My Federer Obsession:
Nadal Was Necessary

William Skidelsky

Despite my personal feelings about Nadal (Click Here) there is a sense in which he was necessary. Even I can see that. Without him, men's tennis would have become anodyne, predictable.

Federer would have dominated for much longer than he did, racked up many more Grand Slams, including, probably, at least four French Opens. (How many majors altogether: twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six?)

His success would have come to seem unlimited--which is dangerous.He could have become uncherished, resented. And tennis would have been deprived of one of its great rivalries.

The sport has undoubtedly benefitted from the coexistence of Nadal and Federer, figures so different as to be virtually diametrically opposite ideals of what a tennis player should be. But I do wish things could have been more even--that the Spaniard could have won less often, and the Swiss a bit more.

Miami 2004 was when they first met. Federer was twenty-two, Nadal seventeen. Federer wasn't long into his reign of dominance: he'd won Wimbledon the previous July and then the World Master Cup in November and the Australian Open in January, displacing Andy Roddick as World No. 1. His record for the year when they met in March was 23-1.

Nadal was ranked No. 34. He'd made his pro-debut aged fifteen, winning his very first match. The next year, he'd won two Challenger titles and reached the third round both at Roland Garros and at Wimbledon. He was clearly precocious, a phenomenon in the making, but he wasn't expected to trouble Federer.

In his memoir, Nadal writes that he rated his chances of beating the Swiss as "scarcely above zero." Hardly anyone would have disagreed.

Yet Nadal won in less than an hour. Federer was well below his best: he'd suffered heatstroke at Indian Wells a week earlier, which had hampered his preparation. But a psychological blow must have been struck. < p> I didn't watch the match at the time--this was before my obsession had fully taken root--but I have done since, and what's striking is how like a microcosm of their rivalry it is: all the major themes are already in place.

Nadal's defensive capabilities unsettle Federer. In the fourth game, he pulls off one of his familiar Houdini acts, scampering from side to side, retrieving several impossible-looking balls before finishing the point with an on-the-run forehand.

The assuredness drains from Federer's play. He no longer seems to know how to balance defense and attack; he starts making errors, meekly concedes serve.

That their very first match conformed to this pattern may seem surprising, given Nadal's youth and inexperience, but what's also noticeable is that the Spaniard appears older than he is. Federer as a seventeen-year-old looked quite different from Federer as a twenty-two-year-old.

There's a YouTube video of him at seventeen playing Agassi, and the rake-thin teenager is scarcely recognizable: both body and game are nascent, half formed. Nadal at seventeen, though, is very much himself.

His game is much as it always would be. His muscles bulge Even this image is in place: the long baggy shorts, the sleeveless shirt, the whole sweat-drenched long-haired warrior look.

The one difference, in fact, is that the tics aren't nearly so prevalent. Before serving, he only bounces the ball once or twice, and there's little of the anxious self-checking. In comparison to what it would be just a few years later, his disposition seems almost carefree.

Not long after that match, Nadal's ankle flared up and he missed most of the rest of the season. The pair next met a year later, in the final of the same Miami event. This time Federer, who once again had lost just once so far that year, got his revenge-but only just. Luckily for him, the match was best of five (as all Masters finals were in those days). Nadal won the first two sets and went 4-1 up in the third before Federer finally found his game. He broke back and forced a tiebreak, in which he trailed 3-5 before reeling off four straight points. After that, he cruised to victory.

Over the next couple of years, the same pattern repeated itself. Federer went on dominating the tour, unfussily dispatching all comers--apart from the Spaniard. He set unprecedented heights of excellence and consistency. It began to be said that he was invincible, flawless.

Except he wasn't, not quite: the hairline crack was already apparent. After that Miami victory, Federer lost his next five matches to Nadal, all but one of which was on clay, including the semifinals of the 2005 French Open.

In the whole of 2006, Federer lost just five times; four of those defeats were to Nadal (the other was to Andy Murray). He did beat Nadal that year in the Wimbledon final (their first meeting on grass) and at the Tennis Masters Cup. But by this point the truth was becoming painfully obvious: Nadal was Federer's nightmare, his bogeyman, his nemesis, the one flaw in his otherwise perfect universe.

Contrast

All great rivalries are founded on contrast. Federer and Nadal's is no exception. One's a rightie, the other's a leftie. One has a single-handed backhand, the other a two-fister. When the two play, attack meets defense. In any earlier epoch of the game, Federer would almost certainly have been a serve and volleyer. Playing in the power baseline era has forced him mainly to stay back, but he's a forward-pressing baseliner who takes the ball early and often comes to the net.

Though Nadal's volleys are by no means poor, his obvious preference is to camp out well behind the baseline and use his loopy topspin ground strokes to force opponents to do the same.

This isn't to say that he can't also attack to devastating effect, especially with his forehand, which is one of the best the game has ever seen. But Nadal prefers to launch his attacks from a position of impregnability, to put his own affairs in order before going after his opponent.

Defense precedes offense; he absorbs, then retaliates. Federer looks to land the heavy blows right away, and defends only if he has to.

As in rallies, so in matches. Federer looks to seize the initiative. His instincts are predatory, domineering. (He is sometimes compared to a leopard or cheetah.) The best tennis rivalries often seem to adhere to this configuration: the same was true of Navratilova/Evert and Borg/McEnroe, although in both cases it was the leftie who had the single-hander.

After losing to Federer, players often say words to the effect of: "I didn't feel I was able to play my game." Nadal's approach is gradualist, incremental. He hangs back, lies low, lets his opponents come at him.

The Spaniard is sometimes compared to a capybara, the buck-toothed South American rodent, but while it's true that there's a striking visual resemblance, strategically he's more of a boa constrictor: instead of swiftly dispatching his victims, he subjects them to a drawn-out asphyxiation.

Because Nadal's instinct isn't to immediately dominate, because his opponents, at least to start with, often seem to have the upper hand, his matches have a very different rhythm than Federer's.

They are invariably battles. This helps explain something I've noticed, which is that his matches often appear closer than they actually are. Come into the room while he's playing, and you might assume, from watching a few points, that it's incredibly tight, or even that he's losing; then you'll discover that he's actually 6-3, 6-2, 3-1 up.

This discrepancy is partly attributable to Nadal's on-court demeanor--his psychological need to assume the role of underdog. But it's also connected with his attritional, counterpunching style, one effect of which is to reduce the observable gulf between him and his opponents. Nadal's progress through matches-and through tournaments--is rarely serene.

Federer's superiority, by contrast, tends to be plainly in view: even when his matches are tight, he usually seems much the better player.

I suppose another way of saying this is that Federer is-as has often been noted--a kind of aristocrat. He believes in his own superiority, and has no scruples about making others aware of it.

There is no part of him that wants to hide his abilities from the world. I am sure that he goes into every match believing that he's better than his opponent, that, all things being equal, he should win. As he likes to put it, making the sentiment sound more technical than it is: "It's on my racket."

Nadal's the opposite. The dial of his self-esteem is set purposefully low. He goes into every match thinking that only a superhuman effort will result in victory.

The irony is that Nadal and Federer have fairly similar backgrounds: like the majority of tennis players, both are bourgeois. As Elizabeth Wilson points out in Love Game (Click Here), lawn tennis started out as an aristocratic sport-its original setting was the country house-and, during the first half of the twentieth century, it continued to be associated more with idle pleasure seeking than with bourgeois striving. https://www.amazon.com/Love-Game-History-Victorian-Phenomenon/dp/022637128X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Elizabeth+Wilson+love+game&qid=1574363890&sr=8-1

It migrated to the fleshpots of the Riviera and to California and, in the 1920s, became popular in Weimar Germany. The barriers to entry reinforced its exclusiveness: you had to be independently wealthy to play it to a high level, since the established tournaments were only open to amateurs. (The amateur/professional partition lasted, remarkably, until 1968.)

Wilson's overall argument-one I find largely convincing--is that, in recent decades, the sport's original spirit of playful inventiveness has receded. Visually, it has become less like dance and more like boxing. It has become less romantic, more martial.

In this context, Federer's aristocratic bearing is significant: it can be seen as another example of his unique era-straddling abilities, his capacity to reconnect the sport with its past.

Yet it is somehow typical of Federer that, alongside recalling the old amateur ideal, he also manages to be the consummate modern professional--not to mention the most financially successful tennis player ever.

Nadal makes playing tennis look like awkward, stressful work. All this, no doubt, goes a way to explaining their respective injury records. Nadal, as we've seen, is seriously injury-prone. Federer, throughout his career, has been miraculously injury-free But the contrast matters for another reason: it reflects how Nadal and Federer embody opposed ideals of sporting excellence. Everything about Nadal stands for effort and its associated attributes: strength, endurance, courage, determination. Federer embodies the qualities that so often go with effortlessness: skill, talent, elegance, beauty. There's a division in sport, as in life, between these two sets of virtues.

There's an extent, of course, to which Federer's effortlessness must be illusory. It's not as if he is exempt from the stringent training that all elite-level sport requires. The ease and beauty of his tennis are underpinned by formidable endeavor. Yet that endeavor has never been particularly visible: he has never given the media access to his training blocks, as Murray did in Florida in 2012.

He doesn't wear his capacity to train hard as a badge of honor, as many other top players do. And there seems to be some genuine basis to the idea that Federer doesn't have to work as hard as his rivals.

As a junior, he was known for never particularly relishing training: his performances were always much better in matches than they were on the practice court. Nor was he subjected to the kind of brutal regime that Uncle Toni foisted upon Nadal.

Federer's parents allowed him to make his own decisions about how much he played, what his goals should be. Videos of Federer and Nadal practicing at tournaments suggest that such differences continue: whereas Nadal always practices with extraordinary intensity, Federer, much of the time, simply strokes the ball over the net at half pace, as if he were hitting in the park.

Nadal fans portray their hero as impeccably grounded, while depicting Federer as bigheaded, supercilious. And there may be an element of truth in this. But it's always seemed to me that there's something excessive about Nadal's humility, that, in a way, it's more dishonest than Federer's hauteur, which at least has the virtue of being com- mensurate with his abilities.