Rafael Nadal, who this week just announced the end of his career, was walking through the living room of his family home in Manacor surrounded by his family. He went with a smile on his face, from ear to ear: he was thought to be invisible. He moved the glasses, gave his father some slaps and everyone played along. “That glass stands up by itself!” they told him. He laughed. He thought that his uncle Toni had been a forward for Milan under the nickname ‘The Great Natali’, that he had powers and that by magic he became invisible.
Another day, also around that time, uncle and nephew were watching a tennis match on television. Rafa didn’t know it, but what that television showed was not strictly live. Let’s say that Toni had already seen it and knew that one of the players was going to retire due to injury. Then he used his magical powers again. “I don’t like that player over there. I’m going to get him injured,” Toni said. Rafa was hallucinating. “No, don’t do that, poor boy.” And when the player in question retired, Rafa went to his grandmother to tell him that his uncle had injured a tennis player.
Another time, on the way to his first interclub tournament, when he was 7 years old, Rafa was in the car with Toni. He was going to face a player several years older. “Don’t worry, if I see that you’re losing, I’ll make it rain,” Toni reassured him. “Can you make it rain?” Rafa responded. “Sure, and so much.” And it started to rain with the game tied. “Toni, I think you can stop the rain now. I think I can beat this guy,” Nadal whispered.
In those years, when winning Grand Slam titles and being number one in the world were distant dreams, Nadal was an innocent child who was deceived by his relatives as they wanted at Saturday meals. He called his uncle Toni the magician. Over time, it is Nadal who ended up fooling everyone. It has been deceiving us for years, decades, making us believe things that do not correspond in any way to reality. He’s a fake.
How many times have we heard that term ‘the left-handed tennis player’? Infinite. Southpaw? No, friends. Nadal plays with his left hand, yes, but it is practically the only thing he does with that arm. He takes the knife with his right, when he plays soccer his good leg is the right one… Nadal is actually right-handed. Why do you play with your left arm then? Simply because Toni thought he was left-handed. As a child, Nadal played both the backhand and the forehand with two hands and one day he started hitting it with his left arm. Toni thought it was natural. But not. Since that day he has been deceiving us all.
And things increased. Because that left-handed man who was actually right-handed began to grow and continued to deceive us. “I like indoor or grass courts more than playing on dirt. Although I like dirt too,” he said in August 2002, at the age of 16, in an interview with local television in Vigo in which he assured that the tournament that most would like to win was Wimbledon. What a phrase for the king of the earth!
There is not, and possibly there will not be, a tennis player who is going to dominate a surface as much as Nadal does on clay: there are 63 titles, 14 of them at Roland Garros. It’s insulting. There was a time, between 2005 and 2007, when he accumulated 81 consecutive wins on clay. There are few objective statements in the field of sport and that Nadal is the best tennis player in history on land is one of them. But even there he was lying to us. He confused us in such a way that while we were gawking at his dirt-smeared clothes, he was preparing to make the jump to the grass of Wimbledon and the hard courts of Melbourne and New York. The king of the land won two titles at Wimbledon, another two in Australia and four more in the United States. What a scam!
And don’t think it stopped there. His muscles, his face dripping with sweat, and his warrior-like pose hid something. Roger Federer, his great rival, was the complete opposite. It was elegant and barely breathable. There is not a single photo in which the Swiss man’s body seems chiseled by a Greek sculptor. Next to Nadal, Federer almost looks like a stripper. In that rivalry, Federer represented Swiss perfection and talent, while Nadal was like a dark-skinned warrior, pure physicality. Another farce: Nadal’s talent overflows from his pores. If not, where are 92 titles, 22 Grand Slams, 209 weeks as number one and more than 20 years in the elite going to come from? If that’s not talent…
We have seen Nadal leave a tennis court with the cup in his hands when a few hours before he was dead and buried. The best example of this other deception was the final of the 2022 Australian Open, when he was losing 6-2, 7-6, 3-2 and faced 0-40 on his serve. He raised it, of course he raised it, against a rival ten years younger than him. And a few months later, we watched, stunned, at a Roland Garros that he won with his foot asleep, without feeling anything. But Nadal has deceived us all, including his rivals.
“I played against him when he couldn’t even walk because of his foot problem. He had his foot anesthetized. In fact, I saw him the next day and he was on crutches. He couldn’t walk,” Casper Ruud, the man who fell, said a few months ago. in that final in Paris. “Even though I lost badly (6-3, 6-3, 6-0), I was actually thinking the night before: ‘You never know, maybe I’ll be so injured I can’t even walk, maybe if there’s a year in the someone who can surprise him could be this one. We all knew he was injured, but he beat us all.” He fooled them all. He fooled us all.
