by Rafael Nadal
The reality was that I was by some distance the lowest in the world rankings of our four team members; I’d had a bad year, for much of which I had been out with an injury; I had recently been beaten badly by Roddick; and I was eighteen years old. Besides, I’d have more chances to play in future Davis Cups than all of them, so if I put myself in Juan Carlos’s and Tommy’s shoes, I could see how playing in this final might mean even more to them than to me. Things became quite tense inside our group, and so I decided that rather than put the captains on the spot I’d go and talk to Carlos about it. I’d already known him for some years. We had practiced together many times. I trusted him as if he were an elder brother. And he was one of my own, a Mallorquín.
I asked him, “Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable, more confident, honestly, if Juan Carlos were to play? I mean, I’m so young and he’s won so much more than me . . .” Carlos cut me short. I remember his words exactly, “Don’t be a dumb ass. You go ahead and play. You’re playing well. For me, there’s no problem at all.” We talked a little more, I continued to remonstrate a bit, arguing the case against myself, conveying how embarrassed I felt. But he said, “No. Take it easy. Enjoy the moment, take the opportunity. If the captains have decided to put you in it’s because they’ve thought about it long and hard and they trust you. I do too.”
That settled it. It would have been ridiculous to carry on insisting I should not have played. First, because, in truth, I was dying to; second, because it would have meant questioning our captain’s judgment, which it was definitely not my place as a teenager to do. The extreme option, a principled rebellion, would have been too stupid for words.
So I played, going on court after Carlos had done me the additional favor of winning the first match. If I beat Roddick, we wouldn’t win the Davis Cup, but we’d have a big foot in the door; if I lost, it would all be up for grabs. I was as motivated as I had ever been, fully aware that this was, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest match of my young life. I was also afraid—afraid that I would not be up to the challenge, that Roddick would give me the same beating he’d given me in the US Open, that he’d win 6–3, 6–2, 6–2, something like that. That would be embarrassing and no help to the team whatsoever. Because you can lose but at least tire him out along the way, drain him for the next match. But if he thrashed me again, I’d have failed the captains who had placed such faith in me, my teammates, the public, everybody. It was a very high-pressure match for me. It was the Davis Cup final, on Spanish soil; I wasn’t playing for myself alone; and, yes, above all, what caused me the greatest fear was that very risky decision they’d made to pick me.
But when I went out on court, the adrenaline pushed the fear away, and the crowd swept me along on a tide of such emotion that I played in a rush of pure instinct, almost without pausing to think. Never has a crowd been more behind me, before or since. Not only was I the Spaniard flying the flag in one of the most fervently patriotic cities in Spain, I was the underdog, the David to Roddick’s Goliath. Anything further removed from Wimbledon’s fine sense of tennis etiquette (silence during points: forget it) it would be hard to imagine. I’d never achieve my childhood dream of becoming a professional footballer, but this was the closest I’d ever get to feeling the atmosphere a football player feels walking out onto the stadium for a big match, or scoring a goal in a championship decider. Except that here every time I won a point, practically, all 27,000 people erupted as if I’d scored a goal. And I have to admit that I quite often responded as if I were a footballer who’d just scored. I don’t think I’ve ever pumped my arms in the air or jumped in celebration more often during a game of tennis. I am not sure how Andy Roddick felt about it, but there was no other way to respond to the festive energy that washed down on me. A tennis crowd rarely has much influence on the result compared to a football or basketball crowd. Here they did. I’d always known about the benefits of home advantage, but I’d never felt it before; I’d never quite known the lift a crowd can give you, how the roar of support can transport you to heights you had no idea you could reach.
I needed the help. Blood wasn’t spilled, but it was a battle we waged out there, Roddick and I, in that amazing amphitheater, in the warm winter sunshine of Sevilla. It would be the longest match I’d played in my life up to that moment, three hours and forty-five minutes of long, long rallies, constant slugging back and forth, with him looking for opportunities to charge to the net and me almost always holding back on the baseline. Even if I’d lost, I’d have done my bit for the cause, exhausting him for the match two days later against Carlos, who’d won his first game comfortably. And I did lose the first set, which went to a tiebreak, but this only encouraged the crowd even more, and I ended up winning the next three sets, 6–2, 7–6, and 6–2. I remember a lot of points well. I remember in particular a return I made to a very wide-angled second serve that went round, not over the net, for a winner. I remember a backhand passing shot in the tiebreak of the third set, a critical moment in the match. And I remember the final point, which I won on my serve when he hit a backhand long. I fell on my back, closed my eyes, looked up, and saw my teammates dancing for joy. The noise in my ears felt like a jumbo jet flying low overhead.
We were 2–0 up in the five game series; we lost the doubles, as predicted, the next day; and on the third day Carlos Moyá, who was our real hero, and who had been chasing this prize for years, won his match against Roddick—and that was that. I didn’t have to play Mardy Fish. We’d won 3–1 and the Davis Cup was ours. It was the highlight of my life and also, as it turned out, the moment when the tennis world stood up and started paying close attention to me. Andy Roddick said something very nice about me afterward. He said that there weren’t many truly big game players, but that I definitely was a big game player. It had certainly been big pressure I’d had to overcome, after the controversy of me being chosen to play Roddick, and it gave me new confidence on which to build for when the time came to play big games, Grand Slam finals, all alone.
You’re the sum of all the games you’ve played, and while that Davis Cup final was far from my thoughts three and a half years later, as I tried to win the third set at Wimbledon’s Centre Court against Federer, it had left its mark. At least it had helped in the first two sets, which I’d won. But he had begun this set playing some brilliant shots, and I was on the ropes, nowhere more so than in the sixth game, on my serve, when I went 15–40 down after playing a really disappointing backhand into the net. For the first time in the match I lost my cool, letting out a cry of rage. I was angry with myself because I knew perfectly well I had not done what I should have done on that shot. I cut it when I should have driven it. My head had failed me. I knew that was not the shot to hit, but I had a moment’s hesitation, a moment of fear, and hit it anyway. I went for the conservative option, I lost my courage. And at that moment, I hated myself for that. The good news was that Federer was on edge too. It was a tremendously tense game for both of us but, for that very reason, it was not the most dazzling game of the match in terms of the quality of the tennis. We were both playing poorly at the same time. The difference was that I played less poorly when it mattered the most. He had four break points in the sixth game, each of which I defended successfully, until finally I got an advantage and won the game, on my second serve.
And so we were at 3–3 with him serving, the famous “crucial” seventh game coming up. It’s not always as crucial as tennis lore has it, not at all, but this time it was: I saw my opportunity and I felt I was ready to take it. He had to have been rattled by his failure to capitalize on the chances he’d had in the previous game. At this point overall in the match he’d had twelve break points to my four, but he’d taken one and I’d taken three. Here was evidence of how tennis matches turn on the big points, of how the difference between victory and defeat lies not in physical strength or native ability but in having the psychological edge. And that was on my side of the court right now; the tension was at its highest, but the momentum had
shifted. Suddenly, having survived the pressure he had been piling on me the game before, I was feeling fleet-footed and sharp. Looking up, I saw the sky was heavily overcast, not a shadow on court. It seemed as if it really was going to rain after all. All the more reason to try and kill off the match now.
And that was what everything suggested I was about to do. Three times he came to the net and three times I won the point. He was rushing things, losing his cool. I was 0–40 up. I heard a cry of support from where my uncles and aunt were sitting. “Vamos Rafael!” I glanced up to acknowledge I’d heard them. But then, in the blink of an eye, the tables turned again. It was I who succumbed to the pressure. I made a poor return of serve, short to mid-court, and handed him the point. Next, I failed to return a serve. But it was a good serve, so on to the next point. I had one last chance to break before he could get back to deuce. Here, at 30-40, was the point in this match that I never forget. A terrible memory. He missed his first serve, hit a perfectly returnable second to my forehand, and I fluffed it completely, into the net. It was my third chance, having lost the previous two, and fear gripped me. I lacked decision, my head was not clear. That was a test of mental endurance, and I failed it, that’s why I remember it so painfully. I failed where I had trained myself all my life to be strongest. And once again, I caught myself thinking, “I may not get this chance again; this might be the turning point of the match.” I knew I had lost a big chance right there to win Wimbledon, or to come very close to winning it.
And, sure enough, two great serves and he won the game. It was a huge disappointment, but I had to wipe it out of my mind immediately. And I did. I won the next game comfortably and he did the next one on his serve. He was 5–4 up and then, as forecast, the rain came down. I was ready for this and took it calmly, even though more than an hour passed before we were able to restart. I marched to the locker room, where Toni and Titín promptly joined me. Titín changed the bandages on my fingers and I changed my clothes. We said very little. I was in no mood for talking. Federer was looking more relaxed, chatting and even laughing a bit with his people. He was down two sets, but I was more tense than he was. Or looked more tense, at any rate.
Back on court, I served to save the set and did so; and two games later saved the set again. We went to a tiebreak and he killed me with his serving, ending the set as he’d begun it. Three aces, plus another serve that might as well have been one, gave him the tiebreak by seven points to five and the set, 7–6. I’d had my chance, and through a couple of moments of weakness when I should have been strongest, I’d thrown it away. But I was still two sets to one up.
* * *
Highly Strung
You didn’t need especially fine antennae on the eve of the Davis Cup Final of 2004 to spot the disgruntlement in the faces of Juan Carlos Ferrero and Tommy Robredo, denied their places in history by the eighteen-year-old upstart Nadal. It was obvious to anybody watching the team press conference the night before the first day of play, seeing the foursome pose for photographs, that the Spanish team was not a portrait of patriotic harmony. Carlos Moyá, Spain’s number one, spoke with ambassadorial poise; Ferrero and Robredo looked as if they would rather be somewhere else; Nadal fidgeted, stared at his feet and forced smiles that did little to disguise his unease.
“When Rafa came to me and said he was willing to cede his place in the match against Roddick to one of the two older guys, I said no, that was the captains’ call and, anyway, he had my full confidence. But inside,” Moyá recalls, “I had my doubts.” Moyá transmitted the same message to Toni Nadal, who was also uncomfortable. “The decision had been made,” Moyá said, “and I saw no point in causing even more tension in the group, and adding to the pressure on Rafa, who was in a dilemma, by saying anything else.”
Moyá spoke bluntly to Ferrero, asking him to take the decision on the chin and remember that he had played his part in getting Spain to the final. The Davis Cup record books would show that, and wins for him and Nadal would mean victory for him too. Whether they bought the argument or not, Rafa’s doubts as to the legitimacy of him playing was now an added factor of concern for Moyá. Had Rafa been more brash, less sensitive, had he either not picked up on, or simply not been bothered by, the ill feeling that suddenly plagued the group, he would at least have been going into the decisive match against the experienced American number one in a less cluttered frame of mind. But that was not the case. Moyá knew very well that beneath the gladiatorial front he put on during a match there lurked a wary, sensitive soul; he knew the Clark Kent Rafa the indecisive one who had to hear many opinions before he could make up his mind, the one afraid of the dark, frightened of dogs. When Nadal visited Moyá at home, Moyá had to lock his dog up in a bedroom, otherwise Nadal would be completely incapable of settling down.
He was a highly strung young man alert to other people’s feelings, accustomed to a protected and harmonious family environment, out of sorts when there was bad blood. Spain’s Davis Cup family was distinctly out of sorts now, and making things worse, Nadal was—if not the cause—certainly at the heart of the problem. Getting his head in order for the biggest match of his life, Moyá sensed, was going be a bigger challenge than usual for his young friend. As if that were not bad enough, Moyá could not help reminding himself that Rafa, however sharp he might have looked in training that week, had lost just fourteen days earlier against a player ranked 400 in the world. And his serve was conspicuously weaker than Roddick’s, which was almost 50 percent faster.
But Moyá did also have reasons to believe in his young teammate. He had known Rafa since he was twelve years old, had trained with him scores of times, and had been beaten by him two years earlier in an important tournament. No top professional had been closer to Rafa, and none would continue to remain on more intimate terms with him, than his fellow Mallorcan. Ten years older than Nadal, Moyá, who had briefly snatched the number one spot from Pete Sampras in 1999, knew that Nadal had special qualities; but just how special he would not find out until after the youngster had gone out in front of 27,000 people at Seville’s converted athletics stadium, all the pressure in the world on his shoulders, and played the world number two in four physically grinding, emotionally supercharged sets.
“People were already talking about Rafa in Mallorca when he was six or seven years old,” says Moyá, “although at first you had to wonder if it was because his uncle was Miguel Ángel, the football player, who was a legend on the island. But the tennis world is small there—my trainer, Jofre Porta, used to do some coaching with him too—and after he’d won the Mallorca under-12s championship at the age of eight, a buzz began to be generated around him. I remember Jofre telling me, ‘This one’s going to be good.’ By the age of twelve he was already one of the best in the world in his category. That was when I met him for the first time.”
The meeting took place in Stuttgart, Germany. Moyá was playing in an ATP tournament, Nadal in a junior one. “Someone from Nike, who’d already had the smarts to sign him up, asked me if I’d warm up with him. I did, for about an hour. Now, to be honest, he did not strike me as being singularly more gifted than other players of his age. I did see he was very combative, though what was more surprising was how incredibly shy he also was. We met and shook hands, but he didn’t even look at me and uttered barely a syllable. It’s true he was probably a bit overawed, since I’d made a bit of a splash in the media after making it, unseeded, to the Australian Open final earlier that year. But the contrast was still striking—shocking, actually—between the timid little boy off court and the super-competitive kid on it, even though we were just rallying, not even playing points.”
When he was fourteen, by which time Moyá had won his one and only Grand Slam tournament, the French Open, he began training with Moyá in Mallorca, as often as three times a week. “People sometimes say to me, ‘You’ve helped Rafa a lot, right?’ Well, maybe, but he’s helped me a lot too. Those training sessions were of value to me too. He was good enough already to push
me hard, even though I was well established by now in the world top ten. We played sets together, and since I didn’t want to lose against a kid of fourteen, he helped me keep my edge. I even think he helped make me a better player.”
The reverse was more obviously true. Few aspiring professionals, if any, in the history of the game can have had the good fortune to practice on a regular basis at the age of fourteen with a player who had won a Grand Slam tournament and who, when he was away on tour, was frequently competing with such tennis deities as Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. It was another example of how kindly the stars had been aligned for the young man who dreamed of being a champion.
There was the original good luck of having had an uncle who, after failing to achieve his own tennis-playing dreams, dedicated himself life and soul to building a player capable of competing mentally and physically at the highest level. There was the warm, doting, remarkably close remainder of the family to act as a counterweight to the uncle’s fiercely disciplined regime. There was his uncle Miguel Ángel, whose sporting celebrity provided an example, right on his doorstep, of the importance of training hard and of how to stay centered, however much acclaim came his way. And then there was Carlos Moyá. Stumbling across a mentor, confidant, and practice partner of such stature and generosity would be beyond the dreams of an aspirant professional raised in New York, London, or Madrid, but in the hermetic tennis environment of a small island like Mallorca, whose natives by nature stick together, it could happen, and it did.
Moyá, who has a home in Miami and another in Madrid and is much more cosmopolitan by nature than Nadal, made the kid from Manacor his pet project. Nadal’s parents gush when they talk about Moyá, noting that a lesser character than he might have run off in the opposite direction at the sight of the young pretender, all the faster the more threatening to his dominion he became. Yet the more successful Nadal became—as he progressively usurped Moyá’s status as king of Mallorca, king of Spain, and king of the tennis world—the warmer the relationship between the two became. Nadal regards him to this day as the wise and benevolent big brother he never had. He has continued to confide in Moyá and seek advice from him to a degree that he can with no one else outside his family circle, with the possible exception of his physiotherapist and resident de facto psychologist, the man he calls Titín.