The Year of Rafa
I haven’t written a full piece in 3 years, which I shouldn’t have let happen, but the longer you go without writing, the easier it is to keep not making the time. I’ve been wanting to break the drought for a while though, and some people wanted to read my thoughts on Rafa’s season, so I’m back in the game, with a couple other ideas I hope to get to soon. Like a player returning from a long layoff, the transition game is lacking and I can feel the rust, but here goes:
The Future
It’s been 17 years now of watching Rafa win major titles, yet this 2022 Roland Garros had an unfamiliar feeling: that it might be his last.
With Nadal, time off tour due to injury has often left people confusing rust for decline, so I don’t really base that off of his form, but more to the unknown future of his foot condition at age 36, the rapid emergence of Carlos Alcaraz, and that I didn’t have the feeling years prior when the mainstream narrative was pretty confident in the opposite (insert obligatory mention of Jason Goodall, an otherwise good announcer, booting Nadal out of the Big Four during his lean years).
An instructive exercise for the state of the tours is to mentally draft players by how certain they are to win a major going forward. Not by total of majors, simply *a* major. Do you feel better about taking the next decade of Stefanos Tsitsipas, or a mid-30s Djokovic? Despite their advancing age, Nadal has never wavered out of the top tier with Djokovic for me, with Nadal annually rising to the top as Roland Garros approaches, then a flip flop in June owing to Djokovic’s dominance at Wimbledon and in Australia, as well as the cleaner sheet of health he’s typically had.
This year, the draft order has probably changed for good with the emergence of Carlitos, already a contender at 19 with no discernible hole in his game that mere experience can’t shore up.
That isn’t to say Rafa is done, he did just become the first man in 40 years to go through four straight top 10 players at a major, after all, it was just weird to watch this Roland Garros with a fragility in the air that didn’t exist previously. That doesn’t have to do with the GOAT chase/Slam record/etc, either (I’ve never cared as much about that as others), more just strange to have the sense that the end feels at least in play in ways it hasn’t before.
Legacy
Oftentimes, legacy is about the statistical numbers, 22, 14, 112-3, those were the big ones with Rafa being the last man standing in Paris yet again. I’ve written about the significance of them myself before, but this Roland Garros felt different legacy-wise.
After a generation or two of primarily Federer acolytes, Nadal now finds himself still winning majors in a sport where some of the brightest young stars instead look up to him, and interestingly, have similarly good reputations in the locker room. The business end of this French Open saw not just a title match against superfan and academy attendee Casper Ruud, but also a semifinal in the women’s bracket between two of his most vocal supporters, Dasha Kasatkina and destroyer of worlds, feels-bad-while-bageling-you Iga Swiatek. Beyond them, there’s top 10 mainstay Andrey Rublev and the emerging Sebi Korda, who competed with Swiatek in a trivia challenge over who knew their Nadal trivia better, and, as many know, named his cat Rafa. The unique dynamic between Nadal and Swiatek even played a small role in Swiatek’s 35 match winning streak, with Rafa recommending to Iga’s team to hold off on traveling to Miami immediately after winning Indian Wells.
As those on the ground confirm, Federer’s popularity hasn’t waned, but with him still off tour, Serena Williams essentially retired, and Nadal being so open about his cloudy future, it feels as if he's stepped into the space Fed has vacated, with fans extra appreciative of what they’re witnessing, potentially for their final time. That combination of what he has left and what he’ll leave behind has this suddenly feeling like his sport in a way that it never has before.
Winning Ugly
Nadal and Djokovic have a lot of similarities, but one of their biggest differentiators is something that never gets talked about: Nadal tends to play really well when he wins (and it takes something special to knock him out), and Djokovic tends to overcome not playing well when he wins.
To be clear: that is not a statement of which of them is/was better (I don’t even really have an opinion on that and think there are excellent arguments for both).
Think of Djokovic’s notable wins in recent years, of course the 2019 Wimbledon final against Federer, where he really didn’t play very well outside of going lockdown mode in the tiebreakers (Fed broke 7 times to Djokovic’s 3 in that match and had a ~5% edge in return points won despite being leagues below Djokovic as a returner), looking adrift in the 2020 Australian Open final vs Dominic Thiem in what was a strange title match, or falling down two sets to a first time Slam finalist in Stefanos Tsitsipas before coming back to win Roland Garros.
Even some of the titles where he absolutely rolled at the business end, like AO 2016, US Open 2018, and AO 2019, featured a particularly thorny escape earlier in the tournament.
Nadal, on the other hand, usually has a higher baseline level of play. He has won a record 4 majors without losing a set, while Djokovic has none, one of the only feats he hasn’t accomplished in his incredibly balanced career.
But those sweeps all came on clay, the skeptic says. So we take a look at the fuller picture, sets lost en route to winning 20 major titles:
Djokovic: 68 sets
Federer: 47 sets
Nadal: 41 sets
Even throw out clay entirely, and Nadal still only lost 21 sets in his 7 titles from Wimbledon 2008 to the 2019 US Open. I don’t love sets as a direct indicator of quality, but it does match up with Rafa generally playing at a really high level to win his titles.
In addition: since the start of 2018, he has lost one (1) set in Round 1 and Round 2 combined at the Slams, and even that one set was Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon.
This brings us to what makes this year such a landmark one for him, a year that has completely bucked the trend.
In Australia, Nadal lost 6 sets, just the second major title of his career with more than 4 (5 at Wimbledon 2010), and then he followed that with 3 dropped sets at Roland Garros, which doesn’t sound like much, but matches his entire total from his 2017-2020 fourpeat, and it may have gone higher had Sascha Zverev not had to retire.
The span of their primes often debated, Nadal’s is the hardest of the Big 3 to pin down because he had the most to gain on his serve from his athletic prime, leading to some of the best stretches of his career (2017 Asian swing pre-knee injury, 2019 Pseudo Davis Cup) occurring squarely outside what is considered his peak.
This year has been nothing like that. Other than Acapulco (Nadal’s Acapulco/Indian Wells was one rib injury away from being eerily similar to Federer’s 2017, where he was untouchable in Indian Wells before riding pixie dust on fumes in Miami), the combination of rust and injury has resulted in Rafa decisively not being in elite form. That doesn’t mean he’s been bad either, as funnily enough, the first two sets of the Australian Open final was probably his worst match of the year, the true random clunker that most players returning to tour have to absorb earlier in the comeback, just that he’s been unable to sustain his top level for long, as evidenced by the notable dips in numerous matches across both majors this year.
In the past, Nadal’s extended matches have featured epics like the US Open against Thiem, or Wimbledon versus Delpo. This time around, in the wake of the most turbulent clay season of his entire career and bad luck wiping out his chances at winning any Masters events, 2022 has been about winning ugly in the brutal Australian heat, marveling at how an elite level is accessed after not having experienced a fifth set on Chatrier in nine years, or turning on the jets to run away with a final after having already logged 11 hours on court against top 10 opposition.
Has Nadal been better in victory? The answer has arguably never been such a clear yes, and yet he’s never been more impressive.