“Rafa Nadal’s Journey: From Left-Handed Anomaly to Tennis Legend and Retirement Announcement”

A week before the 2008 Wimbledon final, the best match in tennis history, Rafa Nadal and his then coach, Toni Nadal, filmed an ad for Nike in which they recalled a happy anomaly: the only thing Nadal knows how to do with the left is playing tennis and playing soccer. The brand made him write, throw darts, brush his teeth with both hands; Nadal is right-handed, and he was right-handed when he started playing tennis: he hit everything with both hands to hit with more force. In the book Sin red (Debate, 2015) by Argentine journalist Sebastian Fest, Toni Nadal refutes the myth that he forced his pupil to play with his left foot. “I thought he was left-handed,” he said, because he assumed that, being left-handed on his feet (there is no doubt about this), he was also left-handed. Playing soccer with his left foot he does it naturally; play tennis, unknown. “Maybe if he had played right-handed he would have played better, I don’t know.” By always hitting with two hands, what was Nadal with the racket? “When he was ten years old I made him play with one hand. With the left, because it was the foot with which he shot the strongest. He was hesitant, and so I told him: “Hey, how many do you know of the top ten play with both hands on both sides? “None”, he told me she. “Well, you’re not going to be the first.”

I remembered this story in the press conference that Nadal gave this week (a press conference to remember, because of what he said and how he said it) to announce his retirement next year, to remember that he has earned the right to leave. of the slopes as he wishes, not forced by injuries, and to say that, as in life, mental health in elite sport must be taken care of and cured when it weakens, also trained. And for that, professionals are needed. Nadal suffers from a degenerative disease in his left foot called Müller-Weiss syndrome. He has suffered from it since 2005. He weakens the tarsal scaphoid bone, deforms the limb and causes pain even when walking; it is an essential bone to move the foot. He has played anesthetized; he has won anesthetized. And I thought: “And if he is also right-handed?”. A crazy idea: Nadal is already left-handed, but what if he was only ten years old out of pure practice, pure training, not from birth? What if, in addition to fighting Federer and Djokovic, two out-of-class tennis players, Nadal –Nadal’s foot, Nadal’s punished joints– were his own first rival, the last monster on the final screen to be beaten? ?

Let’s go back to Nike. has been released Air, a film directed by Ben Affleck and starring Matt Damon. A sensational story: the story of how Nike, through one man, Sonny (Damon), changes the relationship between brands and athletes. He turns one of them, a promising youngster named Michael Jordan, into a pair of sneakers: “He won’t wear our sneakers: he will be our sneakers.” Air Jordan. Sonny’s decision to bet all or nothing on Jordan, wanted by Converse and Adidas, then well above Nike, occurs when he sees Jordan’s shot repeated over and over again, at the age of 18, in the last second of the game. college championship. His peace, his self-confidence, the tranquility of knowing that you are made of the stuff in which geniuses solve matches without blinking at the last second.

Account Carlos Moyá in From Raphael to Christmas (Roca Editorial), by Ángel García Muñiz and Javier Méndez Vega, who became the other in 2004, when Nadal played the second game of the Davis Cup final against the United States. The rival was Roddick, who had beaten him weeks before at the US Open: (6-0, 6-3, 6-4). He also won the first set in Seville: 7-6. Then Jordan came out. Or as Moyá said, “the beast”. The decisive moment and the decisive tennis player; the super elite, those who play even better in the most sensitive moments. He went like a concrete mixer over Roddick. And that, the ability to remain calm and hit harder when it is most needed, the most armored head on the circuit and his tolerance for suffering (against Federer, against Djokovic, against his tortured physique), is what is coming to the final. It’s over.

Nadal’s reign begins the last countdown, the final one of a career threatened by them and that have been disrupted, time and time again, by a title. The announcement of him occurs on the eve of Roland Garros; the tennis player who has been a plague of locusts on the clay. The most dominant on a surface that the world remembers, a terror that returned everything in such a way that he now intends to return to fate the final date of his career: he will say it and with the arm that he considers.

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