Few individuals have brought me greater misery than Rafael Nadal. His viciously top spinning forehands rearing up high to Roger Federer's single-handed backhand marked my childhood. And early adulthood. And, given both athletes’ longevity, managed to haunt my relentless creep into pre-middle age too.
Federer's backhand was not a weakness in the widely understood sense. It was simply a construct of the 1980s, a time when the sport was just switching from wooden rackets to graphite, and the emphasis was still on angles, slice and getting into net. All advantages to those with a single-hander.
Nadal may only have been five years Federer's junior, but he was a product of an entirely new generation. Born into the age of power, spin and oversized racket heads. On bad days, and to my partisan eyes, it simply did not seem like a fair fight.
From 2004 to 2014, Nadal racked up a 23-10 head-to-head lead over Federer, dominating even during the Swiss' peak, when he was losing to virtually no one else. And then something remarkable happened. Federer, with the aide of a larger racket and a newfound aggressive mindset, turned the tables, winning seven of the pair's last eight matches.
Annoyingly, by this time, I had learned to like Nadal. This may have had something to do with Novak Djokovic becoming the real villain. But there was also a gradual realisation. The three of us (Roger, Rafa and myself) had been through so much together. I very much did not treat Triumph and Disaster just the same, but I had learned to appreciate what that rivalry had brought to my life. Joy + heartache + anger + exhaustion = meaning.
You saw what it meant to both of them when Federer retired in 2022. And now Nadal is calling time on his career, an acknowledgement that his body can no longer absorb the blows of professional tennis. He retires with what is probably the most ridiculous record in all of sport: 14 French Open titles.
Calvin Tomkins, the longtime art critic for The New Yorker, once theorised that "the beauty of tennis, like the beauty of dance, is kinesthetic, in that we respond to certain shots as though we had made them ourselves." Few observations have struck such a chord with me. Nadal's top spin can no longer make my shoulder ache or face wince. That was the world of yesterday.
