The Song of Sweat and Fire

On the man who turned effort into art

My favourite thing about this weekend is that I don’t have to watch Manchester United play football.

I've been a United fan since early '98. For fifteen sunlit years, United was a victorious army in red. Old Trafford was its fortress, and the devil on the team crest a warning to those who came too close. Then the architect of their success retired, and it has been a free fall since. These days, United struggle to beat relegation candidates.

See, I’m okay with my team not winning much. I’m a sports fan and disappointment is my middle name. But this, this is something else. This cuts deeper. Beyond the tactical flaws and technical deficiencies, what twists the knife is that the players often look completely devoid of inspiration and energy. On most days, they trudge across the pitch, shoulders slumped, legs heavy, as if they’d rather be somewhere else. And I often nod along, thinking that I really should’ve watched something else.

There’s an unspoken contract between fan and player, an exchange of faith for effort. Weekend after dreary weekend, I pour myself out. In return, I don’t expect constant success, but something far simpler: a bare minimum translation of that energy onto the pitch.

Which brings me to a one-minute Nike commercial from 2019. The ad begins with a clip of a 16-year-old Rafael Nadal playing an ATP Masters game against Carlos Moya. So much about Nadal is immediately recognisable: the long-ish hair spilling over a bandana, the shuffle on the baseline, and the intensity in his eyes, almost screaming “Vamos!” as his opponent prepares to serve.

The next forty seconds are a celebration of Nadal’s incredible career, a montage of his best moments. In the final few seconds of the ad, the teenage Nadal comes back into frame, and we hear a commentator’s voice dripping with disbelief. “Wow! This guy is relentless. Unbelievable! Is he going to play every point like that?”

You expect energy from a 16-year-old. At that age, most kids are bundles of unrestrained enthusiasm wrapped in gangly limbs and questionable fashion choices. Against someone of Moya’s experience - ten years senior, already a Grand Slam champion - a kid had to rely on physicality to some extent. But it’s quite telling that even the commentator was surprised at just how much force Nadal was throwing behind every point.

Tennis has an opera house aesthetic. Think Borg, Sampras, Graf, Federer - many of its best players look like ballet dancers shuffling on a velvet floor to the background score of Bach’s Prelude in G major. Fortissimo sensibilities don't quite fit the vibe. From time to time, you get players who use more power than precision, but you rarely get someone who wants to plug their violin into a distortion amplifier and belt out the opening riff of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. And when one does, they rarely have the endurance to get through the whole song.

Most players learn this the hard way, as their bodies and minds begin rebelling somewhere around the third set of their first Grand Slam quarter-final. Eventually, all the good ones learn to balance attack with defence, and figure out which balls to chase and which ones are lost causes.

Starting with that match against Moya, Nadal told us, in a stronger voice with every passing game, that there is no ball too far to chase, no such thing as a lost cause.

“I just don’t see the point of playing a sport unless you’re giving it your all.”

It was a bit unnerving to watch Nadal unfurl his range at the biggest stages. We were convinced that laws of physics were lurking around, picking the most inopportune moment to reassert themselves and say, “Alright, fun's over. Time to act like a normal tennis player.” But Nadal looked at those laws with the same disdain as he looks at a loose lob - a waste of time, and only meant to be thrashed back to where it came from.

We tried really hard to find a chink in his armour, something that would let us file him away neatly as “good, but not quite as rounded as Federer or Sampras.” We bought all kinds of magnifying glasses, anything that could make us look through an uncut gem and find a hint of impurity. Spoiler alert: we didn’t succeed.

“When he won his first French Open, the RPMs and the heights he was getting on the ball were physical gifts. I did not think he was complete. My coach suggested Rafa would win 8 French Opens right then, I said no way.” - Andy Roddick, here.

Nadal had pocketed three consecutive French Open titles before turning 21, including an 81-game winning streak on clay. No tennis player has had such a dominance on one surface. And just as we were about to use this run and label him a clay court merchant, he dragged Roger Federer to five sets in the 2007 Wimbledon final. He lost, but there was an unmistakable streak in the sky.

The next year, he returned to the Wimbledon final against Federer. That match was so epic, so transformative, that it's now considered one of the greatest matches ever played. Wimbledon has uploaded the entire thing on YouTube like it is a movie. It’s worth watching it back as one too.

“It’s not that I am not afraid, that I don’t have my doubts as to how things will go at the start of each year. I do — precisely because I know that there is so little difference between one player and another. But I do think I have a capacity to accept difficulties and overcome them that is superior to many of my rivals’.” — Nadal, speaking about Wimbledon 2008

As the sun set in London that evening, painting the skies orange and pink, it was Nadal holding the gleaming golden Wimbledon trophy, having conquered tennis’ Everest in dirt-lined white shorts.

In a couple of more years, he completed the career slam - at least one Grand Slam in each surface. He had ascended to a plane of rarefied air, a place inhabited by the all-timers. To paraphrase another Iberian’s timeless words, Nadal wasn’t just someone out of a bottle, but a special one.

And all this while, he did not drop a gram of intensity. At every big match, we thought Nadal would dial it back, be slightly more conservative in choosing his effort-points, and play the long game. And at every big match, Nadal showed that he could play the long game while making every point count.

“Is he going to play every point like that?”

There’s a moment in the documentary “Free Solo” where Alex Honnold is hanging by his fingertips 3,000 feet above Yosemite Valley. There is nothing between him and a long, fatal fall except the strength of his fingers and mind. He’s scaling El Capitan without ropes or safety gear, turning what most of us would consider a nightmare into a weekend getaway. As you watch, your palms begin to sweat, your stomach cramps, and you find yourself remembering the time you got stressed because the elevator was a little jerky. Honnold’s feat is so outrageous, so beyond the realm of normal human behaviour, that it makes you question whether he and the rest of us are even the same species.

In 2012, Nadal played a six-hour Australian Open final against Novak Djokovic. It is still the longest Grand Slam final ever played. At one point, Djokovic was leading two sets to one, and looking good to finish the game in another half an hour. And then Nadal happened, to which Djokovic responded with a display of defiance befitting both his opponent and the occasion.

After the fourth hour, they weren't so much playing tennis but a timeless boxing match, their bodies held upright only by pickle juice and Gatorade. Or that’s what we thought. Turns out, will is a physical entity worth many thousands of kilojoules.

Nadal decided that the sixth hour of the match was the perfect time to start hitting the ball like he was launching rockets to the moon. He served his fastest in the fifth set, hit his hardest shots as the game crossed into midnight, and turned up the dial on his energy as the audience at the Rod Laver Arena, held captive to this exhibition of human endurance, were running out of it.

I think about Alex Honnold sometimes when I watch Nadal play. Not because tennis is anything like climbing El Capitan on fingers - though sometimes, during those marathon five-setters against Djokovic, it must feel that way - but because of the sheer, beautiful insanity of it all. The idea that someone would approach every single point of every single game of every single match as if it were simultaneously the first and last point they’d ever play. It’s absurd. It’s impossible.

This relentlessness has become so synonymous with him that it’s easy to forget how weird it is. We've normalised it like we normalise all great athletic achievements. We watch Simone Biles defy gravity and think "ah yes, gymnastics." We see Mondo Duplantis break his own world records every other week, and start giggling in appreciation. And we watch Nadal turn himself inside out for a point in a first-round match against a wildcard entry from Antarctica and think “Classic Rafa.”

For two decades, Nadal turned effort into art. He made sweat and dirt look cool. He showed us what it looks like when a human being decides that limits are for other people, what it means for an all-time great to have the work ethic of someone who has never won a game. Somewhere along the line, all this stopped being absurd and started being... well, Nadal. 

Every time we thought he was approaching a limit, he shattered it and moved ahead, past Sampras and Agassi, then past what we thought was possible in tennis, and eventually overtook his great rival, friend, and the one guy we thought couldn’t be eclipsed.

In the last few years, as the wear finally began to show, Nadal accepted the existence of a threshold, a finishing line. And from that came public confession, where he openly addressed his plans beyond tennis, his wish to lead a normal, quiet life with his family once the grind of the circuit is behind him. It was odd to hear him in that mood, like a bullfighter admitting that he has lost his reflexes and might just get mauled by a bull one day.

But then, this was Nadal. Instead of changing his style to prolong his career, Nadal ran at the bull. He played far fewer matches, but played them like he’d never get to hit a tennis ball again. Sometimes, it felt like he was willing to risk a long-term leg injury just to win a breakpoint.

In 2022, a decade after that epic showdown with Djokovic, Nadal reached the Australian Open final again. This time, he was up against world number 2 Daniil Medvedev. He had spent half the previous year shuffling between clinics because of a foot injury. This was his comeback slam, his body taped up to just about hold him through a tournament. A final was already a ridiculous thing to achieve.

Two hours and a bit later, Medvedev was two sets and a break up. I suspect the organisers would’ve been preparing for the presentation ceremony at the time. At best, Nadal could win a couple of games from here.

Lost cause?

He won those couple of games, then a couple more, then the third set, and then two more sets. He served his best - 70% first serve accuracy - in the last set, the sixth hour of the game. 

The longest and second-longest ever Grand Slam finals are separated by ten years and bridged by Rafael Nadal’s endurance.

“I gave it everything that I have inside, believe me. I am super, super-tired in all ways. I can't even celebrate. But today was the day to give everything, no?”

2022 was a good year for Nadal. He won two Grand Slam titles and played in all four major tournaments. But in the middle of this hair-raising comeback, his body broke down to the extent where it could not be merely taped up anymore. The next year saw him trapped in a cycle of injuries and comebacks, each return briefer than the last.

Nadal wanted to be fit enough to last through a tournement. The bar for fitness, while different from his heyday, was still high. It wouldn’t be Rafael Nadal to settle for brief hellos.

He’d play just once more at the French Open, but he returned to that court, wearing the Spain red. At the Paris Olympics, he teamed up with part-heir, part-protege Carlos Alcaraz to play doubles. It was a dream team beyond all dream teams, a direct challenge to Mount Olympus. Alcaraz’s bottomless well of energy was a nice cushion for Nadal to lean on. For the first couple of games, that looked to be the tactic: Alcaraz to stretch and dive, Nadal to apply the touch. It worked like a charm.

But in the third set of the quarter-final against USA’s Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram, with the match slipping from Spain’s grasp, Nadal’s grimace - the one we’ve grown all too accustomed to over the years, the expression that was more a battle cry - was back.

For one point in that set, Nadal ran to the net, then all the way back to the backboard to retrieve a lob, then stretched to one side of the court and went back to his starting point. The USA pair were imposing themselves, and Nadal reached for every last drop of energy left in him. This was a 22-time Grand Slam champion, winner of Olympic golds in singles and doubles, diving around clay for one more chance at saving a game.

“He’s 37. I honestly thought he’d have a hard time getting to 28, the way he played.”- Roddick

As the chair umpire called the match point, a smile broke out on Rafael Nadal’s face. It was the smile of someone who gave everything and lost by a slim margin. At that moment, I think he knew.

On Thursday, October 10th, Rafael Nadal announced his retirement from tennis. His final act will be a Davis Cup quarter-final against the Netherlands in Malaga.

All books have a last page, all songs a closing cadence. Amongst writers and composers, there is a theory that the intro is the hardest bit to write. A weak first paragraph and the reader is gone. I submit that the best stories have a strong outro too, one that leaves the audience wishing that they could hang around a little longer.

When Nadal plays that final point in Malaga, you can bet every functioning cartilage in your body that it’ll be with the same fire that lit up his 16-year-old eyes against Carlos Moya. His knees might be screaming, but Nadal will be right where he wants to be - on a tennis court, defying the laws of physics and human endurance one last time. 

We'll be right there too, a lump in our throats, wishing we could freeze time and extend this moment just a little longer.

Nadal’s retirement video lasts 4 minutes and 46 seconds, covering a montage of his career intercut with footage of him speaking to the camera. The video ends with the words, “I leave with the tranquillity of having given my best, of having made an effort in every way.”

He did. He played every point like that.