overcome weakness and pain, push yourself to breaking point but never cave in. If you don’t learn that lesson, you’ll never succeed as an elite athlete”: that was what he taught me.

what separates champions from near champions. You put that failure immediately behind you, clean out of your mind. You do not allow your mind to dwell on it. You draw, instead, on the strength of having won the first point and build on that, thinking only of what comes next.

“Because it’s all in the head, in your attitude, in wanting more, in enduring more than your rival.”

‘Look, you’ve got two roads to choose from: tell yourself you’ve had enough and we leave, or be prepared to suffer and keep going. The choice is between enduring and giving up.’”

“Humble is the way you have to be, period,” Toni says. “There’s no special merit in it. What’s more, I wouldn’t use the word ‘humble’ to describe Rafael. He just knows his place in the world. Everybody should know their place in the world. The point is that the world is quite big enough already without you imagining that you’re big too. People sometimes exaggerate this business of humility. It’s a question simply of knowing who you are, where you are, and that the world will continue exactly as it is without you.”

He has always been obedient, which is a sign of intelligence in a child because it shows you understand that your elders know better than you, that you respect their superior experience of the world.

“It means learning to accept that if you have to train two hours, you train two hours; if you have to train five, you train five; if you have to repeat an exercise fifty thousand times, you do it. That’s what separates the champions from the merely talented. And it’s all directly related to the winner’s mentality; at the same time as you are demonstrating endurance, your head becomes stronger.

The greater the effort, the greater the value.”

I played through the pain to the point that I almost forgot about it. It’s a question of concentration, of putting everything out of your mind beyond the game itself.

He set a benchmark of endurance that has served me as an example and as a reminder ever since that you can put mind over matter, and if you want something badly enough, no sacrifice is too great.

“I could see, by the sheer intensity with which he trained, that he was super-ambitious and desperate to improve. He hit every shot as if his life depended on it.

Because from that time on I saw that I would never know entirely for sure whether a match I was playing would be my last. This understanding led me to only one conclusion: I’d have to play each one, and train for each one, as if it were my last. I had come close to tennis death; I had stared the end of my career in the face, and the experience, awful as it had been, had made me stronger mentally, given me the wisdom to see that life—any life—is a race against time.

Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind.

“Because anybody who digs deep enough can always find the motivation they need for anything. In war, people do things that appear to be impossible. Just imagine if there were a guy sitting behind you in the stadium pointing a gun at you, telling you that if you didn’t run, and keep running, he’d shoot you. I bet you’d run then. So, come on! It’s up to you to find the motivation to win. This is your big chance.

What you can never allow yourself is to fail because of a loss of will. You can lose because your rival played better, but you can’t lose because you failed to give it your best. That would be a crime.

In the end, as Titín says, pain is in the mind. If you can control the mind, you can control the body.

As for me, I took a big lesson from that victory. It was a lesson Toni had been drumming into me for years, but never had I discovered how true it was until now. I learned that you always have to hang in there, that however remote your chances of winning might seem, you have to push yourself to the very limit of your abilities and try your luck. That day in Melbourne I saw, more clearly than ever before, that the key to this game resides in the mind, and if the mind is clear and strong, you can overcome almost any obstacle, including pain. Mind can triumph over matter.

Having made it, there could be no going back. Not then, not now. The path was set, and while there have been moments of doubt and weakness, I have never deviated from it. Not even when temptation was strongest.

But I remember what struck Miguel Ángel, who had never spent night and day with me in the week prior to a tournament before, was that no sooner had we landed, after a trip that had included three flight changes, than I headed straight to a tennis court in the hotel complex for an hour’s training. He was even more taken aback to discover that, even if we had gone to bed at five in the morning, I’d be up punctually every morning at nine to train—and again for another hour every afternoon.

One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in beforehand. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.