Rafa, GOAT, no?

One of the lucrative post-retirement activities sportspeople get to enjoy is invitations to speak at motivational sessions for senior executives. It’s usually a pleasurable, low-pressure gig at a luxurious cruise or resort with the chief guest invited to explain the secrets of his or her outstanding career. You can expect the sage cliches: Hard work, believing in yourself, never giving in, plus the occasional anecdote thrown in. These past few years I have tried to imagine Rafael Nadal in a post-career role as a motivational speaker and concluded that he’ll be terrible at it.
 

Sure, he’s all for hard work and self-belief and all that, otherwise he wouldn’t be where he is at the ripe age of 36, with a record breaking 14th French Open trophy and a 22nd Grand Slam title. But for Rafa, who commentators have written off any number of times in his career of 17 years (and counting), those are just starting qualifications. Other than that, he claims to have no sense of humour about losing and thinks humility is an overblown quality. It’s more important to know yourself but also understand that the world will carry on with or without you, he’s said. And as for playing through pain and injury, he’s learned to enjoy suffering.  

This is hardly the kind of quasi-Gandhian advice leisure-loving C-suite types with large retirement nest eggs and egos to match would like to hear. Not for him Novak Djokovic’s romantic claim that wolves, with whom he grew up in the Serbian mountains, served as his “spiritual nature guides”. Nor the glorious effortless talent that Roger Federer brings to the court. In Rafa’s book, succeeding involves a lot of unpleasant stuff. Not the Jack Welch sort of unpleasantness that’s imposed on others — though as losing French Open finalist Casper Ruud ruefully pointed out Rafa has many victims too — but doing the grunt work of pitiless practice sessions (marvellous exhibitions in themselves) and playing through the pain of strained tendons, ligaments, muscles and a congenital condition in his left foot that would have encouraged lesser beings to retire long ago.

Yet after all that, winning for him comes down to a simple, functional reality. As he explained after beating the 21-year old rising star Felix Auger-Aliassime, coached by Uncle Toni no less, in five gruelling sets in the fourth round at Roland Garros, if you play well you win, if you play badly you lose, no?

Yet a player with such a workmanlike approach to the game has given tennis fans so much unalloyed aesthetic joy. Surely there’s more than just pain and suffering in that glorious down-the-line backhand winner? Or that topspin forehand fizzing across the court at incredible revs per minute? Or the ruthless overhead smash? Or defying all the odds and winning Grand Slam title number 22 with no feeling in his left foot?

It’s because of that foot that no one gave his 2022 season much of a chance. Yet he won the Australian Open to bag his 21st Grand Slam title, beating in-form Russian Daniil Medvedev, the same man he beat in the 2019 US Open. But after that, he’d been beaten by the rising teenager Carlos Alcaraz at the Madrid Open, and in Rome, limped painfully to a three-set loss to Denis Shapolavov.  

Many suggested the outcome at Melbourne would have been different if Novak Djokovic had overcome his vax-phobia and played. As the record nine-time winner of this Grand Slam, he held the upper hand. Plus, there was the small matter of Novak having beaten Rafa, then the 13-time champ, in the semi-finals at the 2021 French Open.

Ahead of their quarter final match at Roland Garros, with Novak having spent two hours less on court than Rafa, Chris Evert suggested a repeat of the previous meeting. Rafa looked tired, she said. But Rafa doesn’t like history to repeat itself as farce or tragedy. So he showed up, played well and won, no?

As for controversy, he takes them grimly on the chin. Multiple warnings for coaching violations eventually prompted Uncle Toni to stay away from his box. And then there’s the weird pre-serve routine that earns him several time violations per tournament. Did he really need to pull his jocks and touch his ears and nose etc before a serve, someone once asked? Yes, he insisted, they helped him focus.  

The pointless debate on whether he, Novak or Roger are the greatest of all time will rage for a long time,whatever the statistics when all three hang up their rackets. But no one will argue that Rafa’s an original, from the time he burst on the tennis scene with his long hair, sleeveless T-shirts and capris in 2005 to now, more conventionally dressed, thinning hair (despite hair transplant surgery), facial lines, an inclination to stand further back from the baseline and a nano-second slower to the drop shot. As he enters a sportsman’s official old age, we must only be grateful he’s still around and say vamos.