Nadal keeps killing ’em with kindness
PARIS — In addition to his physicality, his stamina, his will, his rocketed shots, his left-handedness, his diabolical spin and his rare capacity to take a mid-rally predicament and reverse it into some kind of optical illusion of a winner, Rafael Nadal has this curious knack that continues to wreak a living hell for opponents even 14 French Opens into his career: his humility.
Perhaps no major athlete has plied such a genuine humility to such hegemonic ends. “I have never been arrogant,” he said in Spanish late Friday, and as that has proved true throughout his long stay on a world stage, it also has lent fuel to some outrageous facts.
One fact: He reached his record 11th French Open final Friday when he clambered out of six breakpoint thickets in the first set and destroyed the player soon to be ranked No. 4 in the world, Juan Martin del Potro, by 6-4, 6-1, 6-2.
Another fact: He’s 10-0 in those first 10 finals.
Another: It’s such a thick collection of finals that he has beaten one Argentine, one Swiss four times, one Swede, one Serbian twice, one fellow Spaniard and a second Swiss, so he might as well go ahead and beat an Austrian, who would be No. 8-ranked Dominic Thiem, whose rise through his early 20s found a benchmark Friday when he banged and wrestled through Italy’s Marco Cecchinato, 7-5, 7-6 (12-10), 6-1, to reach his first Grand Slam final.
Another: Around here in the Junes of life, Nadal has beaten men roughly his age, a tad older and a tad younger, so at 32 he might as well expand the collection by playing a 24-year-old from the ballyhooed next generation.
Nadal is 85-2 here. Everybody, including Thiem, chatters about what dreadful chore it must be to beat him in best-of-five. Almost nobody knows. Only two of his 87 matches here have even gone to five sets. Sixty-six wins have ended
in three sets.
Nadal has remained relatively unimpressed.
“Today is a day to rejoice,” he said of doing something for the 11th time. “When you’re in a final like Roland Garros, it’s a great happiness. Being in a final here is something I should rejoice about and be happy about. It may sound easy and logical, but I don’t want it to be. It’s not a routine. I don’t want anyone to think that it’s a routine.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant. I have never been arrogant. So what I simply mean is that even though you have to remain humble, you have to give the value to whatever you’re doing. It would be even more arrogant to think that all this is normal. I have to value what’s happening to me.”
The humility has been a constant, stretching back into last decade.
It turned up early on in memorable little spots such as when he throttled Andre Agassi at the 2006 Wimbledon, saw the crowd fete Agassi upon his farewell, fielded a question about whether he felt slighted or vilified and said, earnestly, “Is his day.”
When he made a smelling-salts exit from the 2009 French Open on the middle Sunday, blasted around the court by the big Swede Robin Soderling in the fourth round, he stopped off on his way out of the premises, giving farewell hugs to the volunteers he’d met. Here, after reporters leave the interview room, he remembers to thank the stenographers. He refrains from assuming. The retired Soderling himself popped by this week, having beaten Nadal in 2009 and lost the final to Nadal in 2010. It’s 2018, with Nadal still up there yearning and straining from the throne, so Soderling said: “It says so much about him. And what I’m really impressed of is that, you know, even though he won it 10 times, he’s here to win 11 times. He looks almost as hungry or even hungrier than when he won it the first time. You know, he didn’t lose any motivation at all. It’s amazing to see.”
How does one not lose even a morsel of zing? “You feel the sport and you appreciate …”
“No, I love what I am doing,” Nadal said. “I love the competition. I love the sport. I can’t say another thing. Because if it’s not that way, it’s sure that I will not be here after I-don’t-know-how-many years of career that I already had. I started with 16 [years old] on the tour, so already 32. So a lot of years of playing and doing the same things every year. But the only way to keep doing this and going on court every morning with the motivation to improve something, because you feel the game, no? You feel the sport and you appreciate.”