Book - Rafa by Rafael Nadal
Notes from the book
Endurance: that’s a big word. Keeping going physically, never letting up, and putting up with everything that comes my way, not allowing the good or the bad - the great shots or the weak ones, the good luck or the bad - to put me off track. I have to be centered, no distractions, do what I have to do in each moment. If I have to hit the ball twenty times to Federer’s backhand, I’ll hit it twenty times, not nineteen. If I have to wait for the rally to stretch to ten shots or twelve or fifteen to bide my chance to hit a winner, I’ll wait. There are moments when you have a chance to go for a winning drive, but you have a 70% chance of succedding; you wait five shots more and your odds will have improved to 85%. So be alert, be patient, don’t be rash.
Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind. Which means taking stock of where you are and thinking coolly.
Aces are like rain. You accept them and move on.
Losing your concentration means going to the net and hitting the ball to his forehand, or omitting in a rush of blood to serve to his backhand - always to his backhand - or going for a winning when it is not time. Being concentrated means keeping doing what you know you have to do, never changing your plan, unless the circumstances of a rally or of the game change exceptionally enough to warrant springing a surprise. It means discipline, it means holding back when the temptation arises to go for broke. Fighting that temptation means keeping your impatience or frustration in check.
Even if you see what seems like a chance to put the pressure on and seize the initiative, keep hitting to the backhand, because in the long run, over the course of the whole game, that is what is wisest and best. That is the plan. It is not a complicated plan. You cannot even call it a tactic, it is so simple. I play the shot that is easier for me and he plays the one that is harder for him - I mean, my left-handed drive against his right-handed backhand. It is just a question of sticking to it. With Federer, what you have to do is keep applying pressure to the backhand, make him play the ball high, strike with the racket up where his neck is, put him under pressure, wear him down. Probe chinks that way in his game and his morale. Frustrate him, drive him close to despair, if you can. And when he is striking the ball well, as he most surely will, for you won’t have him in trouble the whole time, not by any means, chase down every attempted winner of his, hit it back deep, make him feel he has to win the point two, three, four times to get to 15-love.
Pain is in the mind. If you can control the mind, you can control the body.
If you watch the number ten player in the world and the number five hundred in training, you won’t necessarily be able to tell who is higher up in the rankings. Without the pressure of competition, they’ll move and hit the ball much the same way. But really knowing how to play is not only about striking the ball well, it’s about making the right choices, about knowing when you should go for a drop shot or hit the ball hard, or high, or deep, when you play with backspin or topspin or flat, and where in the court you should aim to hit it. Toni made me think a lot about the basic tactics of tennis from an early age. If I messed up, Toni would ask, “Where did you go wrong?” And we’d talk about it, analyze my mistakes at length. Far from seeking to make me his puppet, he strove to make me think for myself. Toni said tennis was a game in which you had to process a lot of information very fast; you had to think better than your rival to succeed. And to think straight, you had to keep your cool.
By pushing me always to the edge, he built up my mental strength.
Ask Toni Nadal what his last words were to his nephew before he left the Wimbledon locker room at the start of the 2008 final and he’ll tell you: “I told him to battle to the end and endure.” Ask him why Rafa has made it to the top of world tennis and he’ll reply: “Because it’s all in the head, in your attitude, in wanting more, in enduring more than your rival.” Ask him what he says to Rafa on those days when the body rebels and the pain seems too great to compete on court, and his reply will be: “I say to him, ‘Look, you’ve got two roads to choose from: tell yourself you’ve had enough and we leave, or be prepared to suffer and keep going. The choice is between enduring and giving up.’”
Another disciple of the endurance principle, in which he believes with almost as much reverence as Toni himself, Miguel Angel says that success for the elite sportsman rests on the capacity “to suffer”, even to enjoy suffering.
It means learning to accept that if you have to train two hours, you train two hours; if you have to train five, you train five; if you have to repeat an exercise fifty thousand times, you do it. That’s what separates the champions from the merely talented. And it’s all directly related to the winner’s mentality; at the same time as you are demonstrating endurance, your head becomes stronger. The things you receive as gifts, unless they come with a special sentimental attachment, you don’t value, whereas the things you achieve by your own efforts, you value a lot. The greater the effort, the greater the value.
You are the sum of all the games you’ve played.
My uncle’s power has always come from the word, from what he says to motivate me. He tells me these days that the most valuable training we did when I was a kid was not on the court but during the sessions we had in the car going to and from games on the fifty kilometer drive to Palma, planning beforehand what we would do or analyzing afterward what we had done wrong. I remember he used examples from football, to catch my attention and ram home his thoughts. And Toni is right. His words taught me to think for myself on court and they taught me to be a fighter. He likes to quote some Spanish writer who said that the people who start wars are always poets. Well, poetry, of sorts, was what he used on me now, at this seemingly hopeless moment when battle had not even been engaged but, in my mind, I had already lost.
“Look,” he said, “it’s five thirty now, and when you go on court at seven thirty I assure you you won’t be feeling any better. You’ll probably be feeling worse. So it’s up to you whether you rise above the pain and the exhaustion and summon up the desire you need to win.” I replied, “Toni, I’m sorry. I can’t see it. I just can’t.” “Don’t say you can’t,” he said. “Because anybody who digs deep enough can do things that appear to be impossible. Just imagine if there were a guy sitting behind you in the stadium pointing a gun at you, telling you that if you don’t run, and keep running, he’d shoot you. I bet you’d run then. So, come on! It’s up to you to find the motivation to win. This is your big chance. Bad as you might be feeling now, it’s likely that you’ll never have as good a chance of winning the Australian Open as you do today. And even if there’s only a one percent chance of you winning this match, well, then, you have to squeeze every last drop out of that one percent.” Toni saw me hesitate, saw me listening, so he pressed on. “Remember that phrase of Barack Obama’s, ‘Yes, we can!’ At every changeover repeat it to yourself, because, you know what? The truth is you can do it. What you can never allow is to fail because of a loss of will. You can lose because your rival played better, but you can’t lose because you failed to give it your best. That would be a crime. But you won’t do that, I know it. Because you always do give your best and today will be no exception. You can, Rafael! You really can!”
I took a big lesson from that victory. It was a lesson Toni had been drumming into me for years, but never had I discovered how true it was until now. I learned that you always have to hang in there, that however remote your chances of winning might seem, you have to push yourself to the very limit of your abilities and try your luck. The key to this game resides in the mind, and if the mind is clear and strong, you can overcome almost any obstacle, including pain. Mind can triumph over matter.
“You’ve got tho think Murder on the Orient Express”, Nadal’s physical trainer Joan Forcades says, “to understand the secret of Rafael’s success.”
Forcades is neither pretentious nor deliberately cryptic. If fact, his reference to the Agatha Christie murder mystery is an unusually illuminating departure for a man who peppers his conversation quite naturally with terms like “holistic”, “cognitive”, “somatic marker”, “assymmetric”, and “emotive-volitive”. His brain is forever finding connections between the world of elite sports and Shakespearean tragedy, or German philosophy, or Thomas Aquinas, or the latest trends in neurobiological research.
“The point about Murder on the Orient Express is that there was one man murdered, but Hercule Poirot, the detective, discovered that a dozen people took part in the crime - all the suspects killed him”, says Forcades, who explains: “That’s the approach you have to take to get to the bottom of Rafael’s victory in Australia, and all the other victories he has had in his career. If you focus only one aspect, on how he recuperated physically, you’re missing a much bigger story.”
Humility is the recognition of your limitations, and it is from this understanding, and this understanding alone, that the drive comes to work hard at overcoming them.
The secret lies in being able to do what you know you can do when you most need it.
(After winning 2010 US Open) Here was crystal clear vindication of the philosophy of hard work that had guided me in my twenty years of tennis life. Here was compelling cause-and-effect evidence that the will to win and the will to prepare are one and the same. I had worked long and hard before the US Open on my serves. And here it was, paying off when I most needed it, saving me at just the moment when my nerves threatened to undermine the rest of my game. I was on the brink of something truly great. The fact that I had got to this point was the culmination of long years of sacrifice and dedication, all based on the unbreakable premise that there are no shortcuts to sustained success. You can’t cheat in elite sports. Talent alone won’t get you through. That’s just the first building block, on top of which you must pile relentlessly repetitive work in the gym, work on the courts, work studying videos of yourself and your opponents in action, always striving to get fitter, better, cleverer. I made a choice to become a professional tennis player, and the result of that choice could only be unflagging discipline and a continual desire to improve.
Had I sat back after winning the French Open, or Wimbledon, believing my game to be complete enough to guarantee further success, I would not have been here now at Arther Ashe Stadium in New York with a chance of adding the US Open to my list of conquests. I’d made it as far as I had because I had never lost sight of my priorities. The real test comes on those mornings when you wake up after a late night out and the very last thing you want to do it get up and train, knowing you’re going to work furiously hard and you’re going to sweat buckets. There might be a moment’s debate in your mind. “Should I skip it today, just this once?” But you don’t listen to your mind’s siren songs because you know that they will lead you down a dangerously steep and slippery slope. If you flag once, you’ll flag again.
Toni Nadal
On the importance of endurance
Endure, put up with whatever comes your way, learn to overcome weakness and pain, push yourself to breaking point but never cave in. If you don’t learn that lesson, you’ll never succeed as an elite athlete.
Regarding the way children should be brought up
Toni is unbendingly doctrinaire in his views regarding the way children should be brought up.
He says
The problem nowadays is that children have become too much the center of attention. Their parents, their families, everybody around them feels a need to put them on a pedestal. So much effort is invested in boosting their self-esteem that they are made to feel special in and of themselves, without having done anything. People get confused: they fail to grasp that you are not special because of who you are but because of what you do.
I see it all the time, and then, if it turns out that they make money and acquire a little fame and everything is made easy for them and no one ever contradicts them, they are accommodated in every little detail of life, well… you end up with the most unbearable spoled brats.
The phenomenon is so common in professional sports that the surprise comes, in Toni’s view, when a brilliant young sportsman turns out to behave not like a brat but like an ordinary decent human being. Fawned upon, surrounded by grasping yes men, sports figures are told all the time they are gods, and they come to believe it.
He says
Humble is the way you have to be, period. There’s no special merit in it. What’s more, I wouldn’t use the word ‘humble’ to it. You just need to know your place in the world. Everybody should know their place in the world. The point is that the world is quite big enough already without you imagining that you’re too big too. People sometimes exxagerate this business of humility. It’s a question simply of knowing who you are, where you are, and that the world will continue exactly as it is without you.
Notes from Toni Nada’s TED talk
It is better for you to know what you are going to deal with. That way, from now on, you can start to look for answers. Accepting reality is one complicated thing to do now-a-days. It seems that, today, we always have to give positive messages to our relatives. We have to say to them constantly that they are almost the best ones, that they are really good. That is not a good principle. I prefer the other one. Knowing that you are not good enough and you know reality, is the first step, the starting point, to reach your goals. I always avoid an overevaluation of the boys I train.
I tell Rafael, ok, well, if you are capable of playing every point as if it were the last one, if you are capable of playing this match as if life depended on it, if you are more excited than him, and you are ready to run faster than him, I think you will have lots of chances of victory. I always believe in chances of victory.
This search of impartiality, of avoiding a hoax, it hasn’t stopped me from having the maximum confidence in knowing that we will reach our goals. We can reach our goals with work, obviously.
There is no way but to shape the character well. I have been a coach to shape Rafael’s character well, strengthening his character, than to form him well technically.
It was never my fault that Rafael never learnt how to serve. It is his fault. Many years ago, I told to the father of a pupil I trained, who, seeing how disastrous his son was, asked me, “Is this what you teach to my son?”, and I answered, “No, this is what he learns. What I teach is very different”.
I never like to assume responsibility. That is the reason, since he was very yound, I made Rafael assume his responsibility. I am known to be a strict coach. I have actually been strict, I have been a tough coach. I don’t believe in roughness as an aim, I believe in roughness as a means. I have been a demanding coach because I cared a lot, I have great fondness for my nephew. I wouldn’t have ever been tough to somebody who couldn’t cope with it or who couldn’t cope with that thoroughness. I would never be tough with somebody who I didn’t feel a great fondness for, for somebody I didn’t appreciate truly. Since I wanted the greater good for my nephew, I was really strict. And to be strict, this thoroughness I always tried turned into self-demanding. One can’t always be stretching constantly to his player, or to anybody who you train in any activity. This is why I always tried to make Rafael feel the responsibility himself. And I think he did.
I think sometimes, a good self-criticism is important. Without self-criticism, it is very hard to progress, to improve without a good sense of self-criticism. I always made sure that he never gave me excuses - about his defeats, about anything that happened. It is too easy to justify oneself constantly. An excuse never made us win a match. That is the truth. As I said, I tried to strengthen up Rafael’s character, and I did try to encourage his ability to endure because I think this is what is decisive in life. The ability to endure. I believe that character builds up thanks to difficulty. And I think this is the great mistake now-a-days. Now-a-days, the children have so many more things, having all the technology behind them, even having nutritionists, having biomedical studies, audiovisual studies, analyzing the hits, statistics that tell you waht to do. In the end, people find it harder to improve.
I give a very clear example, When we arrived to the professional circuit, the first ones there were: Hewitt - 21 years old, Roddick - 20 years old, Federer - 21 years old, Coria - 21, Nalbandian - 21, Ferrero - 23, Safin - 24. I think Moya and Agassi were there, they were a bit older. Now-a-days, the top ones are: Federer - 36, Rafael - about to turn 32, Murray and Djokovic - 31, Wawrinka - 33, Del Potro - about to turn 30, Cilic - 30, Berdych - 33. What has happened? Why does it take so much to the new ones to replace the old ones now-a-days? I think it is simply because they haven’t understood what is essential. Obviously, I am not against technology. The world progresses and technology is going to help us. But I think that there are things that, mostly on the training stages, don’t help. I don’t think making the life of the young ones so easy helps at all. I believe that, sometimes it is better to restrict a bit the advances and go back to the essential. For us, the essential was always - perseverance, it was the respect to the opponent, it was the effort, it was the sacrifice, it was the discipline. Technology weren’t ever the essential. I think that is what all the young ones should understand.