Rafael Nadal retired from tennis on Tuesday night. He won 22 Grand Slam titles in 23 years across all three tennis surfaces, with an Olympic gold medal and 92 ATP titles in all. He was most dominant on clay, winning 63 per cent of his titles on the surface and compiling an 81-match win streak between April 2005 and May 2007, which remains the longest single-surface streak in the Open era of men’s tennis.
He also spent his entire career battling his own body, with Nadal’s injuries both acute and chronic carving the trajectory of his career and to an extent the way he played tennis.
King of clay. Warrior. Spanish bull. Nadal embodied all these things, and tributes written so are not ill-fitting.
But describing Nadal only in such terms does one of the greatest men’s tennis players of all time a catastrophic disservice. A tennis player in constant evolution, Nadal — and his rivalries with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic that constituted the ‘Big Three’ era — refigured the sport. Nadal possessed shotmaking talent, tennis IQ, finesse and flair too often lost in the brick-red dust.
The world tends to define athletes and sometimes people in general in absolute terms. It’s a way of making sense of complex personalities and performers — whittling them down to a single characteristic like a superhero. It also creates easy archetypes for comparison: in Nadal’s case, he was the ferocious physicality to Federer’s effortless elegance and Djokovic’s rubber-limbed flexibility.
All three suffered for their superheroism. Federer was so aesthetically pleasing that his supreme fitness and remarkable defensive abilities were glossed over. Djokovic was cast as reactive, which doesn’t do justice to his point construction or his extra gear in pressure moments (the all-or-nothing cross-court forehand against Federer in the semifinal of the 2011 U.S. Open just one example of many). Djokovic’s three French Open titles barely register because of the 10 he has won in Melbourne, and who cares about a hat-trick of wins when your biggest rival has won 11 more times? Well, as so many players told in June, Djokovic is very possibly the second-best male player on clay of all time.
Nadal still suffered most for his greatness on one surface. He was perhaps the second-most complete male baseliner to ever play the sport after Djokovic, with an all-round game good enough to deliver four U.S. Opens (tied with Djokovic and just one shy of the Open-era record held by Federer, Pete Sampras and Jimmy Connors), and two Wimbledons from five final appearances at the All England Club. As he evolved his game to meet his body’s limitations and started to shorten points more concertedly, he become one of the best volleyers on the ATP Tour.
Subtract Nadal’s 14 Roland Garros titles and his eight remaining majors give him more than tennis legends like John McEnroe and Boris Becker, and tie him with Andre Agassi, Connors and Ivan Lendl. It’s true that some surface homogenization in the early 2000s helped him do more than his clay-court specialist compatriots like Sergi Bruguera, Carlos Moya, Albert Costa and Juan Carlos Ferrero — who all won the French Open but not a major more — but Nadal’s mastery of every surface came from the way he reconfigured tennis itself alongside Djokovic and to an important but lesser extent Federer.
Nadal changed the sport in myriad ways. His shotmaking ability, on the slide and on the run, and the unseen revs and kick of his forehand helped redefine the mechanics of tennis (as with the surfaces changing, equipment changing helped too). Even that shot, which he splintered beautifully into the inside-out thrash, the banana whip, the cross-court hook and so many more variations, is normally figured in terms of brute force as opposed to David Foster Wallace’s “liquid whip” description of Federer’s own devastating groundstroke.
Nadal’s initially belittled deep return position neutralized opponents with bigger serves. It allowed him to start rallies where he could be favorite while knowing that his opponents would do little to counter it. That position, which Dominic Thiem also adopted early, has now become fundamental to men’s tennis.
What all these evolutions have in common is movement, and that is where Nadal remade tennis most of all alongside Djokovic. The return strategy, the baseline missiles launched with margin and the deftness in the forecourt were underpinned by staggering court coverage, whether running round his backhand time and again or sliding a lost position into a winning one, transposing clay-court movement onto new surfaces.
While Djokovic was and remains the true master of sliding, it was the collective strength of their innovations tipped the scales away from servers, and forced up-and-coming players who ran into them to not just dominate on serve, but scramble and rally too. Daniil Medvedev is perhaps the most direct descendant by force.
That’s before considering how the Nadal-Djokovic-Federer-Andy Murray nexus, who contested so many semifinals and finals, made each other better while making everybody else look worse.
None of this means that Nadal is as naturally talented as Federer nor as elastic as Djokovic. Nadal himself felt Federer was more blessed.
His team agreed: his uncle and first coach Toni said in an interview by phone this week that Nadal “had a very good volley, but not a nice volley like Federer”.
Nadal was king of clay. His power and will to win were hard to ignore. But to watch Nadal finding seemingly impossible angles or leaning into his backhands mid-match was to see a master of his craft at work. A fighter yes, but a genius too.
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