Seeking the sources of Rafael Nadal's unbelievable French Open dominance
This is part 1 of a series on the latest book out now about tennis legend Rafael Nadal.
It’s fun to tell myself that Rafael Nadal’s record of 14 French Open championships is a greater feat than Novak Djokovic’s 24 total Grand Slam championships.
That’s likely to be debated for possibly the rest of all time, since it’s difficult to imagine either record ever being broken again. The reason I prefer Nadal’s is because he is one of my favorite players of all time. Others will side with Djokovic, whom I don’t like one bit.
“Nadal came close to Djokovic’s mark for total majors. No one is remotely close to Nadal’s Roland-Garros record, not even his two greatest rivals, and neither could match that kind of dominance at a major on their own best surfaces,” writes Christopher Clarey, a French-American who has long reported on the French Open for the New York Times, in his new book The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay. This is a followup to his book on Roger Federer titled The Master.
“Federer, brilliant on grass, won Wimbledon a record eight times before retiring in 2022. Djokovic, excellent on everything but at his best on hard courts, has won Wimbledon seven times and the Australian Open a record 10 times, which would have gotten a lot more attention if not for Nadal’s numbers in Paris.”
Former player and coach John Lloyd adds, “Of all the statistics that have come out of this great era in tennis on the men’s side, in the locker room what stops people in their tracks the most is 14 French Opens for Rafa.”
I have yet to find a really great book on Nadal. Perhaps the bar has been set too high by perhaps my favorite sports memoir ever, Andre Agassi’s Open, which I recently wrote about in a four-part series. This latest offering doesn’t start out promisingly, jumping around with what at first seems to be a lack of direction and offering silly lines like “One suspects, after watching Nadal beggar belief in Paris for so long, that he might find a way to reach 15 [French Opens] even in retirement.”
But then Clarey begins to find his groove when—perhaps a little too far in—he offers his thesis that Nadal will truly be remembered long into history primarily for those 14 French championships and the many reasons why Roland-Garros was the place that allowed all that dominance to happen for this one man.
Ion Ţiriac, the former Romanian player and continuing influencer for the sport, keeps the Nadal praise flowing: “You are never going to see, not in your life or the life of your children, someone winning a Grand Slam tournament 14 times again.”
When Nadal first played at the French Open in 2005, the record for men’s titles there seemed astronomically out of reach: Bjorn Borg with six. Back in the early 1990s, former No. 1 Ilie Năstase told the author, “Nobody is going to win six again like Borg.”
Clarey argues that one of Nadal’s winning attributes is how he always stayed in the moment better than his foes. Even before all the current distractions of social media, cameras in every pocket, and streaming videos everywhere, this has always been one of the most difficult tasks for tennis players. Nadal found that habitually following routines (including all those wild ticks and pulls and wipes we saw him perform between every point) was his way of staying in the zone.
He laughs about it in the book and admits it all looks ridiculous to the outside eye. But one thing I learned so far in the book that is just utterly stupendous is that Rafa never once threw or broke his racquet. If you don’t play tennis, let me just tell you that is a really amazing accomplishment in such an emotional, difficult, and frustrating game.
In line with the humor he finds in his habitual ticks, he had other ways to turn it on and off on the court versus away from it. While he never threw a racquet on the court, he is known to throw his PlayStation controller plenty when back at the hotel or at home playing video games with friends.
Another paradox: When Rafael’s uncle Toni, who would go on to become his coach, was 11, he saw Năstase play in a tournament in Barcelona and that was the moment he fell in love with tennis. Years later, Toni was done with his own short-lived professional tennis career but recognized the talent in toddler Rafael. Năstase was the complete opposite of what Rafa would become; he was unpredictable, flashy, an underachiever, temperamental, impulsive, vulgar, displayed midmatch buffoonery, and fought with umpires.
Nadal himself explains early in the book: “Clearly there’s always someone with more money, a bigger boat, and a more beautiful wife. I cannot always be looking at the outside, because it’s a recipe for constant unhappiness. It has to come from the inside.”
Many of his peers highlight his ability to outlast his opponents, and clearly that inner strength he was able to conjure was the ultimate source of his legend. Former player John Isner calls Nadal “the greatest competitor in any sport in the history of the world.”
Nadal is of course now retired and remains living in Manacor, where he has essentially always lived. It’s a town of about 50,000 people on the island of Mallorca, Spain, which is east of Valencia and Barcelona and straight north from Algiers, Algeria (the island of Ibiza is also nearby). Clarey writes: “His eponymous, state-of-the-art tennis academy is nearby. His boyhood apartments in Manacor are even closer, and his new clifftop dream house with a Bondian boat slip cut into the rocks below is in Porto Cristo, the resort village only twelve kilometers from Manacor.”
Nadal’s recent retirement adds to the allure of reading the The Warrior right now. Not to mention that the French Open itself has begun (qualifier matches started on Monday) and runs through June 8.