“The first tournament he played left-handed was quite difficult” | Relief

In the week before the match of the century, that 2008 Wimbledon final in which Rafael Nadal dethroned Roger Federer, The Spaniard received a Nike team at the house he rented in London to shoot an advertisement. The idea they had was to record the player doing things with their hands: brushing your teeth, writing in a notebook, playing darts, throwing your keys in the air and catching them again…

What Nike wanted was show one of the issues most incredible in Nadal’s career: that, in reality, the Balearic He is not left-handed, but right-handed. In the advertisement it is clear: with his left hand he does not know how to brush his teeth or write or throw a dart… The only thing he does well – and very well – with his left hand is play tennis.

How did Nadal end up playing tennis with his ‘bad’ hand? History has its crumbbecause in his beginnings on the circuit there was a rumor that it was his uncle Toni who made the decision. That he had forced him to change hands because being left-handed in tennis gives a certain advantage, since most players hit with their right hand. But it was by no means an imposition from Toni: if Nadal plays left-handed, it is simply by chance..

When Nadal started playing tennis at the age of three, the boy hit both the backhand and the forehand with two hands. It is not something very strange, since children do not have much strength in one arm and the fact of playing with two helps them propel the ball. Nadal spent several years like this, until he had a conversation with Toni that changed everything.

“We have to start playing the forehand with one hand,” Toni told him. “Why?” was Nadal’s response. And his uncle responded with another question: “How many top ten players do you know who play with two hands, the forehand and the backhand? Well, you’re not going to be the first, right?” Toni was right: no great tennis player in history has played the forehand with two hands. The most famous case was that of the Frenchman Fabrice Santoro, champion of six ATP titles and who reached number 17 in the world ranking in 2001.

Nadal was convinced, now he just needed to see which hand to play with. And Toni didn’t want him to be left-handed, but he really thought he was left-handed. “I am a logical guy. I chose the left because of what he did. For years, he already served with the left and with the right and he didn’t serve well with either. And when he played in the back of the court and the ball went to him In the middle, he leaned to the left. And he also hit him harder from that side. I thought it was his dominant side,” says his uncle. “All my life I thought I was left-handed.”

“It was a progressive change. One day we started training for a few minutes with one hand and then we did the rest of the training with both. Two weeks later, we added more time playing with one hand. Until one day I told him: ‘You are going to play this tournament with one hand’“, reveals Toni.

Nadal was about ten years old. “I remember it was a strange feeling,” says the Spaniard in the Nike advertisement about that first tournament he played with one hand. “ANDor I remember. The first tournament he played with his left hand was quite difficult, but it was a step that had to be taken“. It was quite difficult, but Nadal actually won that tournament. “He won it because he was much better than the others”says Toni. “Of course it was worth changing hands. The left hand has worked very well for me,” admits Nadal.

The advantage of being left-handed

Would Nadal have been just as good if he had started hitting him with his forehand that day? We will never know, but of course playing left-footed has given him a lot of advantage in a circuit dominated by right-handers. In fact, his rivalry with Roger Federer – right-handed – is marked by a tactic that Nadal used and that would have been impossible to carry out if he had chosen the right hand.

The Spaniard crushed his one-handed backhand with top spin and forced him to always hit with the head of the racket over his shoulder, a very uncomfortable gesture. That strategy was even more exaggerated on clay. Nadal tormented Federer with that top spin and the Swiss found the solution very late. It was in Indian Wells 2017, when in the final stretch of his career he decided that he would no longer wait for Nadal back on the court, but would start hitting almost every backhand with a bounce soon. Everything could have been different if that day, Nadal had picked up the racket with his forehand.