When Rafael Nadal first appeared on court, my 13-year-old mind was too simple to make sense of him. Here was some strange chimera who seemed ancient yet terribly modern. Almost feral, but also quite polite. Long hair, long shorts, no sleeves. Big muscles, high shots, slow serve. He maintained a certain sense of caution and control, due to on-court rituals—and also a sense of determination bordering on self-immolation. If a tennis ball was coming to his side of the net, he was constitutionally incapable of giving up on it. When he did get to the ball, he hit it with this baffling trajectory, arcing in the air and dipping severely downward, more topspin than I thought a tennis ball could tolerate. He seemed impossibly full of life, embodying a fresh vision for what tennis should look like. He was also curiously damp.

As a crude teen, I responded to this novelty with slander: Rafael Nadal was a “pusher.” That was the working theory for me and my dumb little friends—young fans of Roger Federer, threatened by this newcomer and working through our fear in the way common in children (and, I’ve since learned, adult sport fans). “Pusher” is a pejorative for a tennis player who assumes very little risk and taps the ball back into play over and over, without much flair or conviction, until a frustrated opponent finally cracks. It was the word we used to protect ourselves from a talent so freakish that we had to fit it into some category, to avoid the truth. A teenage Nadal beat Federer in their very first meeting, at the 2004 Miami Open, when the Swiss was fresh off winning the Australian Open and attaining the world No. 1 ranking for the first time in his career. As soon as my favorite player hit the summit, his nemesis had appeared.

On the Spanish island of Mallorca, Nadal was born into a sporting family. He once deflected the credit for his physique by pointing to his genes: “If you see my family, a lot of people is big.” In this big family were two uncles of particular note: One uncle, Miguel, was a defender and midfielder for Barcelona, and Rafa too was a talent on the pitch before he committed himself to the courts. Another uncle, Toni, managed a tennis club. He coached his nephew for 27 years, in the most successful coach-player partnership in the sport. As a child, young Rafa swung his racquet with two hands on both sides. (His handedness is mixed; he is right-side dominant for eating food or playing basketball, and left-side dominant for soccer.) Toni, aware that a two-handed forehand was nearly extinct from the elite ranks, had his nephew adjust accordingly. They opted to drop a hand from the left side, which wound up a consequential decision in tennis history.

Uncle and nephew together fashioned a game style ideal for Spain’s native clay courts—for the high and slow bounces, the punishing rallies, the filthy chase. Nadal was the dirtballer of the future, instantly obsoleting all the slimmer models of clay excellence that his country had produced in the decades before. They don’t get any faster or stronger.

Recently I asked the player Gael Monfils, a speed demon himself, about the fastest players he’d ever faced. Gazing out into the middle distance, as if lost in remembrance of sprints past, his brief list of names both began and ended with Nadal—the only peer worthy of double inclusion. When Nadal played tennis, his sheer physicality was tangible in every point, every shot, and even the celebratory uppercuts, aimed at nobody’s ribs but surely fracturing the egos of his opponents. Often his legs and torso were coated in the clay, the red grains adhering to his profuse sweat. This offered another promising if short-lived form of slander for the haters of all sizes: Nadal was just a one-surface specialist. And a gross surface, too, I thought, adopting a proto-Medvedevian view of this stretch of the calendar. Leave the other surfaces to the real players.

All the hedges, qualifiers, and caveats crumbled, one after another, before he’d even left his early 20s, because Rafael Nadal was not just a prodigy but a prodigious learner of tennis. Set him a task, and he’d have it down in a few months’ time. He was a menace on clay, but on hard courts and then grass, too. He assembled the greatest clay seasons of all time, feats that cannot be improved upon—an 81-match win streak on the surface, from 2005 to 2007—and soon enough he imported that same fury to the lawns of Wimbledon, beating Roger Federer in his own leafy refuge in 2008. Rafa was raised on clay and mastered it in a way no one else can replicate, but he expanded his mastery so quickly that he was no longer defined by it. He encroached on Federer’s territory from every angle.

The next phase might be described as “knowing the enemy.” I grew to learn Nadal’s ways, his arcane rituals, as deeply as a fan would. After the coin flip, he did not walk back to the baseline to begin the match, but instead sprinted along some serrated path, big lunging steps from side to side. Then, the iconic pre-serve routine: Sweep a foot along the baseline, pick the wedgie, adjust left shoulder, adjust right shoulder, touch the nose, touch the left ear, touch the nose, touch the right ear. Between points he avoided stepping on the lines, tried to step over the line with his right foot only. On his chair, after sipping from his two bottles, he lined them up so they pointed diagonally towards the court. What was all this for? In his 2012 memoir Rafa, Nadal wrote, “It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” It was also, undoubtedly, a way to control the pace of play, to bring the whole contest onto his desired terms and tempo. It seemed no coincidence that he had mastered the mental reset. Nadal was the destroyer of context, the man who played every point in vacuum, through comebacks and blowouts with the same equanimous mind and full effort.

Frankly, it was hard to resent someone with such a delicate suite of customs. They were somewhat endearing, not unlike his fear of dogs. Meanwhile, my other lines of attack were failing, too. The “pusher” accusation grew dumber with every passing minute. In his very earliest days Nadal was more passive, more content to roll the ball shallowly into the court and rely on the power and endurance in his legs to beat his opponents. That wasn’t true for long. Pushers dink the ball. There is no tennis stroke more spiritually opposite to a dink than the forehand of Rafael Nadal.

I didn’t know a shot like this was possible until he showed us: a violent coiling and uncoiling, yet at contact his head was perfectly still and his arm perfectly straight. Nadal whipped through the ball but also up it, shearing the fuzz off the ball as if it were the flank of a sheep. In its most exaggerated forms, the swing took place only on the left side of his body, the racquet never crossing over to his right shoulder, but instead whizzing past his left ear and coming to rest behind his head, in his classic buggy-whip finish. He abandoned orthodoxy to discover something no one could see, and that no one has fully replicated since.

Much is made of Nadal’s work ethic, but this shot is evidence of the brazen talent in his hands. To get the head of the racquet moving that fast, swing on the trajectory that he did, and still catch the ball so cleanly in the center of the racquet, while tearing around the court at his speed, is an unimaginable feat of coordination. This is not a feat achieved through careful toil, so much as it is a technical genius fashioning one of the most mechanically sophisticated strokes ever, and acing that test thousands of times in a row. Shanking the ball is for mortals. Nadal could run, whirl, whip, and still make crystalline contact every time. It didn’t matter if he was hurtling off the ad side of the court into the doubles alley—he could still rip it, imparting not just topspin but a sidespin that caused the ball to bend in the air and catch the back of the court. That was the “banana forehand.”

So much for a passive, defensive Rafa. This forehand was the best offensive weapon throughout his two decades on tour, and, to me, the defining shot of men’s tennis in the 21st century. Nadal discovered the limits of what was possible with polyester strings, a large racquet head, and modern fitness, and he arguably inspired others to chase down that same spin and power. Nadal acolytes like Dominic Thiem and Casper Ruud borrowed heavily from his style. On the women’s tour, he’ll be missed most by Iga Swiatek, who bears his influences: “Honestly, he was the only player I watched, so I don’t know if I’m going to watch tennis at all now,” she said this week in Malaga. Some of the wilder forehands in the game probably wouldn’t have come into existence had Nadal not demonstrated the potency of big topspin. Anyone who played tennis in the late aughts tried at least one swing like Rafa, and sent many a ball into the bushes.

With every passing year, Nadal brought more polish to his game. He turned his two-handed backhand from a neutral shot into a genuine weapon. Choking up on the grip of his racquet, he developed some of the best volleys on tour, his feel and athleticism combined in his gorgeous backhand overhead smash. With topspin mastered, he moved onto underspin, refining his slice. His serve occasionally peaked into something deadly, and he was unplayable in those moments. His tactics grew more aggressive to spare his aging legs the unnecessary expense. But my chief memory—my dread—will always be the forehand.

To understand the forehand, you must understand the toll it exacted on his opponents. Nadal’s contemporary Andy Roddick has explained it well: “I have never, ever felt a tennis ball in my life feel that way it feels when he ropes a forehand and it hits your racquet, and it kind of causes a delay—like, it doesn’t shoot off [the strings].” Spin and power could make tennis balls feel like cantaloupes. This is also why playing left-handed was so fateful. The default rally in tennis goes diagonally across the court; most players prefer the forehand to the backhand. As a lefty, Nadal could play his stronger forehand at the opponent’s weaker backhands, until death. He would trap them in what Roddick called a “poison pattern,” Rafa’s forehand kicking ever higher and off to the side, the opponents swatting fecklessly at balls above shoulder height as they were pushed off the court, leaving the entire right flank of the court exposed.

Nadal could deform the pattern of play, making even the best players alive uncomfortable. Federer’s one-handed backhand was notoriously vulnerable to that high topspin, and as it was the first serious weakness any opponent had exposed, it defined their rivalry for many years. In a farewell message to his rival, Federer wrote that Nadal forced him to “reimagine my game.” Nadal also, famously, made him cry as they dueled in their 20s. Their rivalry is the best loved in contemporary tennis, and it ended appropriately, with both of them in tears. Nadal’s rivalry with Novak Djokovic isn’t as warm and fuzzy, but in a pure on-court sense, it might be the highest level of men’s tennis ever achieved. There’s an emergent phenomenon I like to call “wide tennis,” in which balls are retrieved from positions that no other player can reasonably be expected to reach, and sent back at speeds and angles that no other player could reasonably be expected to produce, over and over again. These two perfect offense-defense hybrids were the master practitioners of the art.

Even if you were rooting for one of Nadal’s rivals, it was hard not to be enchanted by the personality that poked through with his press conferences. He could dispense wisdom in homespun English. He could walk us through what happen-ed and keep us rooted in the present moment. He could talk, hilariously, about pain. He could wave away unnecessary hypotheticals and stare reality plainly in the face, or deflate an outlandish question with flair. He did not want to look like he gonna be his boyfriend. When I spoke to the stenographers who transcribe the conferences, they told me they loved his gems most of all.

Even in the restricted format of question-and-answer, Nadal was soulful, surprising, recognizably human, always arriving at insights in an oblique way. It was also impossible not to admire how consistently he came back from his constant injuries: elbow, knee, back, wrist, foot, everything. He missed huge stretches of time on tour, including 11 majors between 2004 and 2022. He always found a way to surge right back to the top of the tour. I respected this resilience and his cast of mind, but I didn’t quite understand what moved him. For all his candor, he seemed to be speaking from some other realm.

I can remember the exact moment when Nadal clicked in my head. All the lights in the house were out, and the ice-blue glow of TV settled on me, the folded-out sofa, the blankets strewn all over it. Usually, watching the Australian Open was an enormous test of willpower to assume a nocturnal lifestyle it demanded, but on this 2022 men’s final, I couldn’t sleep anyway, because my baby niece was sick in the hospital and the doctors did not yet understand what was wrong.

I stared at Nadal, down two sets to Daniil Medvedev, serving now at 2-3 in the third set, down triple break point. By this juncture in my life, writing about tennis had denuded most of my genuine fandom. What I had instead was a vague rooting interest for certain narratives, for fresh faces over the men’s Big Three. I was hungry for a regime change. Here, I wanted Medvedev to finish the job and claim his second major title. Nadal had different designs. He fought back, despite managing pain throughout the tournament. “We need to suffer, and we need to fight,” he had said, smiling, after the semifinal. This was an old, familiar pain. He was born with a rare degenerative condition in his foot, which endangered his pro career before it’d even started in earnest. But they’d found a way to manage it with orthotics and anti-inflammatories. Now, it seemed there was nothing else to be done.

As the match went on, I felt my pro-youth mentality waver through the third and fourth sets, then dissolve completely at the sight of an exultant Nadal kneeling on the court after the fifth. Of all his major titles, this was the most improbable, the only one he’d won in a true state of disbelief. Six months prior he had limped out of Roland-Garros after a loss to Djokovic, unable to walk normally for the next two weeks, and ultimately nixed the rest of his season. To come back from that and immediately win a major was one of the most ridiculous feats I’d witnessed on a tennis court. Even so, he knew the pain wasn’t going away. “The doubt is probably going to be here for the rest of my career,” Nadal had said after the semifinal, “because I have what I have and that’s something we cannot fix.” 

When my niece died weeks later, I also found myself with something we couldn’t fix. Grief had its own bodily manifestation, which varied by the day. It was like trying to cough up a coal, or shimmy out from underneath a glacier. I found myself in tears on a bench in the park, or sleepless at the edge of my bed, or squirming with a deep social anxiety that I hadn’t felt before or since. It is jarring, to try and live with this new molten feeling, and to realize that you’d spent the past three decades operating in just a tiny slice of the full emotional spectrum humans could access. Life took on a new dynamic range I’d never wanted from it. Here was a pain I knew I’d have to learn to live with, even if what I really wanted to do was to go to sleep for 10 years and wake up in a different, repaired world.

Many of my old pleasures faded away, but I continued to watch tennis, in a sort of academic way—with the exception of Nadal’s matches, which had changed in their emotional texture. In my youth I’d faintly resented him, but now I counted on him as a kind of spiritual proxy warrior, fighting battles for the both of us on the tennis court. There I was, a man approaching middle age, projecting his emotional damage onto a famous sportsman, surely for the first time in history. I think it was the fact that Nadal continued his life and career while carrying a daily pain that everyone around him knew about. He could not escape it—it was not something to be escaped—but he found ways to keep moving.

After winning the Australian Open, Nadal extended his win streak at Indian Wells. In the second round, he went down 2-5 in the third set to Sebastian Korda. Having played abysmal tennis for the preceding hour, Nadal seemed doomed, and yet he won the match in a deciding tiebreak. Afterward, the man often lionized for his blind self-belief clarified his inner life.

“The only thing that I can tell you is, if the people believe that I am a believer all the time, that I’m going to come back, not true,” Nadal said. “I am not this. I don’t have this amazing self-confidence that even if I am 5-2, ‘OK, I going to come back.’ No.” The picture in his head wasn’t daftly, endlessly sunny. His goal was merely incremental. “Even if I’m going to lose, I’m going to try to finish the match having some better feelings, so I need to fight to find these better feelings.” This was a more palatable level of optimism for me as I still climbed uphill to get out of bed most days. Winning seemed unimaginable—but to fight and find some better feelings? Why not? Build some rituals inside the pain, and see what happens from there.

Nadal beat an insurgent Carlos Alcaraz, only to arrive in the Indian Wells final with a stress fracture in his rib and lose. He had just reeled off 20 victories in a row, and he was then due to head into his favorite stretch of the season, the European clay swing. But the rib sidelined him for the first stretch of the clay season, and the foot haunted him in the second half. “I am not injured; I am a player living with an injury,” Nadal said then, speaking of his foot, if perhaps also speaking to me. “It’s something that is there, and unfortunately, my day-by-day is difficult, honestly. It’s difficult for me to accept the situation sometimes.”

Heading into his key tournament, Roland-Garros, which he’d already won 13 times, Rafa was not carrying a clay title that season. That hadn’t happened since 2004. Despite coming in so cold, he kept moving through the draw. In the fourth round he survived a five-setter over Felix Auger-Aliassime, now coached by Uncle Toni, who recused himself from the match. Nadal notched a decisive quarterfinal win over Novak Djokovic, revenge for the previous season’s ousting. The semifinal was an escape from Alexander Zverev, who suffered a catastrophic ankle injury in the second set. In the final, Nadal annihilated his admirer Casper Ruud. Only after winning the title did he reveal his physical condition: “We played with no feeling on the foot. We played with an injection on the nerve, so the foot was asleep. So that’s why I was able to play.” When asked by an interviewer how many injections he’d gotten, he said, “You better don’t know.” Ruud, the runner-up, later recalled seeing Nadal on crutches the day after the final. I sat with the rich metaphorical possibilities of winning a major on a dead foot.

Wins kept coming that summer; I enjoyed them in a way I hope not to again. Injuries caught up to Nadal when he was deep into Wimbledon, and he withdrew from the semifinal with a tear in an abdominal muscle. During that tournament, at the conclusion of a press conference, he spoke honestly about the constant inquiries into his public pain. “I am a little bit tired to talk about my body,” Nadal said. “It’s not about that I don’t want to answer your question, but in the same time sometimes I am tired about myself, all the issues that I am having. I prefer to not talk about that now. Sorry for that.”

Often I didn’t want to talk about my pain with close friends, and yet, in the span of the same evening, I wanted to babble into the ears of relative strangers. My own needs seemed opaque and volatile. There was no way for anyone to understand my present life without explaining this grief, but also I wanted, deliriously, for my life to be about something besides that grief. And still, another part of me did not want to permit passage to something beyond grief. It was difficult to put it all concisely. Maybe I could just wear a placard with a wiser man’s words: Unfortunately, my day-by-day is difficult, honestly. It is difficult for me to accept the situation sometimes. I could try, slowly, to order my surroundings, to match the order in my head.

A hip injury took Nadal out for most of 2023. For once in his career, he did not recover and get right back to the top of the tour. This current season was mostly ceremonial, and that 2022 Roland-Garros trophy turned out to be his last title: The 38-year-old retired on Tuesday in Spain, at the Davis Cup. I didn’t write much about his wild triumphs of that last real season because the words wouldn’t have resembled journalism, or even coherent prose. Distance has helped make that part of my life legible, and it’s helped everything else, too. I remembered some of the old pain when I was in Paris this spring to watch Nadal fight through one last Roland-Garros, where he lost in the first round to the eventual finalist, bringing his lifetime record at the tournament to a preposterous 112-4. That was first time I’d ever seen the king of clay on his home surface. Despite the futility of that match and the inevitable approach of his retirement, I still witnessed the full Rafa protocol up close: the jagged sprint, the fidgeting, the bottle arrangement, the purity of small routines. For the first time in my life, I felt I understood them.