By Vikram Nijhawan
In his final French Open match in May, Rafael Nadal took to Court Phillipe-Chatrier like one of the three hundred Spartan warriors at Thermopylae. He’d established his prowess and notched countless victories on these courts his entire career. Now that his reign faced legitimate jeopardy for the first time, he was determined to stand his ground. But if a blaze of glory was the best he could hope for, that mission was slipping further and further away.
Nadal served at 15-40, 0-1 at the start of the second set in his first-round match, against an imperious Alexander Zverev. He opened the match by surrendering his serve, then lost the first set 3-6. Another immediate break to start this set would surely be perilous. The red sediments staining his white socks and shorts, the residue from his long-time battlefield, could on this day easily be confused for an old player’s rust, or first blood drawn.
One of his better first serves of the match went deep down the tee, setting up a crosscourt rally. A sharply angled Nadal backhand forced a Zverev forehand to fly long. At 30-40, he fired off his first ace of the match to bring the score to deuce. His next serve went unreturned. At Ad, he yanked Zverev out wide, then ran around to thump one of his signature forehand winners into the open deuce court. He held, and by doing so, gave the invested audience something to hold onto as well.
The inevitable kept at bay, if only for a little while longer. For most of his career, Nadal was content to evade time’s grasp, and to pummel mortality into submission. If his winning on his Parisian terre battue wasn’t a foregone conclusion for the better part of the early 21st century, then he did a good job of making it seem so. His supremacy at Roland Garros felt like one of the few sure things in the increasingly uncertain world in which I came of age. In 2020, the least shocking global event was Nadal winning a 20th major title there, in a near-empty stadium, within a once-buzzing metropolis rendered a ghost town under a nationwide pandemic curfew.
That match happened on my twentieth birthday: Sunday, October 11. But I didn’t watch it then. As with many of my pastimes, I inherited my love for the sport from my dad, and along with that, a fervid loyalty for one swashbuckling Spanish teenager from Mallorca. Throughout his long life as a sports fan, my dad switched team allegiances too many times to count. At the dawn of the first tennis golden age, when he grew up as a club player and fan, he initially took a liking to the antics of Ilie Nastase, then later the irreverent shotmaking of John McEnroe. Perhaps that prefigured his support for another famous lefty arriviste, decades later, who’d challenge the sport’s reigning golden boy, and its status quo.
When I was first introduced to the sport at five years old, Nadal was everything that a traditional genteel tennis player wasn’t: long hair, short sleeves, bulging biceps, and a racquet that in his southpaw grip more resembled a cudgel. It’s not that the sport had never seen a baseline grinder, or a successful Iberian “dirt rat,” — the old pejorative for clay court champions — but Nadal was the apex of this archetype’s evolution. My dad’s uncle, another lifelong player (tennis ran in the family), always derided him as a “bull,” the animal that soon became the young Spaniard’s brand image. If all you admired was gliding cross-court movements and slick groundstrokes, you didn’t need to look any further than Roger Federer. Nadal was the ruffian who sought to disrupt that tennis empire. I perceived him as the Luke Skywalker to Federer’s Darth Vader (not an unfounded analogy, as it turned out).
But from outsider to the establishment, Nadal soon became the steadiest constant himself. At Roland-Garros, he was Darth Vader, the Leviathan, and every other imperious force of myth and pop culture rolled up into one. His lifetime record at the tournament is 112 wins to four losses. In his runner-up speech at Wimbledon in 2022, Nick Kyrgios said that trying to beat any one of the Big Three in a major final was like climbing Mount Everest — a heroic feat, to be sure, but one occasionally proven possible. Trying to beat Nadal in a French Open final was the journey to the center of the Earth that no one ever lived to recount. In 14 different years, his opponents on the other side of the net in championship matches on the Parisian clay were more often than not rendered passengers; no one, including Federer in four attempts and Djokovic in three, even pushed him to five sets. His invincibility at the tournament was accepted as an immutable truth for the nearly two decades I’d been alive.
I never knew the sport without Nadal’s dominance. His violent on-court grunts were part of the soundtrack of my upbringing, coming from our home’s living room TV, which always seemed to be playing tennis by default. His rituals and tics befuddled grandmothers; his raw machismo caused older sisters to swoon. Eventually, my dad and I stopped following tennis regularly, when the other parts of life got in the way. For a patch of my late adolescence, tennis had existed on my periphery, supplanted by other new interests and academic priorities. I ended up on nodding terms with something I once loved, and took for granted the state of the landscape when I had left it.
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By May 2021, a year into a new post-pandemic decade, tennis had become an afterthought. So on one fateful Friday, when my dad nonchalantly informed me that Nadal had lost to Novak Djokovic in a titanic, curfew-defying French Open semifinal, something awoke in me. I watched highlights of the match online soon after, and absorbed the shock of tennis netizens. After three sets of brutally attritional tennis, Nadal’s lifelong foot injury flared up and rendered him unable to play competitively in the fourth. I felt a twinge of disappointment that my longtime favorite player had lost, that I had missed out on a collective cultural moment, but also something deeper. A certain status quo that I took comfort in was upended. It was a taste of something I had yet to truly come to terms with in my life: aging, and impermanence.
It was the shock to my system that caused me to backslide into my old tennis fandom. I followed the rest of Nadal’s lackluster season before his chronic foot injury ended it prematurely, anticipating his return to court at the start of 2022. Djokovic’s GOAT case was beginning to look unimpeachable, but the race for most major titles was still ongoing. The Australian Open would be a decisive chapter in this story. Nadal returned from his sixth-month hiatus in top form, clinching a tune-up event in preparation, decked out in an all-black kit (“Like Darth Vader without the PTSD,” as some unhinged YouTube commenter described his appearance). My mother wondered where all his hair had gone.
I awoke on that ungodly, pre-dawn Sunday morning at the end of January to watch the Australian Open final. I went in half-expecting to watch as if attending a vigil for a once-great champion. When he went down two sets to love against Danil Medvedev, I braced for disappointment. But hope spread its feathered wings. As he saved the third set, after serving from 2-3 and 0-40 down, it wobbled shakily off the ground. By the end of the fourth, it flew steadily. By the fifth, it soared to new heights, as he went to serve out the five-hour, twenty-four-minute marathon match, completing the most impressive comeback win of his career.
It was more than any Nadal fan could ever hope for, beginning what looked like a proper renaissance. Here he was at 36 years old, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, proving that “some work of noble note may yet be done” in his lifelong field. Even as new contenders arrived on the scene, he showed that he could still hold his own against them, including his compatriot and heir-apparent, Carlos Alcaraz. But nothing felt guaranteed, which made every one of his victories all the more special.
One set point he saved against Zverev in a torturously close French Open semifinal that year captured it all. Down 6-2 in the first set tiebreak, an ace from Nadal and a flubbed volley from Zverev brought the set back within striking distance. With Zverev now serving at 6-4, Nadal had to slide into his backhand corner to slice a return, then pirouetted off his back foot to return to the center – one of his trademark defensive movements. Zverev swung a cross-court backhand that could have ended the set there. Nadal, on the run, slung a sangfroid forehand passing shot; Zverev could only watch the ball go past him. The crowd went delirious. From there, Nadal clawed back to parity. After a few more points, he took the tiebreak, the match, and two days later, his 14th Roland Garros title. For the first stretch of that year, during Nadal’s latest renaissance, it felt like time had frozen.
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With Nadal announcing that 2024 would likely be his last year on the tour, there was reason to believe he could end with some further glory. After all, we had the receipts from two years ago, to show that he could still achieve the unthinkable in his mid-thirties. I recall watching his first-round match against Australia’s Jordan Thompson during that resurgent 2022 season, on Phillipe-Chatrier. Thompson complained to the umpire about the noise, or some disputed line call. “Come on, I need all the help I can get here,” he said, in a mock-pleading way. But when the two players faced each other in Brisbane back in January, the reverse could have been true. Nadal let slip a match point and lost in three sets.
With each passing month, Nadal withdrew from event after event with whatever new injuries his 37-year-old body had picked up. Waiting for the wounded titan to return to the court soon felt like that initial 2020 quarantine period — the goalposts for returning to the earlier status quo slid further back, until these projected deadlines ceased to be reassuring. That he gave up winning chances or suffered new injuries wasn’t entirely shocking or unprecedented. But there was a foreboding, for the first time in a long time. There would be no divine intervention or miracles conspiring for the perfect comeback narrative. Nadal had already spent all of his indulgences. A faint alarm bell rang in the distance, if you cared to hear it; the twelve rounds were up.
When the French Open rolled around, after a clay court swing that delivered more on nostalgia than promising results or form, it was clear this would be Nadal’s final hurrah, despite his frequent hedging when questioned about his retirement. Perhaps impermanence was difficult for him to grasp too. In a cruel symmetry, his first-round opponent for his Roland Garros sendoff was one Alexander Zverev, who nearly ended his title run two years prior, and was currently in the form of his career. The enemy army, a million men strong, encroached on Thermopylae.
I knew that this time, I could sooner expect a vigil than a resurrection. It seemed the rest of the world awaited the same. Sportswriters had their Nadal career eulogies drafted and ready to file. Luminaries like Iga Świątek, Alcaraz, and yes, even Djokovic watched in the audience. They wanted to witness the end of something significant too.
The discrepancy in this match-up was clear to the eye. It was tempting to look away to spare the pain, but even the sound of the struck balls revealed it all — Zverev drilled them with a mallet-like intensity, while Nadal struggled just to make clean contact. He was a half-step slower, but time had kept its pace. Mortality wouldn’t submit so easily now. I watched this match on a rainy Monday morning in my grad school residence, alongside a friend and fellow Rafa fan from Mexico, who’d shout his fair share of Vamoses and other Spanish exclamations when our man got on the scoreboard. Resignation seeped in as the match went on, and the inevitable was in front of our eyes. Nadal lost in straight sets, and the world continued spinning.
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In October, just one day before my birthday, the long-awaited announcement came. Nadal’s final match would be in Spain for the Davis Cup. If the previous career bookending didn’t offer a sufficient chance to exit with glory, surely this historically successful event for Spain (and Nadal) would, where his winning record (29-1) was nearly as outstanding as at Roland-Garros.
His entire family was there watching him, alongside fans from across the country. Nadal lost his singles match, and then Spain lost a decisive doubles match. All the tributes from peers and contemporaries seemed to center on the concept of eternity. Spain’s team captain, David Ferrer, in his post-match ceremony speech to the reeling crowds in Malaga, told his teary-eyed former rival, “There are people who are remembered for their achievements in life, regardless of what they are. Some people are remembered until the end of their days. And some people are remembered eternally. You will be remembered eternally.” He was talking to a man who already had a statue in his likeness, at the site of his greatest career triumphs. A man who already had a stadium court in Barcelona named after him.
Immortality is a lofty goal in tennis, a competitive plane that has already seen the records of old smashed to pieces in recent years, many of them at Nadal’s hands. My most enduring memory from watching Federer’s televised farewell at the Laver Cup two years earlier, aside from his and Nadal’s shared waterworks, was Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” ringing through London’s O2 arena. But the symbolism in those lyrics felt more fitting when reminiscing on Nadal’s career: “And I discovered that my castles stand/Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand.” What jumps to mind is a 19-year-old lying on his back atop the red dirt of Court Phillipe-Chatrier, after winning his maiden title there, too ecstatic about the start of an era to even think about how it could end.
Vikram Nijhawan has written longform stories about tennis for Hammock Magazine and the popular YouTube channel Cult Tennis. He has a knack for running into famous players coming out of changerooms at tournaments.
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