/ 9 June 2006

Rafael Nadal: One tough hombre

Get used to it. It is early June and tennis is in thrall to Rafael ”Rafa” Nadal, the Majorcan who, once he steps on to a clay court, transmutes from softly smiling youngster to, in the estimation of one leading British coach, ”the toughest bastard the game has ever seen”.

This is high season for the game played on red dirt, the French Open, and the evidence of the past two years suggests this will be Nadal’s time for perhaps the next decade. Whether Nadal — who turned 20 last week — can extend his supremacy to other times of the year and other surfaces poses interesting problems for him. Notable among these is fulfilling ”my dream of winning Wimbledon”, something that has never been easy for the main contenders at the French, where they put in a massive effort on clay before switching to grass.

Alan Jones, the man who guided Jo Durie to becoming the last British woman to reach the world’s top 10, is the coach who so admires the competitive rage that drives the 19-year-old Nadal — drives him to the sort of extraordinary victory he achieved over Roger Federer in Rome last month. Nadal started that match at the same time as another young Spanish sporting victor, Formula One driver Fernando Alonso, hurtled off the grid in Barcelona. But whereas Alonso’s sedentary work was done when he took the chequered flag in one hour 26 minutes, Nadal, after that long, was not even a third of the way through his epic struggle, in which he battled back against the world’s number one to win in five hours six minutes.

It is not so much the racquet skills that Jones admires, but Nadal’s utter conviction when he looks at his opponent and says to himself: ”I’m tougher than you, you bastard.”

Certainly, Federer seemed to falter against the intensity of Nadal’s challenge. While Federer’s nerve buckled, Nadal’s remained tungsten tough as he equalled Guillermo Vilas’s record of 53 successive clay-court wins. With his quarterfinal victory at Roland Garros on Wednesday, that figure is now 58.

It is impossible to know to what extent Nadal’s commitment is learnt or whether it is simply part of his DNA. One thing we do know is that, genetically, Nadal certainly had a good start in life from a sporting point of view.

One uncle, Miguel, played football as a redoubtable defender for Barcelona and Spain, representing his country at three World Cups, and the other, Toni, was a better-than-average club tennis player who was there to guide Nadal when his father, Sebastian, insisted that his 12-year-old son choose between football and tennis, at which he was almost equally adept. He preferred football but he stood out more as a tennis player having, by the age of eight, already won regional titles for under-12s.

The environment in which to nurture his talent could hardly have been more advantageous. The climate, facilities and emotional stability of a close-knit family group — the families of Sebastian Nadal and his two brothers all live in Manacor on Majorca — combined to produce an atmosphere in which it would have been difficult for a gifted young tennis player not to prosper.

Little wonder his family resisted efforts by the Spanish federation to move Nadal to the mainland to train at a national centre. Instead he went to his local tennis club, where he still plays.

Toni Nadal remains the coach who has helped to shape Nadal both off the court, where he is disarmingly courteous and deferential, and on it, where he is neither of these things. Perhaps Toni Nadal’s most important contribution to his nephew’s game was converting the natural right-hander into a left-hander with all the small advantages that playing from the ”wrong” side bring. The coach noticed Nadal hit his forehand with both hands and, knowing that he kicked left-footed, suggested he drop his right hand from the racket. ”I did and it worked,” says Nadal.

The boy wonder, having quickly outgrown the juniors, took to the senior tour almost straight away. Last year, he was the first teenager to win the French Open since Michael Chang in 1989.

Even the Spanish press, used to a steady supply of high-achieving juveniles, was disconcerted by the emergence of this bulging-biceped smiter of the ball with an almost preternatural desire to win. El Mundo went as far as to question Majorca’s claims to the young phenomenon. The paper suggested that out there somewhere was a Planet Nadal, ”where babies don’t play with dolls but racquets, muscle grows before bone, courage is learnt before speech and the heart beats faster. He is an adolescent who has transformed himself into a superman.”

Not everyone revels unconditionally in the perfection of Nadal’s play. South Africa’s Frew McMillan, a wonderful doubles player in the 1960s and early 1970s and now a keen and astutely critical observer of the game from the commentary box, says: ”I don’t think you could call him a connoisseur’s delight. He’s a bit too much of the muscleman for that. Yes, he astonishes in his retrieving powers and durability, but to me he’s not a silky performer. At the same time, though, players like him have proved over the years that they can win a lot of tournaments.

”Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas were the men who started playing with the style that Nadal has taken to a new height. In other words, he will generally eliminate errors and then, when he needs to accelerate, he can lower the trajectory of his shot, particularly with the forehand down the line, to hit the outright winner.” His two-handed backhand, says McMillan, does not have quite the same ring as the forehand. ”But it’s still very effective, which I imagine to be very disheartening for opponents.”

Whatever the outcome at this year’s French Open, it appears Nadal is serious about wanting to perform well at Wimbledon. He will rent a house in London this year — rather than observe the clay-courter’s usual routine of a one-night-at-a-time hotel booking — with a view to occupying it for as much as a month, from the start of Queen’s to the end of the Wimbledon championships. — Â