I have never written anything on Rafael Nadal. In fact, when it comes to sport, I have seldom written about any team or sportsperson who I truly support. I always felt that I would fail to be objective, to be rational. And when it comes to Rafael Nadal, I am anything but objective or rational.
How irrational you ask? Well, to the point where I would not watch his matches, believing that me watching his matches would somehow curse him to lose. Or maybe I was done with watching his losses, and simply couldn’t bear to. But I would just not watch.
So please, bear with me. This one could get winded.
But first, let’s remain on course. Rafael Nadal, on Sunday, did something absolutely no one could have predicted back in 2005 -- he became the first man to win 21 Grand Slam singles titles in tennis. Rafa Nadal, with all his injuries, setbacks, limitations, and detractors, with a game that was never supposed to translate to winning hard court tournaments, is the first to 21 by winning yet another hard court tournament. No one can take that away from him.
I also happened to watch the final game of the fifth set, having already decided after he blew the chance to close the match earlier that he’d already lost. I must thank my good friend, and a fellow Nadal fan, for that, for it was he who forced me to peel my eyes off the online scorecard and get myself to watch.
“He’ll win if you watch this time,” he assured me. I did. And so did he. He won.
And now for the winded portion.
My hero and a villain
I have been a tennis fan since 1999. Pete Sampras was by far my favourite player. It helped that he won a lot, of course, and was number one at the time, but I liked his no-nonsense approach to the game. Or so I like to believe, since I was also 8 years old.
Fast forward to 2001. I am 10 years old. Sampras is being beaten at Wimbledon -- his favourite tournament that he’s won a record seven times at this point and four years in a row -- by this young, ponytail-sporting Swiss player with what I considered a bad attitude. He also happens to be a mirror image of Sampras -- same playing style, the exact same serve, fantastic forehand, great net skills.
Naturally, I instantly dislike him.
By 2002, Sampras was gone. Enter 2003 and I’m 12. There’s a new king of tennis. It’s the same Swiss Sampras-wannabe, the one I can’t stand. He beat my Sampras. He made my Sampras lose faith. It’s his fault Sampras isn’t playing any more.
I loathed him.
But he’s good. He’s more than just good. He’s incredible. He is Sampras and Agassi rolled into one. By 2004, he’s already won four majors. He brushes aside his opponents as if they don’t exist. He doesn’t sweat on court. He literally does not sweat on court. God I hated that so much. While his opponents are huffing and puffing, he’s gliding, hair never out of place (he ditched the ponytail for a rich-boy haircut fitting of his number one rank, naturally). He’s pristine, he’s chic, he’s elegant, he’s cocky, he’s smug, he’s outright condescending and patronizing. But he’s the best. He’s untouchable, unbeatable.
He’s Roger Federer and he has utterly and completely taken over tennis, dominating like even Pete Sampras had not.
By the end of the decade, by 2009, he already surpassed my beloved Sampras’s tally of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. A record tennis experts said would never be beaten, since the record before Sampras was 12. In 2001, Sampras retired as the greatest male tennis player of all time. Federer was still a kid. He won his first Grand Slam only in 2003. And within the next six years, (six years!) he surpassed Sampras. He’s now the undisputed greatest of all time.
A new kid on the block
But something curious also happened during the second half of the decade of Federer, particularly from 2005 to 2009. See, while Federer danced and glided his way towards the record books, beating literally anyone and everyone that came before him from 2003-2009, there was a glitch in his perfect world. For some reason, there was this strange teenage lefty kid with massive biceps the sport of tennis had never quite seen, sporting sleeveless muscle shirts (but of course with biceps like those), and three-quarter capri pants.
What was very curious was that while his attire and appearance screamed flamboyance, his demeanour had none of it. In fact, he was the most awkward tennis player I’d ever seen. He barely could communicate. He seemed perpetually confused.
He was also among the most awkward tennis players I had seen on court. He could barely serve (relative to other top players), his returns were too short, he had a strange backhand. He was right-handed, but played left handed. Why would anyone do that?
He had a thousand different nervous tics and superstitions, from lining his bottles a specific way on court, adjusting his underwear and the same motion of touching his nose and tucking his hair behind his ears every single time he served (and serving poorly), this kid was insufferable
But wait. He had a forehand, a bloody good forehand, but once again, strange. Very strange. Lassoing the follow through over his head, a guttural battle cry every time he hit a ball. I’d never seen anything like it. And he could run. He could run like no one has ever run. He never stopped running, never stopped chasing balls. Naturally, that meant that, unlike Federer, he would sweat. A lot.
He won though. Sure he didn’t win as much as Federer but then again, nobody did. In particular, on clay, Rafael Nadal was from another planet. If by 2009, Roger Federer had cemented himself as the GOAT, then by then, Rafa Nadal, in four years, had essentially cemented himself as the greatest clay court player in history, winning the French Open four times already, and amassing what remains the record for an unbeaten streak on a surface, going 81 matches undefeated on clay.
He was stupid, chasing after all those balls already destined to be winners, expending his energy. He had no finesse. He appeared to have no brains. He’ll burn out, he’d hurt himself (which he did, over and over and over again).
He was the anti-Federer. He was everything Federer wasn’t.
I loved him, instantly. It was love at first sight. I also naturally began loving clay court matches.
Oh and, of course, because he was the anti-Federer on the court too. For there is no doubt that Federer would have a lot more Grand Slams by 2009, at least five more, were it not for this kid from Mallorca. I say five because that is the number of Grand Slams finals that Rafael Nadal had already beaten Roger Federer at, in his first five years since first facing him in 2004.
From a boy to a man
This kid, who was still growing into a man, was still losing to Federer but unlike other players, was beating him more often than he was losing to him, again especially on clay. He finally turned it around, silencing doubters who only called him a clay court specialist by first beating Roger in Wimbledon in 2008 after losing to him the previous two years (still widely regarded to be at least a top five match of all time) and then, the culmination, when in January 2009, he won a Grand Slam on the hard court, at the Australian Open, proving his detractors wrong.
But most importantly, on that day on February 1, 2009, to 18-year-old Roger Federer-hating me, to my immense glee and satisfaction, Rafael Nadal made Roger Federer cry. The emotionless, suave, pristine, stoic Roger Federer, reduced to a spluttering, stuttering, tearful mess.
I loved it. We’re a group of three friends and Nadal fans who remain so to this day. We were watching the match together. It remains one of my favourite memories.
Now, 13 years later, Rafael Nadal has surpassed Roger Federer for the most Grand Slam singles titles, outright, at the very event he reduced him to tears all the way back in 2009. As soon as the match is over with Daniil Medvedev, us three friends immediately communicate, the love for Rafael Nadal as strong as ever.
I am older now, in my 30s. I certainly don't dislike Roger Federer, quite the contrary. I even wrote about him last year. I was very complimentary.
But as Nadal lifted the Australian Open above his head once again, my 18-year-old self was back once again, hoping that Roger Federer shed a few tears, maybe of joy for Rafael Nadal or, so the 18-year-old in me hoped, maybe of sorrow because of him.
AHM Mustafizur Rahman is Joint Editor, Editorial & Op-ed at the Dhaka Tribune. As mentioned in his piece on Roger Federer, he considers tennis to be the best sport in the world.