Rafael Nadal of Spain bites the winners trophy following victory in his Men's Singles Final against Novak Djokovic of Serbia on day fifteen of the 2020 French Open at Roland Garros on Oct. 11, 2020 in Paris, France.Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Ahead of the French Open final everyone and his tennis-hating brother could have predicted, Novak Djokovic tried playing head games with Rafael Nadal.
Djokovic’s coach, Goran Ivanisevic, was asked to ballpark his man’s chances. By his measure, Djokovic was a borrow-from-a-loan-shark-to-up-your-bet lock.
“In my opinion, Nadal has no chance in these conditions, on this clay and with Novak, who has got into his head,” Ivanisevic said.
That quote went round the tennis world at the speed of stupidity.
Less quoted were the next few words out of Ivanisevic’s mouth: “I went a little too far, but …”
The guy couldn’t keep a straight face for the space of two seconds. As he said it, he already knew how silly he was going to look later.
And it turned out even worse than that.
Nadal didn’t just beat Djokovic on Sunday. He disassembled him – 6-0, 6-2, 7-5.
If it had begun to feel over the past couple of years that Djokovic had become tennis’s unstoppable force, he just met his immovable object.
“Today you showed why you are the king of clay,” the Serb said during his concession speech.
Until Nadal came along, the most dominant player in the history of Roland Garros had been Bjorn Borg. The Swede played in this tournament nine times. Nadal has now won 13 of them.
It is as though there is one tournament being played in Paris by every other pro in history, and a parallel solo one Nadal plays by, for and with himself. In this particular milieu, he is working at a level of sustained excellence unparalleled in an individual professional sport.
Now once again, we must ask the dreary question that has become existential in modern tennis – Federer or Nadal?
Nadal’s win on Sunday brings him level with Roger Federer at 20 Grand Slam titles. If this is being decided by bulk weight of silver, Nadal now has a decisive edge. He is five years younger than Federer, and the Swiss is in the midst of a full year off after knee surgery.
You can’t know what Federer is going to look like when he returns. But it’s a fair bet that a middle-aged man who’s just gone through a year of rehab probably isn’t going to come out the other end better at tennis than he was before. And what he was before was a player just good enough to not win Grand Slams.
But around the time he won his eighth Wimbledon a few years ago, Federer went poststatistics.
He didn’t become arguably the most admired athlete on Earth because he won a bunch of things (or, at least, not just because of that).
Federer is beloved because he inhabits our ur-idea of how a tennis player should be. On the court, he is languid and magesterial. Off it, he is a polyglot with a mid-20th-century sense of social comportment. Everywhere Federer is, he seems totally at ease with himself and his surroundings. You have never once seen the man genuinely out of sorts.
This public persona would not work in every sport.
For instance, former New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist is essentially Federer on skates. If anything, the Swede is even more debonair, more unflappable and looks even better in a suit.
But people don’t want their hockey players doing a James Bond impression. They prefer their rink heroes a little grimier. As good as he was, Lundqvist was never anyone’s favourite player, much less an immortal of the game.
Federer had the sense to do what few pros manage – align his temperament with his talent. The result is a one-man brand that will be making more than any other tennis player going long after he’s stopped playing the sport.
While it’s possible that Nadal is on aggregate better than Federer the player, he is never going to be able to compete with Federer the archetype.
(And let’s not get started with Djokovic. He could win a hundred majors and the first question he’ll be asked in every postretirement interview will be “What’s Roger really like?”)
But if Nadal is tennis’s second man, has there ever been a second man of such significance in any sport?
Again, the key to Nadal’s charm is not his ability. Lots of tennis players have been great. Nadal has had the good fortune to dominate one key venue at a time when medical science has advanced sufficiently to reconstruct his wonky knees every few years.
Nadal is beloved because he has suffered Federer’s pre-eminence so uncomplainingly for so long.
Whenever you see Nadal, he looks melancholy. It’s just the cast of his features. Even when he smiles, he looks as though he’s just endured some insult. He also has a unique ability to point an occasion toward wistfulness.
“The feeling [at Roland Garros] is more sad than usual,” Nadal said early in this year’s half-shuttered, late-fall iteration. “Maybe that’s what it needs to feel like. It needs to be sad.”
Nobody understands sad like Nadal. Everybody remembers that he played in the greatest match in history (against Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon final). Everyone forgets that he won it.
No matter what Nadal does, someone will always say of him, “But if you took away the French Open …”
Except you can’t. You can’t take away anything. Nadal has met every bar for immortality – prodigiousness, sustained excellence, an outsize number of victories and in direct competition with others with claims on legendary status. Nadal didn’t just win more than anyone else, he did it while playing repeatedly against two or three (if we include Andy Murray) of the best players in history.
Federer had a nice, little run at the beginning of his career when the toughest competition he faced was working at the Juan Carlos Ferrero/Andy Roddick level.
That in the end is the unfair difference between the two best. Federer made it all look easy. And even when he is at his best, Nadal makes it look hard.