Rafa could worry about that another time. He was without a title but playing better than he had in years. Like Federer, he had his one blip thus far—his Sam Querrey in Acapulco to Federer’s Evgeny Donskoy in Dubai. Only one player in the field was keeping up with him. What’s more, the red dirt was on the horizon, calling out to him across the ocean. He wouldn’t see Roger for months, because even Roger knew Rafa was going to bury everyone he met in the dirt. The result of the final be damned, something at Miami had revealed that change wasn’t just on the way, change was already there. Neither player would speak of it, but they must have felt it. Wawrinka came in as the top seed of a Masters 1000 for the first time in his career. He’s a wolf who was born to chase, not be chased. He lost in the fourth round. Nishikori was the second seed and lost in the quarters to an unseeded Fabio Fognini, whom Nadal then glided past in the semis. Raonic was the third seed and had to bow out of his second tournament in a row due to injury.
Murray and Djokovic were nowhere to be found.
They were both nursing elbow injuries that had ruled them out of Miami, a tournament neither had missed since 2005. Murray released a public statement on his absence that rang a positive note about the road ahead: “The focus now,” he wrote “is on getting ready for the clay season.” He didn’t know what was coming. But he’d learn soon enough. We all would. The certainty of the circuit being ruled in 2017 and beyond by Murray and Djokovic was by now anything but clear. Who were the hunted and who were the hunters? They all headed for Europe. It was April, its spring suggestions signaling change in the air. And of the surface. Federer was rampant but had decided to cede the stage, at least for now. From far away, the clay was calling. All the circuit turned toward it slowly like a ship. But no matter how close they came to it, still no one could hear what it was saying. No one could make any sense of it aside from Rafael Nadal Parera.
PART TWO Spring
CLAY
The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Which is not to say that those cities don’t have their rough edges. Of course they do. But tennis and rough edges for the most part tend not to mix. If tennis were a leaf falling onto a stream, it would fall on the placid part, the part in a faraway bend, the picturesque but boring part. An obvious exception to this is the divine comedy that is the U.S. Open, but that’s a story of late-summer hard courts that we’ll get to later.
Matches on clay courts are a grind. The surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects. Clay forces a player’s body to adapt or fail, a player’s mind to obey or die. Shots sponge off the granular surface, slowing down and trampolining back into the air at unlikely angles. Returns that would have been winners on grass and hard courts come ricocheting back to you, sometimes bouncing as high as your shoulders, and players have to slide into their shots. It’s hard to stress how difficult it is to adjust to these conditions. Imagine a two-month span of the basketball season in which everyone was forced to play on a thin layer of sand. Suddenly there’s a premium on probing, strategic shots over straight-ahead power.
When I was a kid, watching tennis in the wake of the all-court superstars like Chris Evert and Björn Borg, I loved the clay season: it drew my attention to players who weren’t often afforded a shot in grass- and hard-court matches. The clay-court specialists: I grew up thinking of them like those poets who had that one great mode in them, spring or death or jazz. They were Spanish, Brazilian, Italian, Austrian, Argentine, and, once in a while, American. Out there on the red earth, they’d sweep up what titles they could while the Pete Samprases of the world bowed out in early rounds, their sure footwork suddenly clumsy. The clay season was a time of difference and entropy, of opportunistic, short-lived dominance.
These days, my daughters wake me up to watch matches across the world. We start early in the morning, before school. They learn about time zones, geography, and the changing surfaces of the tennis year, those seasons unto themselves. For my eldest, who is six now, the greatest mystery about clay isn’t how to play on it. Rather, she wonders why everyone calls it red when it’s clearly orange. Her younger sister agrees: It’s orange! As they go about trying to convince me, Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” leaps into my head.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet.
Clay gives and takes from your game. It clings to you and—if you let it—weighs you down. For seven weeks, the players were covered in orange dust, match after match, back to front, head to toe. The clay bristled underfoot. It wasn’t quite summer yet, but the heat had arrived. Clouds were scarce. And the sky was bursting blue. But, as Van Gogh said, there is no blue without yellow and without orange.
General view of Court Rainier III during the final of the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters, April 23, 2017. Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. (Photograph by Agence Nice Presse / Icon Sport / Getty Images)
Club Tennis Llafranc. (Courtesy of the author)
The 2017 clay court season. It fills April and May with orange courts, blue backgrounds, a strong yellow sun. I hope you caught some of it. Some of the early months of the tennis year are blue in green, then everything changes. The gravity is different, history is different, hierarchy is an altered state. They are the gas giants of the circuit. Monte Carlo and Roland-Garros a Saturn and Jupiter on the calendar’s long string of dates. Rafa Nadal returned to clay looking to consolidate the return to form he’d experienced on the hard courts of Australia and North America. If he was good enough now to play in as many finals as he did on his second-best surface, what would happen when he translated that form onto clay?
He rampaged, winning everything he played on clay but Rome. All roads lead to Paris. He won Monte Carlo for the tenth time, Barcelona for the tenth time, Madrid for the fifth time. Federer—with the rare winter trifecta of the Australian Open, Indian Wells, and Miami in his back pocket—saw what was coming, Nadal grinding everyone down into dust, and decided to skip the clay swing entirely.
Meanwhile, Murray and Djokovic arrived in Monte Carlo still ranked one and two in the world. Yet an object in the rearview mirror was closer than it appeared: Nadal, ranked seventh and rising. He played as though caught in a red mist, obliterating his opponents with controlled fury. Playing Monte Carlo resident Sascha Zverev in Monte Carlo on his twentieth birthday, Nadal gave him the gift of a 6–1, 6–1 beating that had the young German shuffling swiftly off the court at the end of the match as though to hide his tears. It was a message to send back to the locker room: Nadal was here with bad intentions.
Djokovic and Murray, on the other hand, continued with their muddled results, playing as though wading through muddy light. In the quarterfinals, Djokovic faced twelfth-ranked David Goffin of Belgium. Goffin is an excellent all-around player, his slight frame supplemented by his extremely high skill level but not enough as to be a true threat to the few players in the world of Djokovic’s caliber. Goffin had not only never defeated Djokovic before, he had won only one set against him in the five matches they’d played against each other. Beat Goffin yet again, and Djokovic would play Nadal in the semifinals. Of the last twelve times Djokovic and Nadal had played, Nadal had won only once; the last three times they had played on clay, Djokovic had not lost. Four months into the 2017 season, already Federer and Nadal had played each other three times, yet neither Djokovic nor Murray had faced either of them eve
n once. It was time to see where everything in this season stood, time for Djokovic to assert himself in this emerging story of the rebirth of two legends and put the hierarchy back in its place. But he lost to Goffin for the first time, 2–6, 6–3, 5–7. The surprise result in that surprise result was Djokovic losing a gut-check final set.
In the third round of Monte Carlo, Murray squandered a first-set lead against the left-handed Albert Ramos Viñolas, one of those thoughtfully skilled throwback players whose game grows two dimensions on the clay. After beating Murray, he continued his good run, defeating fifth-seeded Marin Čilić in the quarterfinals and making it all the way to the finals before facing a 1–6, 3–6 awakening against Nadal. Murray would decide late to accept a wild card to play in Barcelona, to right himself (and maybe to recoup some of his dwindling stash of ranking points). Opportunity smiled on him, or not, as he had the chance to face Ramos Viñolas again; to right himself. Ramos Viñolas continued his scintillating play, hitting wide one moment, deep the next, and tossing in a puckish and perfectly timed drop shot when the occasion called for it—he won the first set 6–2. Not only had Ramos Viñolas now won three straight sets against Murray in little more than a week, he made it look fairly routine. Both of them are curious players in that sense: when Ramos Viñolas is on top of his game and on clay, you’d be forgiven if you thought he was a top-five player; and Murray, despite having carried a twenty-eight-match win streak into the year, has these moments—even in games he ends up winning handily—when his game looks like it fell from the nest of thorns that was cradled high up on an ugly branch of the ugliest tree in the world and hit every ugly branch on the way down to the ground. He adjusts then. The pyrotechnics come. Not the showy cathartic kind: like, say, breaking a racket. No, Murray has this odd type of smoldering explosion where the explosion is definitely happening, you can see it and certainly hear it … but it’s as though a tarp has been thrown over him. To watch an Andy Murray rant is to watch a passion play by and for the passive-aggressive. Everyone is yelled at and no one is yelled at: he yells and doesn’t yell at his coach, his trainer, his wife, his mother, whoever is sitting with them (he doesn’t yell at Ivan Lendl, or, if he does, Lendl sits in the box indifferent to it, as though he were the only one to have put on repellent); he yells at himself and his racket and his grip; it seems as though he can reach deep inside himself during some of those difficult moments and yell at his past self, the young pretender to the throne who got pushed around and then beaten to tears on Wimbledon’s Centre Court by Federer, the junior who used to lose to Djokovic and Monfils, the twelve-year-old in Barcelona who’d want to ditch practice to watch a match at the Camp Nou. Murray’s rage runs deep. It also has proved to be one of the great levelers in the game. It corrects him, brings his barometric pressure to the required place on the scale. He took the next two sets from Ramos Viñolas by force of will, 6–4, 7–6 (7–4). His best tennis? He would have to find that at some other point; now was suddenly about preservation, results. At times, it’s the victories that ring the alarm even louder than the defeats. Something was wrong. The next day, Murray would lose the Barcelona semifinal to Dominic Thiem, 2–6, 6–3, 4–6. He would lose in the third round at Madrid to a “lucky loser,” a player who had lost in qualifying but made it into the draw as a substitute. Then, in Rome, he’d get obliterated in the second round by Fabio Fognini. At the French Open, he would earn his best results since Doha, arriving to the semifinals and beating del Potro and Nishikori along the way before losing in five sets to Stan Wawrinka. And there’s certainly no shame to losing at Roland-Garros to Wawrinka, who won the title on that very same court in 2015 and has as many Grand Slam titles as Murray. But it would be a stretch to say that he looked particularly good in any of those matches, some of which it almost seemed he won on the strength of reputation. Even against Wawrinka, having scratched out a two-set-to-one lead, when forced to a fifth set he faded quickly, looking off the pace and incapable of generating any power at all. His game seemed stripped of its vitality.
For those looking for the 2016 vintage of Andy Murray in 2017 or for the 2017 version to reach even greater heights, it was time instead to lower expectations. Though he began the year in good form in Doha, cracks after that had started to appear and were widening. He lost early at the Australian Open, early at Indian Wells, early at Monte Carlo, early at Madrid, and early at Rome. And by the time the dust cleared on the clay season he was still the number-one-ranked player in the world. Such is the power of the past.
Did he run himself into the ground the year prior in search of the year-end top ranking? Or were these the inevitable injuries of a player now in his thirties? If, at the start of 2017, someone were to tell you that Djokovic would lose in the second round of the Australian Open and in the quarterfinals of the French, it would have been difficult to imagine that Murray wouldn’t end up with either of those titles. But here he was, suddenly and strangely eclipsed. Eclipsed and, like Djokovic, hardly missed. You couldn’t quantify it, but you could sense it. With the return to championship form of first Federer and now Nadal, tennis brimmed with a joy and wonder and spectacle that it hadn’t enjoyed in some time. What would Murray do to get back into the thick of things? It was the ninth of June. He would play in only two more tournaments the rest of the year.
THE GHOST IN THE DIRT
The clay season is a ghost story. It always has been. There’s a ghost in the red dirt. He ran hotels for a living and, oddly enough given how things have turned out in tennis, he was Swiss. You have never heard of him. And, no judgments, but he was a bit of a hustler. His tremendous ambition coupled with his creative bookkeeping forced him into bankruptcy twice. His name was Georges Henri Gougoltz. He spent the last decades of his life as a hotel proprietor by name but in reality owing important men a considerable amount of money. After they took his hotel from him, he was obliged to run that gold mine he had developed from the private castle it once was as though nothing had changed—a figurehead to smile at and arrange things for the ever rising number of foreign elites who wintered there seeking out the sun, their social peers, and the increasingly famous red clay courts of the Hôtel Beau-Site in Cannes, France.
When I tell you that he killed himself on a January morning in 1903 by shooting himself in the head not once and not twice but three times—you probably won’t believe that he killed himself. And you probably shouldn’t.
We’ll never know exactly what happened to him, but when, in 2017, Nadal lifted La Coupe des Mousquetaires ebulliently over his head for a tenth year, standing proudly on a makeshift podium at the center of that rectangle of brick-red in the middle of Roland-Garros’s show court, Gougoltz’s crushed-ceramic sand courts—the ones that once graced the foot of the hill of the Beau-Site just past the lush and sloped sculptured courtyard, like a mirage of politely placed tonnage of light-red dust at the edge of a politely placed jungle of imported greenery—were with him there, inhuman and yet veritably part of him, a 150-year-old first idea.
The back of a dinner menu at the Hôtel Beau-Site, 1880. This gives an early idea of how Gougoltz thought to promote the hotel: prominently placed on a hill surrounded by other grand estates. Note the absence of tennis courts in this promotion, along with the prominence of Gougoltz himself. (Property of the author)
Myth, legend, and truth: they work on their own time and make their own order—they’re brilliant and terrible. This story has never been and will always be about a man’s suicide in the face of crushing financial debt: we’ll get to that. And this story has never been and will always be about Rafael Nadal’s run as the master of clay-court tennis. The two collided, unwittingly, on a warm Sunday afternoon in early June in Paris, 2017, when Nadal once again won the French Open in front of a crowd packed into Court Philippe Chatrier. It was his tenth title there, his tenth time turning the orange dust into a celebratory scene for the rarest of synergy between player and surface, a gift that at times has seemed as sacred as a covenant, a strange bond between him an
d the ground. To celebrate the achievement, the powers that be at the French Open had ready a montage of Nadal playing a point in which, stroke by stroke, he aged a year and the tournament advanced a year, so that the final point was match point of the 2017 men’s final: the past catching up with the present, present alive in the past.
Sports strain to stress to us that we are watching history, and the Fédération Française de Tennis didn’t want to let slip the opportunity to make that literal. And yet, the spectacle of Nadal’s achievement began 150 years ago from that moment. In the age of history and myth, sometime before the first orangish grains of sand were pulverized into life and in turn gave life to the game of tennis on clay. Before Nadal or Kuerten or Muster or Noah or Evert or Borg, in the beginning there was myth, with all of its typical daydreams of heroes and genius. And before that, in the beginning of that beginning, there was the empty Château Court, looking down on a grass field from its slight hill on the west end of Cannes, and, looking up at it, with dreams of grandeur in his eyes, was a hotelier from Switzerland who would live and then die, tragically and horrifically, with the clay. Rafa Nadal’s tenth French Open title began 150 years ago on that day when, in 1867, Bruno Court sold his château to Gougoltz.
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