“I became world champion in Mexico the year I was born,” says Jorge Valdano. I couldn’t see it, Rafa Nadal apologizes. A former footballer, a legendary Argentine striker for decades, interviews a former tennis player who is still trying on his retirement suits: Rafael Nadal, 22 Grand Slam, 14 Roland Garros. Universe ValdanoThe Movistar program brought together the public and the media last Thursday the 20th at Espacio Telefónica on the Gran Vía in Madrid. Queue to get in, expect electric. Barely cold outside, warm from the mud and June sun inside.
One of the most interesting moments of the interview concerns where Valdano takes him, with the Nadal archetype, and the reductive characteristics of his game: the dedicated, self-sacrificing, combative, courageous man, resistant to his opponent’s infernal psychology, a man as strong as a rock. But isn’t tennis a sport of great quality, one in which a mountain of muscles can sometimes be dissolved, at the crucial point, with a very gentle flick of the wrist? Valdano asks: “Didn’t Nadal sometimes feel less valuable in tennis, or because of the quality of his game?” Nadal smiles. He quotes the phrase, without a clear father, that success is 99% hard work and 1% talent. To emphasize that he worked hard, trained hard, and put in tremendous efforts, but what he did, someone else could do. This means: If success is for those who train their bodies the most, then we can all train it.
A related story was told by José Luis Cuerda. One day, a woman, pointing at César González Ruano, asked her partner what that man did there every night. He replied: “Write.” “Come on, this is what you live on?” “Woman, if we lived like this, we would all write.”
Nadal basically defends something like this in the interview. It gives a certain impression to see one of the best tennis players in history defending his quality and natural talent. But Valdano is right. There is a narrow fantasy of flashing lights in which the idea that Nadal is a great athlete has been entrenched. Instead of playing with a racket, he plays with a loaf of bread. “You can train for as many hours as you want, but if… Driving “It doesn’t go where you want it to go… You can’t stay at the highest level without good tennis, that’s clear.” And without chance, he says, without nature rewarding you with a certain physique or certain characteristics. “Nature has been generous to me,” he admits.
The legend of Lamine Yamal – who takes the name Valdano – and youngsters like him who realize their talent early at the world level, speaks about the importance of passion. About the importance of exploring what your passion is before, when you were kids. And enjoy. “Surround yourself with people who really help you. Let them tell you things that successful people don’t want to hear. Everyone wants to see you, everyone wants to hear from you. But you have to find a point in real life, a place to return to.” “I did everything any teenager could do in their life,” he recalls.
In Rafa style, Nadal defends a powerful discourse: Manacor, his lifelong friends, his lifelong neighbours, the one that carries him to a place that does not threaten to blind him like the lights of New York or Monaco or Shanghai, where everyone knows Nadal. In Manacor too, but to the point where it’s another one. “I always come home,” he takes a sip of water and clears his throat. There are many of them: his birth in a small town and on an island helped him. He says life there “doesn’t move that fast.”
“I didn’t make big sacrifices,” he says. “What I did was a great effort. I didn’t become obsessed. I was a competitor, and when I couldn’t compete at the level I understood I had to compete at, I left. I loved what I did. I didn’t retire because I got tired of what I was doing.” Not even because it is Without the necessary incentive. I retired because my body couldn’t take it anymore. But I was still happy with what I did.”
Success, Valdano asks. Nadal is honest. “The success – the Davis Cup point in Seville, that madness in 2004 when I was 17 – I experienced it naturally.” Because, remember, before he became a world champion, he had already been a champion since he was a child. “I had already won the tournament in Mallorca, and I was already champion in the Balearic Islands. My development was always linked to success, so when professional success arrived, I was already prepared.”
Nadal says tennis is a repetitive sport. “In football, you can do something great throughout the whole match, and not do anything again, and the game is over,” he says. In tennis, if you make three geniuses, you can lose a match. “In tennis it is not possible to disappear.” In fact, Rafa Nadal will never go away.