U.S. Tennis
by Christopher Clarey
June 2005
Nadal's passion is his greatest weapon. Swaggering, fist-pumping Rafael Nadal has the competition seeing red, but does the muscular Mallorcan have the guns to win Roland Garros?
Rafael Nadal had just become a national icon. He�d played some of the most spectacular tennis of his, or anyone�s, life to beat Andy Roddick on red clay in Seville, Spain, during the Davis Cup final last December. Naturally, it took only a few seconds for the next round of questions�and expectations�to begin. �Do you think you can win the French Open?� he was asked as a manic, celebratory Spanish news conference was coming to a close.
Nadal, his long, dark hair dangling forward over his high cheekbones, smiled, which is something he does frequently when he�s not bashing forehands and chasing down balls in the corners. �Look,� he said, �what really interests me is playing in the French Open.�
It�s easy to forget that this 19-year-old lefty has yet to compete in the major best suited to his game. Everything about him�the lateral quickness that allows him to track down balls that would get by most guys, the whiplike forehand that yanks opponents off the court, and the tenacious attitude that has him screaming �vamos!� after winning big points�suggests it�s a question of when, not if, he�ll triumph at Roland Garros. He�s a Spanish Lleyton Hewitt, minus the grating edge.
While he hasn�t made it to Roland Garros, Nadal has done everything else in tennis ahead of schedule. He was only 8 when he captured the under-12 title of his native island of Mallorca. In 2002, at 15, he won his first ATP match. As a 17-year-old, he reached the third round at Wimbledon, becoming the youngest man to advance that far at the All England Club since a 16-year-old Boris Becker did it in 1984. At 18, Nadal won his first three tour titles, all on clay (Sopot last fall, and Costa Do Sauipe and Acapulco this season), and became the youngest man in the Davis Cup�s 104-year history to win a singles match in a Cup final for the winning team, beating Roddick in four sets on opening day in Seville to give Spain all the momentum it would need against the United States.
Now, the 6-foot-tall Nadal is looking to bring his topspin and attitude to the capital of clay, Roland Garros. In 2003, after receiving a wild card from French Open organizers eager to show off the game�s latest prodigy, he had to withdraw four days before the tournament began after injuring his right elbow in practice. In April 2004, when he looked well-positioned to cast a long shadow over the clay-court season, Nadal suffered a stress fracture in his left ankle that kept him off the tour for nearly three months.
�My goal this year is to play well and get my ranking up, but my biggest goal is to get through the year without injuries,� Nadal said in Seville. He is now putting more emphasis on off-court training to keep his labor-intensive style from landing him on the disabled list again.
�Roland Garros has been frustrating for all of us, most of all Rafael,� says his coach and paternal uncle, Toni Nadal. �But sometimes it�s best to wait. It makes you appreciate [victory] more.�
Rafael Nadal began playing tennis when he was 5, with Toni as his coach. It didn�t take long for his uncle to realize that he had a special athlete in his care. He�d grown up with another gifted athlete, his brother (and Nadal�s other uncle) Miguel Angel Nadal, who was a rugged central defender for the Spanish national soccer team and FC Barcelona, one of the world�s best-known clubs. He was an intimidator in front of the Spanish goal in the last three World Cups before retiring this spring. It�s hardly surprising that a young Rafael, the first of the next generation of Nadals, was attracted to his national sport, too.
But after winning the Spanish and European under-12 tennis titles in the mid-�90s, Nadal figured that a tennis racquet was his meal ticket. �When I was little, I was playing both sports,� he says. �When it was clear that my tennis was really taking off, I decided to go in that direction.�
By his early teens, Nadal was periodically training with Mallorca�s most famous tennis player, Carlos Moya, who is 10 years his senior and was born and raised in Palma, the island�s biggest city, 30 miles west of Nadal�s hometown of Manacor. �Carlos was always the player I looked up to,� Nadal says.
Unlike so many of Spain�s best players, including Moya, who moved to Barcelona to train at the national tennis center, Nadal has remained with his family in Manacor. There, he shares a five-story apartment building with his grandparents, his parents, his sister, and Toni and his family. The close quarters are by choice: The Nadal family is prosperous, with extensive property holdings on Mallorca and a window company owned by Rafael�s father, Sebastian.
Although futbol is part of his past, you can still see the soccer player in Nadal on a tennis court. His scissors-kicking, fist-rattling, howl-at-the-heavens reaction to a timely winner resembles nothing so much as a post-goal celebration, and it�s the need to let the public know what he�s feeling that could make him the biggest Spanish tennis star of the last 20 years.
Spain has had its share of top-flight talent in recent decades, beginning with Emilio Sanchez in the 1980s and continuing with Sergi Bruguera, Alex Corretja, Moya, Albert Costa, and Juan Carlos Ferrero. Yet in spite of the country�s well-earned reputation for pageantry, spontaneity, and exuberance, those players have been self-contained men on the court. Even Corretja, the most genial of the group, had difficulty transmitting the warmth of his personality, partly because his style of play was grindingly unspectacular.
Nadal is the opposite of all that. He has an on-court charisma that conjures the Spanish stereotypes of swaggering, arch-backed matadors and olive-skinned, long-haired futbolistas. And for anyone in Spain who was not yet convinced of the kid�s ability to embrace the big moment, last year�s Davis Cup final, with its record crowds of 27,200 and huge television audiences, set the record straight.
�I�ve always wanted to play the big matches,� Nadal says. �I�ve always liked this pressure, ever since I was a boy.�
That attitude bodes well for his chances of winning a major title.
But there�s still work to be done. His heavily spun serve, a weak left-handed argument compared to the arm-twisting force of his forehand, remains an issue on surfaces other than clay, although it didn�t keep him from pushing Lleyton Hewitt to five sets on Rebound Ace in the fourth round of this year�s Australian Open and taking Roger Federer to five in the NASDAQ-100 final.
�Rafael�s a marvel,� says Manuel Santana, the Spaniard who won Roland Garros in 1961 and �64. �All he needs to do is improve his serve, and we�ll have a grand champion.�
Nadal has increased the velocity of his serve in recent months, using a lower toss and an abbreviated take-back to help him occasionally reach the upper 120-m.p.h. range. But his lack of a consistently huge delivery, coupled with his reliance on heavy topspin at the baseline, means that he has to fight like a pit bull for more points and dig more deeply into his reserves than bigger, flatter hitters like Federer and Marat Safin.
�He�s using up a lot of energy and not just on hitting the shots,� says last year�s French Open finalist, Guillermo Coria. �When he learns how to channel some of that, he�ll be even more dangerous.�
Perhaps, but for the moment it�s difficult to imagine Nadal without the leaps and fist pumps. Such theatrics might not always help him win tournaments, but they�re part of his character, and a big part of his appeal to a global audience that should get the chance to see him holding up the Coupe des Mousquetaires in Paris one day.
First things first, though: He has to play in the French Open.
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