More from Rafa's book, which is available from today.
MADRID -- Devastated and "without appetite for life," Rafael Nadal contemplated a move into professional golf after a career-threatening injury sidelined him, the 10-time Grand Slam champion writes in his autobiography.
The Spanish player writes in "Rafa" that doctors discovered a rare foot injury in 2005 that had the potential to sideline him for good, prompting thoughts of a future in golf.
In the book, provided to The Associated Press and to be released in the United States on Tuesday, the 25-year-old Nadal describes his toughest on-court battles with Roger Federer at the 2008 Wimbledon final and subsequent Australian Open.
But his off-court problems play a large part in the former top-ranked player's career. The mental toll of his parents' separation hindered his recovery from injuries in 2009, when pride led him to try to defend his French Open title despite his physical problems.
Still, his lowest point seems to have been when doctors discovered a congenital bone problem in the bridge of his left foot soon after a five-set victory over Ivan Ljubicic in Madrid on his toughest indoor surface.
Nadal said that joy was soon replaced by "a state of deepest gloom."
"(The) diagnosis had initially been like a shot to the head," Nadal writes. "The bone still hurts me. It remains under control, just, but we can never drop our guard."
Nadal wept then, just as he did after losing the 2007 Wimbledon final to Federer. But he did not cry on the flight from Melbourne in 2009 when his father, Sebastian, revealed to the recently crowned Australian Open champion that his parents had separated.
"My attitude was bad. I was depressed, lacking in enthusiasm. (My team) knew something had to give," writes Nadal, with the weight of those problems leading to his only defeat in seven appearances at Roland Garros and his subsequent withdrawal from Wimbledon. "My knees were the immediate reason, but I knew the root cause was my state of mind."
Mental toughness -- instilled by coach and uncle Toni -- is a key theme, especially in his ability to bounce back, including trying for his first victory in three Wimbledon finals against Federer.
Nadal was "gripped with fear." The warrior figure he'd cultivated had "lost his courage" after failing to clinch victory on several match point opportunities against Federer. Nadal credits moments like these for improving his mental stamina, with one chapter even titled "Fear of Winning."
"What I battle hardest to do in a tennis match is to quiet the voices in my head, to shut everything out of my mind ... should a thought of victory suggest itself, crush it," Nadal writes on the opening page before later adding: "I think I have the capacity to accept difficulties and overcome them that is superior to many of my rivals."
Toni's "cruel to be kind" coaching strategy was key in developing him into the "tennis machine" he is. He compares his uncle to a figure descended from 16th-century conquistador Hernan Cortes with a Spartan philosophy of life uncommon to his home island of Mallorca.
"There was no let up from Toni. No mercy," the second-ranked player writes. "I look back at that teenage Rafael and I am proud of him. He set a benchmark of endurance that has served me as an example and as a reminder ... if you want something badly enough, no sacrifice is too great."
Nadal offers interesting insight into his regimen, and his family offers some surprising details about the Manacor native, in the 250-page memoir, which was written by John Carlin, who also wrote the book that director Clint Eastwood turned into the film "Invictus."
Nadal's mother Ana Maria Parera labels him a "scaredy cat" who sleeps with a light on, an obedient and docile child who became the "family mascot" inside a close-knit family that Carlin describes as "something Sicilian ... without the malice or guns."
Perhaps the strangest revelation is Nadal's dislike of animals, especially dogs: "I doubt their intentions."
Of Federer there are mostly respectful reflections of a rival and friend that he calls "a blessed freak of nature" for his talent.
The closest Nadal comes to criticism is when he says Federer mis-hit a shot "the way an ordinary club player might" while recounting the epic All-England final that delivered the first of his two Wimbledon wins.
Of current top-ranked player Novak Djokovic, who has beaten Nadal in five straight finals this year, there is trepidation of a "formidable opponent" who is "one hell of a player, temperamental but hugely talented."
Courtesy: ESPN
Showing posts with label Book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book. Show all posts
Uncle Toni Soprano
A little initimidated: Rafael Nadal with his authoritarian uncle Toni
Photo: REUTERS
Last Updated: 7:14AM BST 19/08/2011
If the extracts from Rafael Nadal's autobiography published by Telegraph Sport in recent days here were captivating by any standards, let alone those of the sporting memoir, they also came sprinkled with unusual poignancy.
This is largely thanks to the gap between writing and publication, known in our trade as the lead time. I write as one who once wrote a rave review of a restaurant which closed the day before the piece appeared in print.
Albeit less farcically, the same curse has afflictedRafa: My Story – a memoir conceived in modest celebration of a singular talent in its supremacy, but born into a dramatically different tennis world.
On Monday week, Rafael Nadal will enter the US Open as a very self-doubting defending champion indeed. In the months between the book's completion and its publication, Novak Djokovic, whom he beat in last year's final to complete his 'career slam', has done more than seize his No 1 ranking. With defeat after brutal defeat, on clay more than once as well in the Wimbledon final, he has crushed Nadal's self- belief. Just as the mental scar tissue madeRoger Federer terrified of Nadal, so Nadal now looks well beaten by Djokovic during the knock-up.
Although my copy of this volume is still in the post, I crave the sequel in which he writes of this assault on his senses. I say "he writes", although the author is John Carlin, a half-Spanish journalist whom Nelson Mandela so admired that he wrote the foreword to a previous opus about Africa. Mr Carlin works only with the giants, and Nadal has a useful track record himself when it comes to collaborators.
All of which brings us, by way of a sub-local radio segue, to the star of Thursday's extract, his coach Uncle Toni, who moulded a tiny, right-handed Mallorcan boy into the leftie raging bull who continually gored the Fed to death. He did it through terror. If Toni noted a lapse in concentration, he would belt the ball at little Rafa "to scare me, to startle me to attention". When, at seven, he arrived for a match one broiling day having forgotten his water bottle, Uncle T refused him a drop "to teach me responsibility". He screamed, cussed, teased him for being a mummy's boy, and sent him home sobbing. Such was his hold over the boy that he persuaded him he had the superhero power of invisibility.
To residents of a country where the tight, extended family unit is as quaintly nostalgic a concept as the child's fear of adult authority, this vignette of a boy knuckling down under a wildly aggressive coach is alien. In Theo Walcott's new memoir (and how we've been waiting for that), he comes over all traumatised when Fabio Capello shouts at him for ignoring tactical orders on the training ground.
In Mallorca, things are different, or were 20 years ago. Rafa didn't rebel, he says, not just because he was "an obedient and docile child" who loved tennis. He also loved Uncle Toni, and trusted that he was being cruel to be kind. He still does. "Everything I have achieved, all the opportunities I have had," he declares, "are thanks to him." This is undeniably drivel. No amount of belted balls and enforced dehydration can create a champion. The raw talent and hunger must be there in the gene pool. But it is sincere drivel, and reminds us that what makes Rafael Nadal uniquely appealing in the age of sporting narcissism is his humility.
However enduring the bond, one wonders whether it is time for him to part with Uncle Toni. Facing a challenge as monstrous as Djokovic, anyone else in his position would. So crushing is the Serb's hold over Nadal that it looks almost perverse not to gamble on a new coach with fresh ideas.
Perhaps he will. Judging by the final extract from the book, which concluded, "He is not the all-knowing magician of my childhood," the temptation is there. Much more likely, however, he will not. For Rafa, you suspect, loyalty to family and gratitude to a capricious, tyrannical uncle outrank even tennis. Nauseatingly soppy though this must sound, it is impossible not to adore him all the more for that.
Courtesy: Telegraph
Rafael Nadal - I'd Be Nothing Without Uncle Toni
A little initimidated: Rafael Nadal with his authoritarian uncle Toni
Photo: REUTERS
Last Updated: 6:55AM BST 18/08/2011
In the third part of our exclusive serialisation of his autobiography Rafael Nadal talks about the complex, tense relationship with his coach in our final exclusive extract from his autobiography
My uncle Toni was the resident coach at the tennis club in our home town, Manacor. The clubhouse was what you'd expect in a town of barely 40,000 people: medium-sized, dominated by a restaurant, with a terrace overhanging the clay courts.
One day I joined in with a group of half a dozen children Toni was teaching. I was already crazy about football, playing on the streets with my friends every spare moment my parents let me .
I liked being part of a team and Toni says that at first I found tennis boring. But learning in a group helped, and it's what made possible everything that followed. If it had just been me and my uncle, it would have been too suffocating. It wasn't until I was 13, when I knew my future was in tennis, that he began training me on my own.
Toni was tough on me right from the start, tougher than on the other children. He demanded a lot of me, pressured me hard. He'd use rough language, shout a lot, he'd frighten me — especially when the other boys didn't turn up and it was just the two of us. If I saw I'd be alone with him when I arrived for training, I'd get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
My friend Miguel Angel Munar reminds me sometimes how Toni, if he saw my head was wandering, would belt the ball hard at me, not to hit me, but to scare me, to startle me to attention.
It was always me, too, who he got to pick up the balls, or more balls than the others, at the end of the training session; and it was me who had to sweep the courts when we were done for the day. Anyone who might have expected any favouritism was mistaken.
Quite the opposite. Miguel Angel says Toni bluntly discriminated against me, knowing he could not have got away with it with him and the other boys but with me he could, because I was his nephew.
My mother remembers that, as a small child, sometimes I'd come home from training crying. She'd try to get me to tell her what the matter was, but I preferred to keep quiet.
Once I confessed to her that Toni had a habit of calling me a "mummy's boy", which pained her, but I begged her not to say anything to Toni, because that would only have made matters worse.
Toni never let up. Once I started playing competitive games, aged seven, it got tougher. One very hot day I went to a match without my bottle of water. I'd left it at home.
He could have gone and bought me one, but he didn't. So that I'd learn to take responsibility, he said. Why didn't I rebel? Because I enjoyed tennis, and enjoyed it all the more once I started winning, and because I was an obedient and docile child. My mother says I was too easy to manipulate.
Maybe, but if I hadn't loved playing the game, I wouldn't have put up with my uncle. And I loved him too, as I still do and always will. I trusted him, and so I knew deep down that he was doing what he thought was best for me.
I trusted him so implicitly when I was little that I even came to believe he had supernatural powers. It wasn't till I was nine years old that I stopped thinking he was a magician capable, among other things, of making himself invisible.
During family get-togethers my father and grandfather would play along with him on this, pretending to me that they couldn't see him. So I came to believe that I could see him but other people couldn't.
So there was fun in my relationship with Toni, even if the prevailing mood when we trained was stony and severe.
And we had plenty of success. If he hadn't made me play without water that day, if he hadn't singled me out for especially harsh treatment when I was in that group of little kids learning the game, if I hadn't cried as I did at the injustice and abuse he heaped on me, maybe I would not be the player I am today.
He always stressed the importance of endurance: "Endure, put up with whatever comes your way, learn to overcome weakness and pain, push yourself to breaking point but never cave in. If you don't learn that lesson, you'll never succeed as an elite athlete." He did a lot to build that fighting character people say they see in me on court.
There's a fine balance in the tension that my uncle's presence in my life creates. Usually, as the record shows, it's been a positive, creative tension.
Sometimes he doesn't measure his words well and the effect is to sour, rather than to enhance, my mood, which in turn impacts my game.
A trivial example of the sort of thing I have to put up with would be this: we are at a hotel somewhere in the world and we agree to meet downstairs in the car at a certain time to go to training. He arrives 15 minutes late, but I don't say anything. But the next time I arrive 15 minutes late for an appointment, he complains that we can't carry on this way.
Another example. During a match I'll hear him say, "Play aggressive!" before a return of serve . I'll go for it, the ball will go out, and then he'll say, "Now wasn't the moment".
But it was the moment; it just happened that I messed up the shot. If the ball had gone in, he'd have said, "Perfect!" The atmosphere in our team is tenser when Toni's around than when he's not.
What I never lose sight of is that, on balance, that tension benefits my game. Nor do I forget that he wouldn't generate such a response in me, be it for good or for bad, if I didn't feel a tremendous respect for him.
When I am hard on him, it's because I believe he asks for it.
But one thing must be clear: if we have fights, they are to be taken in the context of a mutual trust and a deep affection built up over many years of being together.
Everything I have achieved in the game of tennis, all the opportunities I have had, are thanks to him. I'm especially grateful to him for having placed so much emphasis from the very beginning on making sure I kept my feet on the ground and never became complacent.
While Toni's refusal to let me off the hook has its value, in that he pushes me always to improve and do better, it can also be bad because he creates insecurity.
I often feel this way, especially in the early rounds of a tournament, and the truth is that while he deserves credit for so many good things in my career, he also deserves blame for me being more insecure than I ought to be.
The point is to hold on to the lessons I've absorbed from Toni but to impose my own judgment more, striving to find the right balance between humility and overconfidence.
Sure, you must always respect your rival, always consider the possibility that he might beat you, always play against the player ranked 500 in the world as if he were ranked No 1 or 2. Toni has helped me to have this very clear in my mind, maybe too clear.
What I am trying to teach myself now is to tilt the balance the other way, to exercise more autonomy over my life and disagree more openly with him. This may be a consequence, in part, of me seeing that Toni has his doubts and insecurities too; that he contradicts himself often; that he is not the all-knowing magician of my childhood.
These are edited extracts from 'Rafa: My Story' by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin, published by Sphere (RRP £17.99). It is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
Courtesy: Telegraph
Rafael Nadal - The 3 Ladies In His Life
Private lives: Rafael Nadal's girlfriend, Maria Francisca Perelló avoids the limelight
Photo: REUTERS
Last Updated: 6:32AM BST 17/08/2011
Rafael Nadal still lives in a wing of his family's large, modern seafront home with its own bedroom, sitting room and bathroom.
He says his family and support team "cocoon me from the dangerously distracting hurly-burly that comes with money and fame, and create the environment of affection and trust I need to allow my talent to flower. To imagine my good fortune and success in their absence is to imagine the impossible".
Nadal's mother Ana Maria Parera
"Deep down, he is a super-sensitive human being full of fears and insecurities that people who don't know him would scarcely imagine," says Ana Maria. "He doesn't like the dark, for example, and he prefers to sleep with the light, or the TV, on. He is not comfortable with thunder and lightning, either. When he was a child he'd hide under a cushion when that happened and, even now, when there's a storm and you need to go outside to fetch something, he won't let you.
"And then there are his eating habits, his loathing of cheese and tomato, and of ham, the national dish of Spain. I'm not as mad about ham myself as most people seem to be, but cheese? It is a bit peculiar.
"He's a prudent driver," she adds. "He accelerates, brakes, accelerates, brakes, and he is awfully careful about overtaking, however powerful his car might be. If I take the car to drive to Palma, only an hour away, he'll beg me, always, to drive slowly and carefully.
"I like to light up the fireplace almost every night. If he goes out, he'll remind me before leaving to put out the fire before I go to sleep. And then he'll phone three times from whatever restaurant or bar he is in to make sure I've done so."
Nadal's girlfriend since 2005, Maria Francisca Perelló
"Travelling together everywhere, even if I could, would not be good either for him or for me," says Maria Francisca, who has a degree in business administration and a full-time job with an insurance company in Palma, Mallorca. "He needs his space when he is competing, and just the idea of me hanging around waiting on his needs all day wears me out. It would asphyxiate me. And then he would have to be worrying about me … No. If I followed him everywhere, I think there's a risk we might stop getting along."
She remembers a time when they were in Paris and he had to go to a dinner hosted by one of his sponsors. "He asked me if I wanted to go, but I chose not to," she says. "I stayed in our hotel. When Rafael got back he said, 'Thank God you didn't come'. The place had been swarming with photographers. For me to have gone would have meant stepping into that celebrity world. It's not a world I want to be part of, nor do I think Rafa would have chosen to be with a woman who looked for that in life.
"Even if my family asks me about Rafael," she adds, "I prefer not to say much. The fact is that I just don't feel comfortable talking about these things, even in private. It's what works for me, and what works for Rafael and me as a couple. We wouldn't have it any other way."
Nadal's sister Maribel, five years his junior
"One time when he was away in Australia my doctor ordered me to have some tests done – nothing too serious – but in all the messages I exchanged with Rafael that was the one thing I didn't mention. It would freak him out; it would risk throwing him completely off his game," says Maribel, whose pride in her brother's achievements does not blind her to "the truth", expressed with teasing affection, that he is "a bit of a scaredy cat".
"He's always talking about buying himself a boat. He loves fishing and jet-skiing, but he won't jet-ski, nor will he swim, unless he can see the sand at the bottom. Nor will he ever dive off a high rock into the sea, as his friends do all the time.
"Most boys growing up see their younger sisters as irritations," she adds, "especially when they are teenagers but that has never been the way Rafael has treated me. He's always urged me to come along when he goes out with his friends. It's natural to us, even if others might sometimes find it strange, and it's part of the secret of our special bond."
- These are edited extracts from 'Rafa: My Story' by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin, published by Sphere (RRP £17.99). It is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
Courtesy: Telegraph
Rafael Nadal - I Act Like Tiger On The Golf Course
Rafael Nadal: why acting like Tiger Woods is the only way I can play a round of golf
Bad loser: Rafael Nadal admits to being 'decidely unfriendly' during a game of golf
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Last Updated: 6:32AM BST 17/08/2011
I think I have a capacity to accept difficulties and overcome them that is superior to many of my rivals. Maybe that is why I like golf so much, because it's a game that also plays to the discipline I've acquired in tennis to stay calm under pressure.
You need a base of talent, obviously, and lots of practice, but what's decisive in golf is not letting one bad shot affect the rest of your game.
I find it impossible to play any game without giving 100 per cent. As a little boy I'd hate losing at anything. Cards, a little football game in the garage, whatever. I'd throw fits of rage if I lost; I still do. Just a couple of years ago I lost at cards with my family and I went so far as to accuse the others of cheating, which I now see was going a little too far.
I don't know where all that comes from. Maybe from watching my uncles compete in the bar at billiards with their friends. Yet it used to amaze even them that, sweet as I supposedly was, I became transformed into a little demon whenever there was a game on.
This means that when I go out on the golf course with my friends everyday human feelings are put on hold. I have a phrase I use before a game to set the boundary between our enmity on the course and our affection off it. I look hard at my golfing pals and say: "Hostile match, right?" I know they laugh at me behind my back about this, but I am not going to change.
I am decidedly unfriendly during a golf game, from the first hole to the last. It's true that you don't need the same intensity of concentration as in tennis, where, if your mind wanders for three or four minutes, you can lose three or four games.
In golf you have more than three or four minutes between shots. Which means there's plenty of time to joke and chat about other things during a round.
But that's not the way I play the game. I take my cue from Tiger Woods. From start to finish, I barely say a word to my rivals; I certainly don't compliment them on a good shot. They complain, they get angry with me, curse me for my rudeness.
They say I'm more aggressive even than I am on the tennis court. The difference between me and my friends, some of whom are much better golfers than I am (I have a handicap of 11), is that I just don't see the point of playing a sport unless you're giving it your all.
- These are edited extracts from 'Rafa: My Story' by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin, published by Sphere (RRP £17.99). It is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
Courtesy: Telegraph
Rafael Nadal - Family Crisis Destroyed My Body & Soul
Rafael Nadal: family crisis destroyed my body and soul
No warning: Rafael Nadal, pictured with Roger Federer after winning the 2009 Australian Open, was stunned by his parents' separation
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Last Updated: 6:32AM BST 17/08/2011
In the second part of our exclusive serialisation of his autobiography Rafael Nadal describes the injury and torment he suffered after the separation of his beloved parents.
On the first leg of the long journey back from the 2009 Australian Open, on the flight from Melbourne to Dubai, my father told me there were problems back home between himself and my mother.
I quickly figured out he meant a separation was on the cards. The news left me stunned. I didn't talk to my father on the rest of the trip home.
My parents were the pillar of my life and that pillar had crumbled. The continuity I so valued in my life had been cut in half, and the emotional order I depend on had been dealt a shocking blow. Our family was close and united, there had been no conflict visible, all we had ever seen was harmony and good cheer.
Assimilating the news that my parents had been going through such a crisis after nearly 30 years of marriage was heartbreaking.
My family had always been the holy, untouchable core of my life, my centre of stability and a living album of my wonderful childhood memories.
Suddenly, and utterly without warning, the happy family portrait had cracked. I suffered on behalf of my father, my mother and my sister, who were all having a terrible time.
But everybody was affected: my uncles and aunt, my grandparents, my nephews and nieces. Our whole world was destabilised, and contact between members of the family became, for the first time that I had been aware of, awkward and unnatural; no one knew at first how to react. Returning back home had always been a joy; now it became uncomfortable and strange.
Through all these years of constant travel and ever more frenzied claims on my time as my fame had grown, Manacor and our neighbouring seaside resort of Porto Cristo was a bubble of peace and sanity, a private world where I could isolate myself from the celebrity madness and be entirely myself again.
Fishing, golf, friends, the old routine of family lunches and dinners - all that had changed. My father had moved out of our Porto Cristo home, and now when we sat down to eat or watch TV, he wasn't there. Where there had been laughter and jokes, a heavy silence hung. Paradise had become paradise lost.
Strangely, the effect on my game was not immediate. I was on a winning streak, and the positive momentum carried me through for a couple of months. I felt no elation at my victories, but my body somehow kept going through the motions.
My attitude was bad. I was depressed, lacking in enthusiasm. On the surface I remained a tennis-playing automaton, but the man inside had lost all love of life.
My team members were at a loss as to how to react to the gloom that descended on me. I became a different person, distant and cold; short and sharp in conversation. They worried about me, and they worried about the impact of my parents' separation on my game.
They knew I couldn't keep winning; they knew something had to give. And it did. First it was my knees that went. I felt the first twinges in Miami, at the end of March. The pain got worse week by week, but I managed to keep playing through it until early May, in Madrid, when I couldn't keep going anymore. Mind could no longer overcome matter and I took a break.
I came back a couple of weeks later for the French Open. Maybe I should not have competed at Roland Garros, but I had won the championship the previous four years and I felt a duty to defend my crown, however unlikely the prospect of victory felt. Sure enough, I lost in the fourth round to Robin Soderling of Sweden, my first ever defeat in that tournament.
This finally pushed me over the edge. I'd made a huge effort to be in shape for Roland Garros, battling to overcome both my parents' separation and the pain in my knees, but now I knew that, debilitated in mind and body, I could no longer keep going.
Terribly sad, I pulled out of Wimbledon. My knees were the immediate reason, but I knew that the root cause was my state of mind. My competitive zeal had waned, the adrenalin had dried up.
My physical trainer, Joan Forcades, says there is a "holistic" cause-and-effect connection between emotional distress and physical collapse. He says that if your head is in permanent stress, you sleep little and your mind is distracted – exactly the symptoms
I was showing at that time – the impact on your body is devastating. Messages are relayed to the muscles that, under the pressure of competition, lead to injuries. I am sure Joan is right.
Being at Wimbledon, trying to get fit, instead of at home reminded me every minute of how dramatically our lives had been altered, which only deepened my introspection and grief.
I've never reached the point of hating tennis, as some professional players say they have. You can't hate something, I don't think, that puts the food on the table and has given you almost everything you have in life.
There can come a time, though, when you grow weary and a part of that fanatical enthusiasm you need to keep competing at the highest level begins to ebb. I've always believed, as my coach and uncle Toni has, that to keep competing you must never break your established patterns.
You have to carry on training hard, long hours whether you feel like it or not, because any slack in intensity will be reflected in your results on court. But a point comes when you just cannot keep going at 100 percent, mind and body, every single day, and the best thing to do is pause and wait for the desire to return.
- These are edited extracts from 'Rafa: My Story' by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin, published by Sphere (RRP £17.99). It is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25
p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
Courtesy: Telegraph
Rafael Nadal - My Story Extracts
Put it there: Roger Federer congratulates Rafael Nadal after the Spaniard won the epic Wimbledon final 6–4, 6–4, 6–7(5–7), 6–7(8–10), 9–7
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Last Updated: 7:27AM BST 16/08/2011
Before a big match my mental state is as taut as it is fragile. I have to follow my locker room rituals in the same order always. It's like a great big matchstick structure: if every piece is not symmetrically in place, it can all fall down.
Forty-five minutes before facing Federer I began the last phase of my pre-game ritual. I took a cold shower. Freezing cold water. I do this before every match. It's the point before the point of no return. Under the cold shower I enter a new space in which I feel my power and resilience grow.
I'm a different man when I emerge. I'm activated. I'm in "the flow", as sports psychologists describe a state of alert concentration in which the body moves by pure instinct, like a fish in a current. Nothing else exists but the battle ahead.
I put on my earphones and listened to music. It sharpens that sense of flow, removes me further from my surroundings. While Titín, my physical therapist, bandaged my left foot, I put the grips on my rackets, all six I'd be taking on court. I always do this. They come with a black pre-grip.
I roll a white tape over the black one, spinning the tape around and around, working diagonally up the shaft. I don't need to think about it, I just do it. As if in a trance.
After Titín had bandaged my knees, I stood up, got dressed, went to a basin, and ran water through my hair. Then I put on my bandanna. It's another manoeuvre that requires no thought, but I do it slowly, carefully, tying it tightly and very deliberately behind the back of my head.
There's a practical point to it: keeping my hair from falling over my eyes. But it's also another moment in the ritual, another decisive moment of no return, like the cold shower, when my sense is sharpened that very soon I'll be entering battle.
Titín bandaged the fingers of my left hand, my playing hand, his moves as mechanical and silent as mine when I wrap the grips around my rackets. There's nothing cosmetic about this. Without the bandages, the skin would stretch and tear during the game.
I stood up and began exercising, violently — activating my explosiveness, as Titín calls it. I jumped up and down, ran in short bursts from one end of the cramped space to the other — no more than six metres or so. I stopped short, rotated my neck, my shoulders, my wrists, crouched down and bent my knees. Then more jumps, more mini-sprints, as if I were alone in my gym back home. Always with my earphones on, the music pumping inside my head.
I went to take a pee. (I find myself taking a lot of pees – nervous pees – just before a game, sometimes five or six in that final hour.) Then I came back, swung my arms high and round my shoulders, hard.
I sat down and checked my racquets, felt the balance, the weight; pulled up my socks, checked that both were exactly the same height on my calves.
Once on court, I sat down, took off my white tracksuit top, and took a sip from a bottle of water. Then from a second bottle. I repeat the sequence, every time, before a match begins, and at every break between games, until a match is over. A sip from one bottle, and then from another.
And then I put the two bottles down at my feet, in front of my chair to my left, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court. Some call it superstition, but it's not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It's a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.
The last part of the ritual, as important as all the preparations that went before, was to look up, scan the perimeter of the stadium, and search for my family members among the blur of the Centre Court crowd, locking their exact coordinates inside my head.
I don't let them intrude on my thoughts during a match – I don't ever let myself smile during a match – but knowing they are there, as they always have been, gives me the peace of mind on which my success as a player rests. I build a wall around myself when I play, but my family is the cement that holds the wall together.
These are edited extracts from Rafa: My Story by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin, published by Sphere (RRP £17.99). It is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
Rafael Nadal - Book Signing in New York
Sat. Aug. 27, Rafael Nadal, Rafa: My Story . The Spanish tennis superstar is sure to draw a crowd for the signing of his autobiography, written with John Carlin. Watch which hand this lefty uses for autographs! Barnes and Noble Fifth Avenue, 555 Fifth Ave.at 46 St., 6 p.m.
Courtesy: Examiner
Courtesy: Examiner
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