An Ode to Rafael Nadal

“A great song, leaves you enraptured for hours together after hearing it for the 1st time

A great movie, leaves you enchanted for 2-3 days after you watch it for the 1st time

A great Grand Slam final in which Nadal accomplishes the inconceivable sports marvel once again, you remain flabbergasted right until the next Grand Slam, when he comes back and does it again!“

Before I start, I’m neither a sports columnist with the philosophical tennis eloquence of David Foster Wallace/Nirmal Shekhar, nor an avid follower like Jai Arjun Singh who follows Nadal’s every tournament (and deservedly wrote the wonderful Nadal’s profile for Sportstar’s 40th-anniversary edition), nor a prolific and successful startup entrepreneur like Vidit Aatrey (Meesho’s CEO) who has been inspired by Nadal for over 17 years, nor a lawyer like Suhrith Parthasarathy who has the gift of gab and a slash career as a lover of sport / Nadal, but a common man trying to get off the race; Being an occasional onlooker who just had the opportunity to read Rafa’s autobiography once, and having always been amazed by his ability to come back from the nadir, I just started watching the Australian Open final last week due to a random sequence of events which had left me absolutely bored. And the rest as they say is “Nadal history”, AGAIN!

If the 2008 Wimbledon final was the main reason that pushed Nadal to write his 1st autobiography, Rafa My Story, I guess the 2022 AO final is a good enough reason for a sequel with the title “Rafa, My Story Now”. If only it detailed everything that went on his head during this once-in-a-blue-moon Grand Slam final, it will dethrone his current book as the No.1 Tennis bestseller, not just in India, but the world over.

All popular Tennis columnists have already described with fluency and craft the happenings of the night of Jan 30th, 2022 at Melbourne Park. In case any of you readers want to binge on this, here are my top favorites to soothe your soul – Suhrith’s Rafa 21, Gerald Marzorati’s The Tenacity of Rafael Nadal (The New Yorker), and Jason Gay’s Rafael Nadal’s Unbreakable Heart” (WSJ).

Here, I am just reflecting on 3 of the biggest takeaways from Rafa’s life, his latest victory, and lessons it holds for me (and in a way for all of us!)

1. In sport and life, suffering and failure are not just integral to the process, but also for winning; and they both are not bad things!
   • This is best explained by quotes from Nadal himself
     • “I learnt during all my career to enjoy suffering”
     • In his post AO 22 semifinal interview – “(After dropping the 3rd set) We need to suffer, we need to fight in the 4th again. That’s the only way to be where I am today”
     • If you don’t lose, you cant enjoy victories. You have to accept both things.
     • Losing is not my enemy. Fear of losing is my enemy.
   • Do I really have to say more??? Ok, let me just say this – Rafa has lost 4 times at the Australian Open before – 2012 (Djokovic – 5 sets), 2014 (Wawrinka – 4 sets), 2017 (Federer – 5 sets), 2019 (Djokovic – 3 sets)
   • As Mark Manson (another human I look up to) says, we just need to decide “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
2. In this age of ADHD and microsecond attention spans, the ability to direct and pay attention to things you want is the ultimate superpower – be it a tennis ball or be it the most important thing in your life
   • Ok, I wont be able to do justice here and so I’m going to quote the immortal Nirmal Shekar here (How much we all regret  him not being there to capture this moment) – The below excerpt is from the Hindu article “Nadal and the art of attention“, written by Nirmal Shekar after his 2013 French Open SF victory over Djokovic.
     • “Watching Rafael Nadal pay attention to the moment, especially when it happens to be a passage of play charged with meaning, is like watching a great scientist — perhaps on the verge of a Nobel-deserving discovery — pace his laboratory, solitary and single-minded.
     • Surely, thoughts such as ‘Oh, God, this is a life-or-death point,’ or questions such as ‘Am I as good as I was,’ would have crossed Nadal’s mind. But he just chose to shut them out like a busy housewife would an uninvited door-to-door salesman.
     • From time to time, as a career sports writer, you are asked who you’d choose if you wanted someone to play for your life. Over four decades, I have often considered names like Bjorn Bjorg, Steve Waugh and Rahul Dravid. But I guess, finally, I have to settle for Nadal.
     • To do what he is doing in the age in which he is doing it, is incredible. Cyber-invasion has shortened our attention spans as never before and many of us may be suffering from attention deficit disorder to some degree.
     • This is precisely why patience, perseverance and deep reflection are at a premium. And so are the rewards that come with them — the joy that fills you after a whole day of reading and re-reading The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) or Albert Camus’ L’Etranger.
     • But it is one thing to be ‘in the moment’ as a member of the audience, and quite another to do it on stage as a performer, especially when pushed to the wall — as Nadal was on Friday.”
3. Never Never Give Up, Even When History, Expert Opinions, Statistics & Your Family & Friends have all given up on you
   • History – No one in the open era of tennis has comeback from being down 2 sets to win the AO final. (Source: tennis-X)
   • Experts – Before the start of the final, 8 experts predicted the outcomes for the game with 5 of them saying Medvedev, and 3 of them saying Nadal (ESPN AO 22 Expert Picks, Jan 29)
   • Statistics / Math – As the telecast for the final started the win predictor for the game came out early into the 1st set and had a 64% Medvedev vs 36% Nadal chance of victory. Early into the third set this was 96% Medvedev and 4% Nadal
   • Family & Friends – You only had to look at Nadal’s stand to see the dismay in the faces of Moya and others when Nadal had lost the tie break in the 2nd set. 

• IMHO, I guess what they all had missed to account for is the suffering he would have gone through during his 4 failures at the AO Open Finals, his physical resilience, and his uncanny ability to shut down the unnecessary and negative voices in his head.

I have to conclude this now and I am shameless in borrowing David Foster Wallace’s quote about Federer for Nadal: “Resilience is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human resilience”.(from DFW’s  eternal “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” essay, where instead of resilience, you had beauty for Fed)

Finally, I have always tried to keep off from putting my heroes onto a pedestal, but I can’t ever refrain from doing this to Nadal. It could be either because I do lack the resilience I see in him or because I haven’t ever had an opportunity to exhibit any of it, or because of any other reason, but, by showing to me what a human being can do, Nadal has taught me (more than anybody else) about the power of human beings to be indefatigable about not just mental and physical hardship, but about everything that life throws at you!

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In case you are still curious, here are a few additional thoughts:

Nadal’s physical resilience:

• For the uninitiated, Nadal has been battling Muller-Weiss disease, a rare degenerative disease which is a deformation of one of the bones located in the central part of the foot since 2005. Around August 2021, his goal was to return to the field without any pain.
• He writes about this in his book (Rafa, My Story, co-written with John Carlin) – “The rest of us (other than Federer) just have to learn to live with pain, and long breaks from the game, because a foot, a shoulder, or a leg has sent a cry for help to the brain, asking it to stop. That’s why I need to have so much bandaging done before a match; that’s why it’s such a critical part of my preparations.”

Tags: Present Day Heroes