If you want to keep a secret, it’s best not to share it with Roger Federer. In a time coincidence as extraordinary as involuntary, Rafael Nadal insisted that he is not a retired tennis player so that, just hours later, Federer exposed all his doubts about precisely that issue: continue or hang up the racket.
Nadal spoke first on Monday night in Madrid. He did so with the discourse of his recent times, winding, unclear, sometimes somewhat contradictory.
‘I’ve had a lot of physical problems throughout my career, but especially these last two years. In the end there comes a time when I can’t live every day thinking about retirement,’ Nadal told Pablo Motos on “El hormiguero”, one of the highest rated shows on Spanish television.
And what happens if Nadal stops thinking about retirement?
‘What I have done during all this time is to give myself a margin, to give myself the option to enjoy again, to play tennis after a year and a half away from the courts. And that’s what I’m doing, trying to enjoy every day, trying to do my best every day’.
Translated: he wants to continue. Which does not mean that he has no doubts. He has a lot of doubts, of course, and that’s why he called Federer last week, as the Swiss himself revealed Tuesday, a few hours after Nadal’s remarks in Madrid, to Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s flagship ‘Today’ show.
What Federer said has to be analysed sentence by sentence, because it is very significant.
‘I actually just spoke to him this last week. He wanted to ask me something, and we had a chat’.
Likely translation? Nadal called him to ask him for advice on a very important issue. And what is the most important issue the Spaniard has on his hands today?
‘I felt a little bit sorry for him. That his summer didn’t go as well as planned because, at the French Open he had a tough draw. Olympics, he had a tough draw as well. He was hoping, I think, to get a medal.’
Likely translation? Nadal confessed his feelings to Federer, the blow it meant for him not to achieve the goals he had set for 2024. When the Swiss says ‘I felt sorry’ for him, the verb tense he chooses implies that that sorrow stemmed from what Nadal told him during the conversation.
‘But you know, overall he can do whatever he wants. He’s been one of the most iconic tennis players we have ever had in our sport and that’s what I told him. So I just hope he can go out on his terms and the way he wants to, but he’s a great guy, great career.’
Likely translation? A succession of very clear sentences from Federer. When he says Nadal ‘can do what he wants to do’, what is he referring to if not his decision to retire or not?
When Federer places him as one of the iconic players of all time, and says that’s what he told Nadal himself, what other avenues might the conversation have gone down, if not to stay or stop? ‘Should I stay or should I go’, sang ‘The Clash’.
And when he says he hopes Nadal can ‘go out on his terms’, what more is there to say?
Perhaps something else: Nadal, a deeply rational being, is probably deluding himself when he says he can’t think day in and day out about retirement. The subject, unsurprisingly, is a recurring one in his head. He is a ruminative Nadal, because it is a decision that takes a long time to digest. And a spontaneous Nadal, because as CLAY was able to find out, he did not warn his entourage that he would call Federer to ask him an important question.
So much time and thought goes into analysing the decision that Nadal shared a joke he makes to his son Rafael jr., who will be two years old next month.
‘I always tell my son, who is already starting to do something: ‘Dad, a potato’, because since he has come into this world I have not won almost any match’.
In Spain they say you are ‘a potato’ when you are really bad at something.
The 14-time Roland Garros champion, absent from the current edition of the US Open for fear of re-injury, then explained in more detail the joke and how he feels about his son.
‘That has changed me for the worse, in sporting terms. But in life, in most things, it has changed me for the better, because in the end I’ve lost, I’ve been injured, but whatever happens, coming home and seeing him changes my mood’.
