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24 Jun 09
in tennis you have to kill the other.” Not just play better. Sometimes the one who plays better can lose. It’s a sport of splendid cruelty, for all its decorum and finicky trappings; every winning point comes when the other guy, in front of a whole stadium of people staring directly at him, is forced by his opponent into inadequacy. He lunges for the ball but whiffs, he whacks it long, he hits it into the net, he screws up. From the stands, you sometimes see players surrender not because they don’t know how to return the shots coming at them but because the specter of this impending inadequacy has suddenly just taken over their brains. It transpires right in front of your eyes: something sags, and they go sort of limp; you can see their faces and their posture start registering get me out of here.
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Federer is elegant and fluid and cerebral, so that his best tennis looks effortless even when he is making shots that ought to be physically impossible. Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will. His victories and his taped-up knees and his years as a very good No. 2 in the world all resonate together, as though the rewards and the wages of individual effort had been animated in a single human being: if you hurl yourself at a particular goal furiously enough and long enough you may tear your body up in the process, but maybe you can get there after all.
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“Benito! Throw something at me.” Perez-Barbadillo tossed his cellphone. Nadal’s right arm jerked up and grabbed the phone out of the air, and he smiled and shrugged. “Whatever involves feeling, I do with the right.”
The word he used was sensibilidad, which means many kinds of feeling, literal and perceptual and emotional, and the assertion that Nadal does everything of sensibilidad right-handed seemed sort of preposterous, given what tennis requires of the hand that is holding the racket.
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the young man is educado, as they say in Spanish, not so much educated in the formal sense (Nadal left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15), but courteous, respectful, raised by a family with its priorities in order. Nadal may have the on-court demeanor of a hit man, as far as the party across the net is concerned, but you will never see this champion hurl his racket during a match.
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Among the numerous Rafa-and-Toni stories I heard in the stands: that Toni declared years ago that if he ever saw Rafa lose his temper on the court (racket-hurling is the standard tantrum, but there’s also cursing the line judges, sulking and yelling at spectators), their coaching relationship would end on the spot. Or that Toni refuses on principle to carry Rafa’s rackets for him. Or that they always fly commercial because Toni scoffs at the idea of a tennis star, even one worth scores of millions, believing that he merits a private jet.
These accounts turn out to be exaggerated, but not by much. “No, no, I’ve never delivered ultimatums to him,” Toni said dismissively in Spanish when I met him in Miami in March. “He knows he can’t throw a racket. He just knows. As far as I’m concerned, it’s shameful when he orders a meal and doesn’t finish it. Understand? Same thing with rackets. These rackets cost money.”
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Like Woods, Nadal started what would become his career sport when he was a toddler; Toni remembers his nephew having been no older than 3. “He was at the club one day, and I handed him a racket, we had some little ones, and then tossed a ball at him,” Toni said before practice one morning in Miami. “When he hit it back — two-handed, he wouldn’t have been strong enough otherwise — I said to myself, ‘O.K., this is not normal.’ His feet, especially, the way he’d move himself into good hitting position when I tossed balls at him. This is a rare thing in a child.”
Rafael’s parents have a standard policy of declining interview requests; their support for him is by all accounts unwavering but uniformly private, and when I asked Toni how the family managed the destined-to-do-this challenge, how you help a gifted child flourish without oppressing or souring him, he shot me a look that was at once mocking and stern. “I don’t believe anybody’s destined to do anything in this life,” he said. He is firmly antireligioso, his term, and he also seems to take pleasure in placing the game of tennis — “being able to pass a ball back and forth over a net,” as I’ve heard him describe it — into its proper perspective in the universe. (Once when I used the word “drama” in a question about Rafa and Federer, Toni interrupted me midsentence. “This is not drama,” he said. “Drama is people in Africa who don’t have enough to eat. Drama is people no one ever smiles at. There is no drama here.”) The primary athletic goal when Rafa was little was ensuring that he had fun
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The arms have also been considered with more seriousness of purpose, as have the legs, by observers trying to dissect the mechanics of Nadal’s power and to guess at the cumulative toll his style of play may be taking on his body. The coach Robert Lansdorp, who has worked with Pete Sampras and Maria Sharapova, among others, uses the informal label “reverse forehand” for Nadal’s most characteristic stroke, his searing, spinning, miserable-to-return forehand drive. The crowds around Nadal’s practice courts love to watch him up close as he repeats this stroke over and over; his racket appears to rip across the top of the tennis ball, shooting it toward the net like a twirling missile, not only brutally fast but also heavy-feeling and unpredictable on the bounce. The “reverse” part comes at the finish, which is sometimes not the traditional across-the-chest follow-through, but rather a defiant full-arm snap upward, as though Nadal were whipping a lariat over his head or delivering an Italian obscene gesture — almost the opposite, Lansdorp observes, of what coaches generally teach tennis students to do.
“It’s not that he’s the only one who hits this,” Lansdorp says. “Nadal just does it to an extreme, and he’s really mastered that reverse forehand to a great extent. He can do it from anyplace, almost to any ball, and make winners. He can hit it cross court, down the line, wherever he wants to go. And he’s probably done it since he was 10. Thank God nobody changed it and told him, ‘Hey, that is not the way to hit a forehand.’ ”
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“The first guys we did were Sampras and Agassi. They were hitting forehands that in general were spinning about 1,800 to 1,900 revolutions per minute.” Sampras’s serve, the deadliest in tennis during his five years as the world No. 1, was so hard to return partly because it combined so much speed with so much spin, Yandell said. “One guy who played against him said to me once: ‘John, I can return to guys who serve faster than Pete. But the problem with Pete’s serve is you’re trying to return a bowling ball with a badminton racket.’ ”
Yandell chuckled. “Federer is hitting with an amazing amount of spin, too, right? Twenty-seven hundred revolutions per minute. Well, we measured one forehand Nadal hit at 4,900. His average was 3,200. Think about that for a second. It’s a little frightening to contemplate. It takes a ball about a second to travel between the players’ rackets, O.K.?” He grabbed a calculator and punched in numbers. “So a Nadal forehand would have turned over 80 times in the second it took to get to Federer’s racket. I don’t know about you, but that’s almost impossible for me to visualize.”
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