Culture
Nadal's focused on clay – and other things we learned from the first Australian Open warm-up week
For months, Rafael Nadal has been trying to temper expectations for his comeback, telling the world that he had little sense of whether he would ever return to his championship form or anything approaching it.
On Sunday, Nadal showed the world why he was so cautious. At 37 years old, he knows how brittle he is and after suffering a slight tear in his muscle at a tuneup tournament in Brisbane, Nadal announced on his social media channels that he was pulling out of the Australian Open.
“Hi all, during my last match in Brisbane I had a small problem on a muscle that as you know made me worried,” Nadal wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Once I got to Melbourne I have had the chance to make an MRI and I have micro tear on a muscle, not in the same part where I had the injury and that’s good news. Right now I am not ready to compete at the maximum level of exigence in five-set matches. I’m flying back to Spain to see my doctor, get some treatment and rest.”
What Nadal hinted at during his few exchanges with the media in Australia and what became crystal clear Sunday is that achieving great results in these first weeks of the season, on hard courts and after being away from the game for nearly a year, was never the priority. Nadal has won the French Open 14 times. He is known as the “King of Clay”. Tennis does not start happening on the red clay he excels on until April. He is intensely focused on being in top form then, not now, and for Roland Garros, which begins in late May, and likely for the Olympics, which will take place at Roland Garros in late July.
“I have worked very hard during the year for this comeback and as I always mentioned my goal is to be at my best level in three months,” Nadal wrote on Sunday. “Within the sad news for me for not being able to play in front of the amazing Melbourne crowds, this is not very bad news and we all remain positive with the evolution for the season. I really wanted to play here in Australia and I have had the chance to play a few matches that made me very happy and positive.”
Whether Nadal’s hip, knees, or chronically injured foot allow him to play is anyone’s guess. Modern tennis, especially the brutally physical brand of it that Nadal plays, is not kind to the ageing athlete. Ask Roger Federer and Andy Murray, or Novak Djokovic, who dedicates so many waking hours to maintaining his health and is battling a niggle in his wrist right now.
But Nadal showed in his three matches in Brisbane that he still knows how to play tennis. Say what you want about his opponents — a faded Dominic Thiem and two middling Aussies, Jason Kubler and Jordan Thompson – there were moments when Nadal looked as slick as ever, especially when he sprinted after drop-shots from deep in the court and pulled off those running, angled flicks that only seem to come out of his hands.
(Patrick Hamilton/AFP via Getty Images)
He also lost three match points to Thompson in the second set and had to receive medical attention for discomfort near the hip that doctors surgically repaired last year. After losing the match, Nadal signalled that playing in the year’s first Grand Slam would depend on how he felt the next morning and in the ensuing days. “After a year it is difficult for the body to be playing tournaments at the highest level.”
There’s a glass-half-full view of all this. Had Nadal won those match points, he might have been tempted to play in the semifinal on Saturday and possibly a final on Sunday, risking a more serious injury. He got in three matches and reminded himself that he can play sublime tennis against solid competition, at least for a few sets. Now comes some rest and recovery.
Whatever happens next in terms of his playing schedule, there is now zero doubt where his focus lies — the red clay of Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Paris.
What else?
It’s just the opening week of the season, so these tournaments mean nothing.
One of the biggest tournaments of the year, the Australian Open, is just days away, so players have to be in form right now.
Only in tennis could both of those statements be true.
After the briefest of “off-seasons”, the Australian Open starts Sunday, January 14, which means hundreds of players were doing what they could during the first days of the year (and the last days of 2023) to prepare.
Results from the tuneup weeks come with the stock-picker’s warning — past performance is not an indicator of future success. Some top players didn’t compete at all.
That said, we were watching what was happening in Australia, New Zealand and even Hong Kong. Here are some things that caught our eye.
Novak Djokovic lost a match in Australia.
It doesn’t happen very much. He’s won the past four Australian Opens that he has played in, and 10 overall, but he fell 6-4, 6-4 to Alex de Minaur of Australia in the United Cup, a mixed-team competition.
The loss isn’t much of a concern. It happens.
But Djokovic is nursing a right wrist injury and received medical attention throughout the United Cup. No one knows how to take care of his body better than Djokovic. He suffered through significant injuries (hamstring and abdominal tears) at his last two Australian Opens and still won. Still, wrist injuries to tennis players can be major red flags, flaring up unpredictably at the worst moments, and there is no way to hide them.
Like Nadal, Naomi Osaka did not forget how to play tennis.
She won a match and lost another in Brisbane, but most importantly she played five tight sets, including two tiebreakers, and gave Karolina Pliskova all she could handle in her first tournament after a year layoff due to injury, struggles with mental health and maternity leave.
Their ball makes a different sound when it comes off Osaka’s racket, a kind of firecracker pop that serves as a quick reminder of why tennis is better when Osaka is playing. And the way she whacks her thigh with her left fist as she gets ready for a big point… if that doesn’t get the juices flowing, it’s hard to say what will.
Iga Swiatek is in a good place.
Yes, the world No 1 was winning a lot of matches for Poland in the United Cup, often blitzing her opponents in her usual way, but she also seemed lighter, not carrying around that ranking like Atlas trying to hold up the globe.
She even joked about the thing she hates to joke about – “Iga’s Bakery”. That’s the nickname the media has given to all of her 6-0 (bagel) and 6-1 (breadstick) sets. After she and Hubert Hurkacz partnered to beat Spain 6-0, 6-0, she said she would consider hiring Hurkacz as one of her bakers.
Coco Gauff had about as good a start as she could have wanted.
She headed to Auckland to defend her season-opening title in the ASB Classic. Gauff won the last Grand Slam at the U.S. Open. Starting the season as a Grand Slam champion can mess with the mind.
Gauff reeled five straight wins, taking 10 of 11 sets, defending her title with a win over Elina Svitolina, healthy once more, thankfully, in the hard-fought final, 6-7 (4), 6-3, 6-3. Gauff was clearly wiped out at the WTA Finals in early November. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup finals the next week in Spain. After a nice little break, she looked rested and sharp.
She could get a bad draw and lose in the first round of the Australian Open, but she could not have kicked off her season any better.
Svitolina shut herself down after the U.S. Open with a stress fracture in her ankle.
Returning to competition on hard courts, which aggravated the injury during the summer, is not ideal. But Svitolina appeared to be playing, and winning, without pain in New Zealand. That’s good news.
(Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Frances Tiafoe took the court for the first time in a while without Wayne Ferreira guiding him.
Tiafoe and Ferreira parted ways after spending the better part of four seasons together and making the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 2022.
Tiafoe made the top 10 for the first time last year but slipped in the final months of the season and said he was entering 2024 looking to have more fun, play more aggressively, and be less results-focused under the guidance of Diego Moyano.
“A lot of 2023 I was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” he said. “I really wanted to do well. It was really hard for me. Still had a great year, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do in the big events.”
Tiafoe went 1-1 at the Hong Kong Open, losing his quarterfinal match to J.C. Shang of China.
Which brings us to this: keep an eye on J.C. Shang this season.
He is just 18 years old and already showing off acres of upside. Shang has spent much of his time at the IMG Academy during his tennis life. (IMG once upon a time guided Li Na of China to her groundbreaking career.) He qualified for the Australian Open last year and won a match before losing to Tiafoe. He also qualified for the French Open.
In addition to beating Tiafoe in Hong Kong, he beat the highly regarded Botic van de Zandschulp. Shang lost to Andrey Rublev, who enjoyed a tip-top first week, in the semifinals.
Again, take those results for what they are — early season wins off veterans trying to find their rhythm – but when teenagers beat seasoned pros it catches the eye.
Emma Raducanu is alive and playing tennis again.
The 2021 U.S. Open champion had triple surgery last spring – two wrists and one ankle. She has set expectations low and is hoping everyone else does, too, since she’s basically starting from scratch, ranked 301st in the world when the year started.
“I feel reborn,” she said.
She moved well and crushed some backhands in her opening match, which she won. She was on the verge of winning a second before Svitolina caught her in three sets.
She will now play in the Australian Open main draw without having to go through qualifying, which might be a curse in disguise. She could probably use the matches and did pretty well the last time she played qualifiers at a Grand Slam at that 2021 U.S. Open.
Like Nadal though, Raducanu is just hoping to stay healthy.
(Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Jelena Ostapenko, the fiery Latvian, hasn’t changed one bit during the break.
Ostapenko was not happy with a call by the chair umpire Julie Kjendlie during her loss to Victoria Azarenka.
“You will never be on my match again,” Ostapenko railed at Kjendlie. “You ruin my matches.”
So on-brand.
A few very big names decided to skip warm-up week altogether.
Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Daniil Medvedev are heading into the year’s first Grand Slam without any competitive tuneups. That’s three of the top four men, but also three players who played a ton of tennis last year and in the case of Alcaraz and Sinner, two players who are still trying to figure out how to optimize their schedules.
Alcaraz also missed the Australian Open last season with a last-minute injury and he certainly did not want that to happen again.
Sinner reached the finals of the season-ending ATP Finals and then led Italy to the Davis Cup.
Medvedev, well, he does a lot of unorthodox things when it comes to tennis, like hitting a forehand like someone trying to swat a mosquito in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle.
May it ever be thus.
(Top photo: Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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