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Two decades chasing the amazing story of Rafael Nadal

story of Rafael Nadal
Sebastian Fest during an interview with Rafael Nadal in November 2011 in London.
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In the more than 30 years that I have been a journalist, I have never followed a story with such closeness, persistence and intensity as that of Rafael Nadal.
On the day of his retirement, the introduction to my latest book, ‘Gracias’, (Ediciones B, Penguin Random House, Barcelona 2023) in which I delve into the career of one of the most amazing sportsmen of all time.
***
The room looked white, very white. As white as the atmosphere was unbearable, saturated by the smell of fresh paint.
I was alone, waiting for someone to arrive whom I knew very well, but with whom I had never spoken until then. It was 17 August 2004, in the middle of the Olympic Games in Athens, and Carlos Moyá opened the door, bringing a prodigy practically by the hand: Rafael Nadal.
On that Greek night, it was Moya who carried the weight of the conversation. World number one for two weeks in March 1999, one year after that great title at Roland Garros, we knew each other well: I had been following him on the tour for years and had written about him 
for the DPA news agency, where I worked at the time.
I had seen Moyá win his first ATP tournament in 1995. It was in my city, in Buenos Aires. Hardly anyone knew him, but no one would forget: Moyá became adopted by the Argentines, a people and a country among whom he always felt very comfortable.
The young Rafael was facing a similar moment to that of Moyá nine years earlier. He had just won in Poland, in the seaside resort of Sopot, his first title on the major tour.
He had enough to count on, but Nadal respected his elders, in this case, Moyá, who was a mentor, rival and then coach, as well as a lifelong friend. Nadal, serious countenance and eyes wide open, spoke little and listened a lot.
‘For me it was a goal to be here, also in singles. It could not be because in Spain there is a very good level, I could not be among the top four and, well, that’s the way it is.
It is touching, almost two decades later, the phrase of a Nadal who had just lost in the first round of doubles in Athens 2004 with Moyá. 
It was impossible to imagine all that the Mallorcan would achieve, but it was clear that there was something special there, someone very special.
That Nadal of the beginnings still often looked to the ground, crushed by a shyness that evaporated the moment he stepped on the court. He was a different man, less than three years later, when we met in the cafeteria of the Dubai Aviation Club, on an afternoon in March 2008 when, in half a minute and without hesitation, he assembled his ideal team of footballers of the moment. He showed he knew a lot, because after putting
Robinho at right forward, he crossed out the name and replaced it with another: Lionel Messi.
The Brazilian was a Real Madrid player, and Messi was a Barcelona player, although that never mattered to Nadal, who has his ‘Real Madrid hooligan’ moments, but who sees and understands football in depth and beyond colours. And that he plays it too well, in fact; you only have to take a stroll through YouTube to admire some of his goals and moves in the days of his youth when he could still afford to play football.
Nadal already looked more grown-up in that chat in the club that saw him born as a tennis player in Manacor, or in the family restaurant in Porto Cristo, Mallorca. He was in a bad mood, sleepless in the lobby of the Intercontinental hotel in Miami, sparkling with his girlfriend in the cold, grey players’ lounge of Paris-Bercy, relaxing outdoors amidst the lushness of the Princess Hotel in Acapulco and serious and tired at the Monte Carlo Country Club as we chatted while losing sight of the Mediterranean.
Sebastian Fest during an interview with Rafael Nadal in April 2012 in Monte Carlo / BENITO PÉREZ BARBADILLO
And very kind in 2015. After eighteen years of living in Spain, I had returned to Buenos Aires to take over as Sports editor of the newspaper La Nación. The twists and turns of life: I was actually supposed to go to Washington as a correspondent for the DPA agency, but something happened, the plans changed. In January 2015, convinced that my journalistic mind would soon be set on the White House and not Roland Garros, I covered the Australian Open and explained to the Nadal family that I was saying goodbye to tennis, at least to the intensity I had been following it until then. Toni Nadal, genuinely shocked by my shift from top-level sport to top-level politics, had some very kind words for me, and shortly afterwards I received an unexpected gift: Nadal’s racket.
I didn’t touch it for four years, it seemed to me a sacrilege that my tennis should come together with that racket. But one day I decided to try it. I was surprised.
Five months later, in June, with the Washington plans shelved for a while, I attended Nadal’s press conference at Wimbledon after a straightforward first-round win over Brazil’s Thomaz Bellucci.
A month earlier, ‘Sin red’ had been published, the book in which I break down the rivalry between Nadal and Roger Federer, the most transcendent ever in men’s tennis.
At the end of the press conference, Nadal comes out from behind the desk where the players usually speak and approaches my seat to greet me, to the astonishment of several Anglo-Saxon colleagues in the room.
He knew I was living in Buenos again. Gently, he greeted me in my new life. I had sent him a copy of ‘Sin red’.
– Did you get it, did you read it?
– Yes, yes. I got it. And I must say I’ve read quite a lot, quite a lot for me.

– What did you think?
– I enjoyed it…

Seven years later, in November 2022, in Buenos Aires, Nadal was in jocular mode
. A recent first-time father, he had travelled to Argentina to play an exhibition match with Norwegian Casper Ruud. As I waited for the moment to sit down and talk with the Norwegian, who was coming off an amazing season, a voice rang behind me and next to my ear.
‘Sebastian, stop lying to people.’
It was Nadal. It had been a while since we had seen each other, injuries and pandemics aside, and that approach, halfway between warmth and irony, was very Nadalian, it carried his stamp. And it was a good way of greeting each other without saying much more.
I am fortunate to have been able to speak in Spanish with Nadal, our shared mother tongue, and in German with Roger Federer, also his mother tongue. A certain type of dialogues that, when the back and forth takes place in English, the lingua franca in the world of tennis, are lost.
This is not the case in this book.
There were many nuances in the early hours of 14 September 2010, a vibrant early morning.
‘Hey, congratulations, that’s amazing what you did.’ It probably wasn’t my wittiest or warmest witty or warm, I probably could have said something more substantive. But it was half past one in the morning, I was in the middle row of seats of a white van in a dark parking lot in Queens, New York.  and the excitement and tension of the past few hours were pounding not only in my body: they had also taken their toll on my mental agility.

So little light was there in that open-air car park on that closed night at the end of the New York summer, that if I hadn’t climbed into the van with him, I simply wouldn’t have known who I was talking to,
Even though I’ve been covering big events for more than thirty years, those details of top sport never cease to thrill me. I never cease to be shaken: at the moment of triumph (or defeat) there is a lot of light, even too much, there is too much light, there are thousands of spectators and tens or hundreds of millions of television viewers. Everyone is watching the star. 
But sooner or later, that star is left alone and in the dark. 
And so he was, practically alone. And in the dark, no doubt. ‘Thank you, thank you”, was the answer that slipped between the hollow of the headrest that served as a “border” between the two of us and allowed us to keep some distance. So it was that we opted each one trying to sort out his own particular whirlwind of the last few hours – his incomparable, mine merely journalistic – and I was also respectful of a young man who had come from four hours of battle on the concrete, a long press conference and several interviews with accredited journalists at the tournament. An intense working day of almost ten hours. That, and the barrier that I always impose on myself: that of a distant proximity to the distant proximity to the protagonists. Too far away you get cold, but too close you get burnt.
In that brief minute we spent alone in the van, I was privileged, the envy of almost anyone: I was alone with Nadal, the man who had just won the US Open, the number one who could already say that he had lifted the trophies of the four major tournaments, the young man who was a legend on a par with Fred Perry, Rod Laver, Donald Budge, Roy Emerson, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer. And since that night, so has Nadal. Later, Novak Djokovic would join them.
What was I doing there with Nadal? The van was the scene of his last interview that night, a place as unusual as it was ideal, because as we crossed the empty motorway on our way to a calm Manhattan empty freeway on our way to a calm Manhattan, both of us already very loquacious and re-energised, Nadal gave me one of the best interviews I ever did with him. If for a good interview you need a good interviewer, but also a predisposed interviewee, Nadal was the ideal counterpart that night.
So much so that he neutralised the obstacle still represented by that headrest, through the side of which I had slipped my tape recorder. ‘Do you want me to hold it? That’ll be more comfortable’. And for the next twenty minutes, with the white van cutting through the darkness of the night, the man who was already one of the greatest tennis players of all time kept the tape recorder up to his mouth. While we talked about wooden rackets, the fear of the sea when he can’t see the bottom or whether it’s possible to ‘hate’ tennis, an entourage that is unusual in an interview listened in absolute silence: his father, his girlfriend, his agent, his press officer, his man at Nike and his physiotherapist.
In the end, and before I was dropped off in the corner of my hotel, we ended up talking about football. After all, two months earlier, Nadal and I had been to Johannesburg, at Soccer City Stadium – him as a fan, me working – the one in which Spain had won the World Cup for the first time in its history. After all, Argentina, my country, had surprisingly beaten Spain 4-1 in a friendly match in Buenos Aires a few days earlier.
‘World champions of the friendlies,’ Nadal teased me with laughter. Not a bad definition, especially coming from a man who knows so much about football
. Two minutes later the Nadal’s dropped me off on Second Avenue and Fiftieth Street, twenty metres from my hotel.
It was an early morning of empty streets in the city par excellence of the United States. A country which, when it comes to sport, offers statistics for everything. Everything is measurable, there is always a figure to explain what happens. This often leads to sports chronicles in which there are too many numbers and not enough soul, heart and life, which is what sport is (also) about.
But the Americans forgot one statistic, they missed an opportunity to measure a strange phenomenon, a opportunity to measure a strange, novel phenomenon: that of the thank you machine.
‘Gracias” (Thank you), Sebastián Fest’s latest book about Rafael Nadal

It may sound like a boutade, but it is not: hardly anyone in the history of sport has said ‘thank you’ more times than Nadal.
Thanks to the public, thanks to the organisers, thanks to the rivals, thanks to the ball boys, thanks to the journalists, thanks to the chauffeurs, thanks to the restaurant staff, thanks to the hostesses of the airlines, thanks to the employees of the hotels staff. 

Thank you.
Once, ten times, a hundred and a thousand and a thousand times over more than two decades of public exposure. A beautiful word, because it says a lot about the recipient, but much more about the sender.
That is why we chose it to baptise this book.
Thank you, says Nadal.
And thank you, I say to you. Thank you for reading.
+Clay  The great tennis taboo falls: Brazilian Joao Reis comes out as gay

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