By Chris Oddo | Monday June 11, 2018
Rafael Nadal's 11th Roland Garros title run may have lacked drama but the layers of nuance and the historic character of his achievement make it a seminal moment for tennis and for sport in general.
Photo Source: Clive Brunskill/Getty
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In other words, insanity would be trying to defeat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros. Good luck, even the best of you tennis players, with your No.1 rankings and your five or ten major titles. Good look you young guns who have spent the last five to ten years of your life becoming as elite as you can be, as powerful as was possible, so bulletproof that you thought you were virtually unbeatable.
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Good luck and good night, for you are destined to meet your maker and he is Spanish, with a snarl so epic and the biceps of a God incarnate. Good luck and good riddance, for as much as we love you and wish for you to continue in your quest, it’s not your time. Not your place.
Roland Garros, you see, belongs to the surly Spaniard they simply call "Rafa." He’s 13 years older than when he first tossed the dust around at this place, with his long hair and pirate pants and panther quickness and ninja efficiency. He’s lost a square of hair and taken his share of lumps, had his seminal series of setbacks and even been served two portions of humble pie right here in Paris. At the time, he had lost enough confidence along the way to fill a few tractor trailers or swimming pools or what have you.
But Nadal, three years after his second and final loss at Roland Garros (which came to Novak Djokovic in straight sets in 2015 if you’re scoring at home), has built all that confidence back now, and at 32 years of age he’s licked the stamp, slapped it on the envelope and sent the letter that reads: let it be known that I’m coming for anybody who dares try to dethrone me in Paris. Indeed, Nadal is coming fast and furious with a focus and a feeling. He’s coming hell-bent and he’s coming with every kernel of wisdom he ever learned from Uncle Toni or anybody else who has ever propped him up and puffed him up, and he’s coming with his most fearsome armament—his red-hot and revered lust for battle.
There’s nothing quite like how this man competes. Nadal gives his whole being to the sport, and it’s a treat to pick out the nuances of his psychology, how every single moment is seen by him as a chance to gain an edge or defend a component or prolong a movement.
Like how he hit an absolutely sublime drop shot on his second return point of his 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 victory over Dominic Thiem on Sunday. Message? Don’t get too comfortable back there, kid.
Or the look on Nadal’s face after Thiem scorched a forehand winner to break him back for 1-2 in the third game of the opening set. The switches turning inside Nadal’s head told him that it was already go time, that however early this was in the match he would have to draw the line in the sand—immediatement!
Thiem was hitting with the power that only he can hit with and when he held for 2-2 Nadal peered across the court as he toweled off, looking for clues on the mood of his adversary.
Two points later Nadal hit a miraculous lob at 15-all and didn’t celebrate one bit. Another nuance: the no-celly. Thiem had mistakenly hit the backhand right at Nadal from in close at the net, it was a clear mistake by Thiem, not to be celebrated. Maybe if Nadal needed an emotional pick-me-up, if it was later in the match or he was down by a set, he’d let out a Vamos! But not now. Now to only focus.
After Nadal holds for 3-2 NBC cuts to a clip of the Spaniard macking with his first Roland Garros trophy. He is a kid, slobbering all over that thing like a puppy on his first bone. We had no idea back then he’d do it for an eleventh time on Sunday June 10th, in a more discreet manner.
14 years, 11 titles. No equal. It’s crazy—yet true.
Rafa’s asking questions and Thiem is, at least for the time being, answering them in this final. Many, including the great Ken Rosewall in a somewhat haphazard post-final interview right there on Court Philippe-Chatrier, would later say that Thiem was disappointing in this final. That he came at Nadal too fast and didn’t play with enough margin. That he tried to catch lightning in a bottle instead of slugging it out. They might be right. But can you blame a man that plays courageous tennis against the most indomitable force in the sport? The Austrian came out gunning for glory against tennis’s version of the Great Wall of China—he deserves no criticism.
Thiem showed some staying power in the final and if you can think of a player that would have done better than him on Sunday please tell me your name so I can tell you why you’re wrong.
Thiem gets through a 5-deuce game that featured a bad overrule against him to hold for 3-all. The game lasts 13 minutes but the Austrian, at least for now, is staying in step.
Moments later in the very next game Nadal slips a backhand slice high and deep and tucks it into the open corner of the court that a net-rushing Thiem can’t cover for 3-3, 40-15. It’s a normal shot to most, but to Nadal, who knows he can’t be giving this kid looks at 30-all in a heated first set, it’s everything. Struck with clarity, prescience, emotional stability. Just an opportunity taken, treated as important and executed as such.
That’s the brilliance you get from Rafa and if you’re not paying attention you hardly even notice. With Nadal all the little things get done. He’s a taskmaster. He’s playing chess, moving Thiem around, probing him, throwing in haymakers that blind him, hitting behind him, and just when the Austrian turns the tide, as he did so many times in this match because he is a true physical phenom and was red-lining, Nadal is there to defend, to extend, to redeploy, to gradually push and pull the point back to neutral so that he may put you back on the string that will have you shaking your head as yet another big point goes his way.
The Spaniard won his 11th French Open title and improved to 86-2 lifetime on the terre battue of Paris on Sunday, proving what has already been proven ten times over—that there is nobody who even remotely compares to him on his preferred surface, at his preferred venue.
Nadal has been sailing in uncharted waters in Paris for years now, he’s so far beyond what we thought was possible that we can just throw our hands up in the air, look skyward and wonder—how is this possible?
It’s not. It can’t be. And yet it is.
Tennis fans have witnessed one of the greatest runs of dominance in all sports from the moment that Rafael Nadal won Roland Garros on his first appearance in 2005. It was obvious then that he was a phenom, a whirling dervish of a tennis player with a revolution for a forehand, the legs of a sprinter and the clear-headed lucidity of a soldier that can walk through a fusillade of enemy fire, dodging munitions like they were gently falling feathers on a gentle spring day. There have been dynasties in sport. The Boston Celtics won every title for eight years in the late 50’s and 60’s. The 1927 Yankees won 110 games and scored nearly 1000 runs. Michael Jordan won ten scoring titles and his Bulls won six NBA championships. There has been domination. Think Mike Tyson in his prime, Wayne Gretzky in his most prolific seasons, Roger Federer on grass. You can take them all, one by one, and stack them up against what Nadal has done in Paris and I’m sorry—they’ll lose.
Imagine what it takes to win a tournament like Roland Garros just once. Federer, Djokovic, Wawrinka, they’ve all won it once. Now multiply that by 11. There’s an element of impossible in what Nadal does because his game was supposed to be too physical to sustain into his thirties. We’ve witnessed his brand of tennis, we know how hard he’s had to work to maintain this torrid, superhuman, uber-visceral tennis. He has never rested on his laurels and he approaches the game with an uncanny willingness to challenge himself, to suffer, if he must, to honor the competition. That is what, more than anything, has allowed Nadal to carve out such a mind-bending reality in Paris. His desire for more, not in a greedy fashion, but in an honorable one. As if to say: I will walk through fire so that you must walk through fire to beat me, anything else is unacceptable. Working himself into this type of fury every spring with such meticulous preparations, it is truly unfathomable.
And yet he has done it, again and again.
There have been dynasties in sport, but Nadal at Roland Garros is where you cross the line and go into empire. He’s the ancient Rome of tennis.
To really get a feel for how on point Nadal was in the crucial moments of this final I flipped to the four-all game in the first set and watched it a few times because that was when the biggest pressure was on Nadal to grab the all-important opener. Either he could kill a piece of Thiem or the Austrian would grow bigger, depending on what happened in these next few games.
Nadal, serving, ended the first point with a swashbuckling inside out forehand, hit from as high or maybe even higher than his head. It was clobbered so viciously that it left the Austrian no chance but to be a spectator.
15-love.
Out of the blue Nadal double faults, and it was actually an ugly double fault.
15-all, and this brings me to another point about this match. Nadal did make a few mistakes and, every so often, tossed in an easy error. But NEVER did he do so at an important moment and never did he do it more than once in a segment. When he made mistakes he put them behind him and got back into his groove.
Case in point: A beautiful service down the T draws an error from Thiem’s backhand and a Vamos from Nadal.
30-15.
Next point: Nadal has to play a little defense and he does so impeccably, distributing medium-deep slice and topspin under control as he feels for an opening. But first he has to defend an attack from the Thiem forehand with a perfect counterpunch backhand that sets up the kill shot on the 11th stroke of the rally. The put-away was a vicious signature crosscourt bomb forehand.
40-15.
Another wicked serve elicits a return error and it’s 5-4. Nadal would never look back.
Meanwhile the faces Nadal is making are caricatures. They’re almost comical because he is so intense. There is no chart for his intensity, there’s no level you could assign it because it’s simply beyond. It’s from another planet and it's pretty adorable as well that he can go to this place where the rest of the world shrinks away and all that remains is the battle and he Must. Find. Ways! to win it. He wears it all on his face and one could probably spend the whole match just analyzing the meanings and origins of said faces.
Now it’s 5-4 with Thiem serving to stay alive in the first set.
Suddenly all the pressure from Nadal, and all the pressure of the moment, causes a fissure in the armor of Thiem. He makes a volley error to give Nadal the first point of the tenth game and he goes off the rails and gifts the game and set to the Spaniard.
Thiem learned the hard way that you cannot give Nadal an inch because he’ll take a mile and bury you back on the side of the road where you made that mistake. He’ll use your mistake and thrash you for it and you’ll regret it.
That’s who Nadal is at Roland Garros. Rude and shrewd. That’s how he’s built an empire here. You may, as Thiem once did, catch him off guard at Buenos Aires, or Rome, or Madrid. You may be, like Thiem is, one of the three players that have defeated Nadal on clay more than twice. But at Roland Garros, if you melt down and gift a game while serving to stay alive in the set, you’re a burnt croissant, baby.
Nadal takes the set and doesn’t even celebrate because he knows he doesn’t need to and he knows it might be tacky and he also—and this is most important—is already in his mind thinking of ways to step on Thiem’s throat in the second set.
Nadal knows that drama is the enemy and that’s why there are myriad people who groan when they talk of Nadal’s domination at Roland Garros, as if it’s too predictable, too mundane—where’s the drama?
The drama, my friends, has been kiboshed by a merciless man with a buggywhip forehand. Nadal is the drama killer, and the drama is dead.
After Nadal takes the break in set two, Thiem puts his best foot forward and throws the kitchen sink at Nadal, but the Spaniard has kicked it into overdrive, he’s the shark that smells blood. He’s that lion in the nature program that takes down the zebra by first nipping at the back of its thighs, then clawing up its haunches, then gashing the belly as it struggles.
It may take time but it will happen.
With Nadal serving at 4-2 there is more magic. Thiem had a point for 30-all and he played it to near perfection. But somehow Nadal went from defense to offense, before Thiem made a great counter that caught Nadal by surprise. The Spaniard was going to take the net but ended up backing up and furiously peddling his feet to hit a giant forehand while retreating. It’s the eleventh stroke of the rally and it’s good enough to put Nadal in position to crack a giant forehand that wins him the point. Soon it would be 5-2, and though Thiem would hold for 5-3, Nadal took the set and dug his heels in even harder to begin the third.
Thiem saved four break points to get to 1-0 in set three. The game didn’t yield a cataclysmic break for Nadal but he would get it soon enough. Nadal actually looked like he felt some sympathy for Thiem when he broke him for 2-1 in the third on his sixth break point of the set. Again with the faces...
But wait a minute, somethings going on here...
Nadal's sympathy quickly turned to fear moments later when one of the fingers on his left hand suddenly wouldn’t retract due to a physical ailment that appeared to be cramping or some kind of cramp-like symptoms, potentially caused by the tight wrist wraps that Nadal wore under his sweatbands to keep perspiration from flowing down onto his hands.
After a brief, frantic delay Nadal was a worried man when he set about serving at 2-1, 30-0. He quickly double-faulted but then—hand be damned—played sublime tennis to take the next two points.
The segment from 2-1, 30-0 to the finish, after the cramping incident, might have been the most impressive achievement that we saw from Nadal on Sunday.
It was as if, during his meticulous preparation for the final, Nadal had taken time to prepare his mind for how to react if near tragedy struck. He had the answers for that challenge. He won the final three games of the match and when Thiem’s last return sailed long of the baseline (after the Austrian had already saved four match points in the game, mind you) it was a weary warrior that turned and smiled in the direction of his player’s box.
His 17th major, sealed with another work of obstinate perfection.
If you weren’t careful you would have believed that it was just another boring day at the office for the King of Clay. But between the lines of those predictable chapters is the blood, sweat and tears of a man who has found miraculous depth of purpose on the red clay at Roland Garros. He has given everything to construct and maintain his empire there. He has built and continued to develop the perfect game for clay, rife with nuance and tactical aplomb. He has honed and perfected all the shots and practiced how to make them in all situations against all opponents.
And on the second Sunday in June every year he creates another work of sublime severity for all the world to either admire or bemoan.
It’s impossible, what Nadal has done. It’s far-fetched and remote. It’s Groundhog Day meets Lord of the Rings with Philip Glass and System of a Down collaborating on the soundtrack. And even more impossible is the very real possibility that he’ll do it again next year.
That’s Nadal in a nutshell.
Clarity to the bitter end. A red clay ruffian with a lion-sized heart and a menace like tennis has never seen.
When it was all said and done Paris cheered him like they never have, and he wept like a child that needed to hear that he was loved.
À la prochain, Paris.