“I became world champion in Mexico the year you were born,” says Jorge Valdano. I couldn’t see it, Rafa Nadal excuses himself. A former soccer player, this one for decades, a legendary Argentine attacker, interviews a former tennis player who is still trying on his retirement suits: Rafael Nadal, 22 Grand Slam, 14 Roland Garros. Valdano Universethe Movistar program, brought together the public and media last Thursday the 20th at the Espacio Telefónica on Gran Vía in Madrid. Queue to enter, electric expectation. Barely cold on the street, warmth from the clay and June sun inside.
One of the juiciest moments of the interview has to do with, that is where Valdano takes him, with Nadal’s archetype, the reductionist characteristics of his game: the dedicated, self-sacrificing, fighter, courageous, resistant guy with an infernal psychology for his opponent, a man strong as a rock. But isn’t tennis an exquisite quality sport, one that sometimes a mountain of muscles resolves, at the decisive point, with a very delicate flick of the wrist? Hasn’t Nadal sometimes felt, asks Valdano, a little less valued for his tennis, for his tennis quality? Nadal smiles. He quotes the phrase, without a clear father, that success is 99% hard work and 1% talent. To affirm that he has worked very hard, he has trained very hard, he has made enormous efforts, but what he has done, someone else can do.
José Luis Cuerda told a story that is relevant. One day a woman, pointing to César González Ruano, asked her partner what that man did there every night. “Write,” he replied. “Come on, and that’s what you live on?” “Woman, if we lived on that we would all write.”
Nadal basically defends something like this in the interview. It produces a certain impression to see one of the best tennis players in history defend his quality, his natural talent. But Valdano is right. There is a narrow imaginary of blinking lights in which the idea that Nadal is a great athlete has been established. Instead of playing with a racket, he plays with a loaf of bread. “You can train as many hours as you want, but if the drive It doesn’t go where you want… You can’t stay at the highest level without tennis quality, it’s obvious.” And without chance, he says: without nature rewarding you with a certain physique or with certain characteristics.
The legend speaks, regarding Lamine Yamal – he takes the name Valdano – and young people like him who exploit their talent precociously on a global level, about the importance of passion. About the importance of having explored before, as children, what your passion is. And having fun. “Surround yourself with people who really help you. Let them tell you things that successful people don’t want to hear. Everyone wants to see you, everyone wants to hear from you. But you have to find a point in real life, a place to return to.” “I have done,” he remembers, “everything that any teenager can do in his life.”
And Nadal defends, in Rafa mode, a strong speech: Manacor, his lifelong friends, his lifelong neighbors, that which holds him to a place that does not threaten to blind him like the lights of New York, Monaco or Shanghai, where everyone knows Nadal. In Manacor too, but so much so that it is one more. “I always come home,” he takes a sip of water and clears his throat. And it abounds: being born in a small town, and on an island, has helped him. Because life there, he says, “doesn’t go so fast.”
“I have not made great sacrifices,” he says, “what I have done has been great efforts. I have not become obsessed. I have been a competitor, and when I could not compete at the level that I understood I should compete, I left. I liked what I did. I did not retire because I was tired of what I was doing. not even for being without the necessary motivation. I retired because my body couldn’t handle it anymore. But I was still happy doing what I did.”
Success, asks Valdano. Nadal is sincere. “Success—the Davis Cup point in Seville, that madness in 2004 at the age of 17—I experienced it naturally.” Because, remember, before being champion of tournaments around the world, he was already a champion since he was a child. “I had already been champion in Mallorca, I had already been champion in the Balearic Islands. My evolution was always linked to success, so when professional success arrived, I was already prepared.”
Tennis, says Nadal, is a repetitive sport. “In football you can do something brilliant throughout the entire game, not do anything again and have resolved the game,” he says. In tennis, if you make three geniuses, you can lose a game.
