by Lynn Barber
Everyone kept telling me that Rafa was so tired and had had a bad day. But then I was so tired and had had a bad day too, traipsing round the boiling Foro Italico stadium, surviving on bottled water, watching his boring match, waiting for his press conference and then hanging about with mobs of screaming fans waiting for him to emerge from the players’ entrance. He eventually came out with a posse of security men, signed a few autographs, had his photo taken with a baby, and was whisked off in his car. I was told to follow and meet him at his hotel, which turned out to be some characterless sports/conference complex miles outside Rome – it could have been in Croydon.
HIS bad day only consisted of playing one short tennis match and signing a few autographs, which I thought was what tennis players were paid to do. He admitted at the press conference that he had played badly, dropping a set to a completely unknown Italian player, but he offered no excuses. However other people were quick to offer them for him: it was the day of Seve Ballesteros’ funeral and Rafa was very fond of Ballesteros. When he had to sign his name on the television lens (apparently one of those rituals they do at tennis tournaments) he signed ‘Seve’ instead of ‘Rafa’. And, according to David Law, a radio commentator and media director for Queen’s Club who very kindly served as my guide to the tennis world, Rafa was definitely below par the day we met, and two days later was diagnosed with a virus. He then went on to lose the Rome finals to Novak Djokovic, having lost the Madrid Masters to him the Sunday before, so his position as world number one was already beginning to look shaky.
What do we know about Rafa Nadal? Only what his minders want you to. He was born in 1986 in Majorca. His father is a businessman but the whole family is sporty – one uncle was a professional footballer known as the Beast of Barcelona. Another uncle, Toni, a former tennis pro, taught Rafa to play tennis from the age of three, and encouraged him to hold the racquet in his left hand, even though he is naturally right-handed. Rafa played in the Spanish juniors and was urged to go to tennis school in Barcelona but he chose to stay in Majorca with his family – Uncle Toni has been his only coach throughout his career. He started playing professionally when he was just fifteen and won his first Grand Slam at nineteen. He lost his first two Wimbledons but finally won against Roger Federer in 2008. At that point he seemed unstoppable – but then a string of knee injuries (tendonitis) meant he didn’t win a title for almost a year and commentators started saying he might have to retire. He missed Wimbledon in 2009 partly because of injury but also because his parents had just split up and he was very upset – ‘For one month I was outside the world.’ But he bounced back in 2010 and there has been no talk of tendonitis recently. However, he is now under threat from Djokovic.
Despite his vast wealth – £24 million in winnings, probably twice that in sponsorship – everyone agrees that he is unspoiled, unchanged. His best friends are still the friends he made at school; his hobbies are football, golf and fishing. He goes back to his home town, Manacor, in Majorca whenever he has time, and shares a big apartment block with his mother, sister, grandparents and Uncle Toni and his family. He also has a beach house at Porto Cristo, Majorca (not Ibiza as the press sometimes says) where he likes to go fishing. Two years ago he bought a £2 million beachfront house with its own golf course in the Dominican Republic, but he has never stayed there. I asked if there was some tax reason for choosing the Dominican Republic but he said no – he pays all his taxes in Spain – but he has some property investments in Mexico and thought it would be good to have a base near there for when he retires from tennis. He also has a charitable foundation, run by his mother, which has already opened a school with three tennis courts in India.
Anyway, back to the interview. Since I was perforce staring at his underwear, I decided to ask about it. Frankly, I’m amazed that any underwear company should want to sponsor Nadal, given that his on-court behaviour always screams, ‘My pants are killing me!’ He can’t go five minutes without fiddling with them – they seem to get stuck between his buttocks and then he has to pull them out. I remember the first time I saw him at Wimbledon thinking: Gosh he’s supposed to earn millions – you’d think he could afford some decent underwear by now. Anyway I asked whether his contract stipulated that he should wear Armani underwear on court and he said, ‘I don’t have to but I am very happy to wear Armani because their underwear is fantastic.’ But then why is he always fiddling with it? ‘That is something I am doing all my career, something that I cannot control.’ Has he ever tried to stop? ‘It is difficult for me because it bothers me all the time and I play with different underwears – long, short – but it is impossible to stop.’
Perhaps it’s just another of those rituals that all his fans adore. Every time he comes on court, he waves at the crowd, sits down, gets his water bottles out of his bag, takes a sip from each, and then carefully lines them up so that their labels all face precisely the same way. It takes a long time and his opponent is meanwhile standing by the net, waiting for the coin toss, getting quite irritated I imagine. Eventually when Rafa has faffed and fiddled enough, he leaps to his feet and does a sort of Superman swoop across the court and starts jumping up and down in his opponent’s face while the umpire tosses his coin. Then he races to the baseline as if he is dying to start the match and his opponent has been cruelly delaying things. The fans love it. What can I say? I asked if he suffered from OCD but of course this required translation and much conferring with his PR and produced the eventual answer, ‘It is something that you start to do that is like a routine. When I do these things it means that I am focused, I am competing – it’s something I don’t NEED to do but when I do it means I am focused.’ Does he have other rituals, perhaps in the locker room, before the match? ‘I always have a cold shower.’ And any particular rituals last thing at night before he goes to sleep? ‘No. I have to have the TV or computer on, but I turn it off if I wake up. What I normally do is have dinner, do some work with Rafael my physio, then sleep.’ Gripping stuff.
As far as I can see, Nadal has made only one (mildly) controversial remark in his life and that was in 2009 when he criticised Andre Agassi for saying in his autobiography, Open, that he had taken crystal meth while he was still on the circuit. Nadal said that tennis was a clean sport, and it was very bad of Agassi to suggest otherwise. Was it really news to him that anyone in tennis took drugs? This requires some heavy conferring with his PR but he eventually comes back: ‘Well that’s something that’s all in the past. But I was shocked. I know Agassi did a lot of good things for tennis but that book wasn’t one of those things. You didn’t feel bad when you were playing and then you feel bad five years after you retire – it’s not a moral thing. Anyway, that is something that is impossible today. We have twenty-five drugs tests a year.’ Random ones? ‘Sure. A lot of times.’
Agassi also said in his book that he grew to hate tennis, having played it so relentlessly for so long. Nadal says that could never happen to him – he loves tennis – but he wishes the tour could be shorter. All the ATP players have to commit to playing sixteen obligatory tournaments, most of which last two weeks, but Nadal in addition always plays Barcelona, for the sake of his family and Majorcan friends; he also plays Qatar as preparation for the Australian open, and Queen’s as preparation for Wimbledon, which means that he plays eleven months a year. And of course, because he is rarely knocked out in the early rounds, he never gets time off. ‘For sure,’ he sighs, ‘the tour is not perfect. In my opinion, three months is the minimum time that you should be off. Because if not, we have a shorter career. Everybody has a shorter career and it’s not good for the sport, not good for the players, not good for the fans.’ I asked Nadal if his history of knee injuries meant that he would be more crippled at age fifty than someone who had never played tennis, and he said, ‘For sure. When you play eleven months of the year, mostly on hard courts, that’s what happens, yes.’
So, it’s a hard life, and a very very unnatural one. The players live inside a bubble surrounded by
these great phalanxes of middle-aged men, big-bellied habitués of the hospitality tent, who don’t seem to have anything much to do except talk on their mobiles. If required to do so by a journalist like me, they will effuse about their ‘boy’ and what a lovely lad he is and how he loves his football and his fishing and is so close to his family, etc etc, wheeling out their tired old stereotype of what a lovely lad consists of, and you think: Hang on, your ‘boy’ could eat ten of you for breakfast – why do you talk so patronisingly about him? And why do you find it so remarkable that he is still close to his family and that he still sees his old friends? Presumably because you are some multi-divorced adulterous sleazeball who dropped your old friends the minute you moved up in the world. One journalist found it remarkable that Rafa had still not upgraded his mobile phone a year after winning Wimbledon. Rafa (good man) said that it was a perfectly good phone, it worked, why change it? But the journalist seemed to take this as evidence of an almost saintly degree of unworldliness, right up there with the Dalai Lama.
The degree of publicity control in sport is comparable to the heyday of Hollywood, when they had these great studio publicity machines that took young actors as soon as they were signed, and proceeded to invent their life stories for them. Poor Merle Oberon was told she grew up in Tasmania, Australia, when she actually grew up in Bombay, but woe betide any actor who ever deviated from the script. The game was exposed in Oscar Levant’s remark, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin,’ i.e. before the studio got their mitts on her. And poor old Rock Hudson had to die of Aids before anyone could reveal that he was gay. Incidentally, David Law told me that there are no gays on the tennis tour, which made me boggle a bit.
Anyway it means that sports stars, like Hollywood stars of old, are forced to live within the boring and meagre straitjackets their publicity machines have crafted for them. But once in a while the machine breaks down – most memorably in the case of Tiger Woods. Here was a young man exceptionally good at golf whose minders and sponsors dictated that he was also Mr Wholesome, a clean-living guy devoted to his wife and kids, a role model for would-be golfers – ‘lads’ – around the world. And lo! he turns out to have a long and sleazy history with hookers. And the world – or at any rate his sponsors – throw up their hands and shout this is APPALLING! We are amazed, we are shocked to the core, we wash our hands of him. Whereas in fact if they were doing their jobs and knew anything at all about him, they would have known, the way studio publicists knew that Rock Hudson was gay, that it was all a charade.
Anyway, I wanted to ask Rafa about Tiger Woods and spent a long time before the interview plotting how I could best raise his name without looking too obvious, but then Rafa saved me the trouble by raising it himself. Almost out of the blue, having talked about Seve Ballesteros (usual paeans), he said, ‘But if I have an idol, I love Tiger Woods.’ Crikey. I almost fainted with excitement. Er . . . and did his opinion of him change when he found out . . . ‘No, it didn’t change my opinion of him because I don’t care about his personal life. Nobody must care about his personal life – Tiger Woods is a very important person in the world because he plays golf.’ But when he’s been marketed as this great clean-living role model for the young and then it turns out . . .? ‘Well I don’t want to discuss about these things but in my opinion’ – which unfortunately requires a great deal of translation and discussion with his PR who eventually comes back with: ‘He says that Tiger never hurt anybody in the outside world, he only hurt himself. He is a role model for him on the golf course and also in public because he always behaved properly. But what he does in private is his personal life, nobody else’s, and Rafa says his problems with his wife are HIS problems with HIS wife, not anybody else’s.’ Yes, but there’s a certain hypocrisy when he’s been marketed as Mr Clean? This question doesn’t seem to need translation because Rafa responds sharply, ‘Well. Anyway. Next question.’
Right. Which brings me to the subject of The Girlfriend. Her existence was first unveiled to the world by Uncle Toni in 2008 (though unveiled is perhaps not the word) when he said that Rafa had a childhood sweetheart back home in Majorca called Maria Francisca Perello, or Xisca for short. Rafa was quoted as saying, ‘She is perfect for me, because she is very relaxed and easy-going and I’ve known her for a long, long time. Our families have been friends for many years.’ Hardly the language of passion you’ll agree but at least from then on he had an official Girlfriend, which made up for the fact that his sleeveless tops and bulging biceps reminded one inexorably of Freddie Mercury.
But The Girlfriend remains a distant presence, never actually around. She sometimes make an appearance at his finals, among his family, but even long-time tennis insiders like David Law have never met her. Rafa says that he sees her whenever he goes back to Majorca but that is only maybe thirty days a year. For a young man in peak physical condition, it doesn’t suggest the height of sexual fulfilment.
Anyway I asked if he was going to marry The Girlfriend and he said flatly, ‘No.’
Me: No??!!??!!
‘Not now, no. I don’t have any plans in that way.’
‘Do you mean you’ve split up?’
‘No. I don’t talk about the girlfriend in public, but I have the same girlfriend since many years.’
‘When do you meet?’
‘Her house is very close to my house so when I am in Majorca I see her, and when she has holidays sometimes she comes to the tournaments, but she cannot follow the tour around because she has to do her work. [She works for a big insurance company.] She has her life and I have my life.’
‘Do you think she’ll wait for you? To get married when you finish tennis?’
‘I didn’t ask her to.’
‘But if you only see her – what? – thirty days a year, it can’t be a very fulfilling relationship?’
Rafa for the first time in our interview seems to turn his full attention on me, a laser stare, and for a second I can imagine what it must be like to stand on the baseline waiting to receive his serve. ‘But do you care about my relationship?’ Well no, I have to admit, as the ace whizzes past me, of course I don’t really care about his relationship, I’m just doing my job. Somehow this breaks the tension, and we both laugh.
Rafa: I understand your point, but I never talk about my girlfriend. I have a fantastic relationship with her, we understand each other. It is not a problem for her if I travel every week and for me not a problem if when I am in Majorca she has to work all day.
Me: Do you talk on the phone though?
Rafa: No. When I am in a tournament I have to concentrate. Sure, I talk every day with her.
Me: I’m confused now.
Rafa: Forget about my girlfriend.
Me: Do you phone your mother every day?
Rafa: Yes. My mother, my sister, my father, everybody.
I AM confused. I can only record that there was a big difference in the enthusiasm with which he said he phoned his mother and sister every day, and whatever he was saying, or not saying, about his girlfriend. According to the Majorcan press, they split up last year, but then got together again. Before that there were rumours that he was ‘close’ to the Danish player Caroline Wozniacki. There was also a curious episode a year and a half ago when he made a ‘steamy’ video with the Colombian singer Shakira for her single ‘Gypsy’ and was photographed having what seemed like a romantic dinner with her. It looked like an attempt to rebrand him as a stud. But his PR later revealed that he was present, along with Rafa’s manager, Shakira’s manager and other members of their respective teams, so it was hardly a tête-à-tête. And Rafa says he has ‘no plans’ to do more videos with Shakira, or with any other pop singers.
Listen: I dare say Rafael Nadal really is a lovely man (though I refuse to say ‘lad’). But the point I’m trying to make is that whether he is or isn’t I wouldn’t know, and you wouldn’t either. He lives within this tight stockade of team Rafa, and sticks to the script his minders have written for him. It must require gre
at discipline to be so controlled, but then it must require great discipline to be a world champion anyway. Oh for a McEnroe, a Connors, an Agassi! There was a time, O best beloved, when tennis players had temperaments, when they threw racquets and shouted at umpires and had sex in broom cupboards and often behaved quite badly. Nadal has never thrown a racquet in his life – his Uncle Toni trained him not to. And the tennis player HE most admires is Björn Borg, whom he admires precisely because he had ‘ice in his veins’ – which was what always made him so deadly dull to watch. But Borg, we might note, retired at twenty-six, not from injury but because he was burned out. All that discipline must take its toll on a young man. Even more than the injuries, the psychological attrition of having to be on your best behaviour every day, to play match after match, to give press conference after press conference, to meet and greet sponsors, the sheer boredom of living on this treadmill, must wear anyone down. And for Nadal already the best may be over. He was number one when I started this article, but will probably be number two by the time you read it. I asked if he might retire at twenty-six, as Borg did. ‘If I have injury I could. You never know. But it’s something I prefer to believe is not going to happen.’ How will he know when to retire? ‘When I don’t have enough motivation to go on court and play every day and love the competition. But that is not the case at the moment.’
Do you think physical or psychological wear and tear will make you stop eventually? ‘I really don’t know. Nobody knows the future. I don’t know if I will be injured before mentally, or physically. It is something you cannot plan.’
*
I’d only recently joined Twitter when I published this piece, and it gave me my first experience of being trolled. Every Nadal fan in the world, it seemed, wanted to tell me they hoped I got cancer. It was upsetting of course – on the other hand, it left me with twice as many Twitter followers as I’d had before. Some of them stopped following me after the frenzy died down, but most of them stayed. Since then, I’ve learned that you can always boost your Twitter following by writing something rude – it seems that the people who follow you in order to abuse you are just as loyal as the ones who like you. And among the torrents of abuse, I did have one or two sober messages of support, as well as the priceless photographs of ‘Capybaras who look like Rafael Nadal’ which you can still find online.