Culture
Rafael Nadal is ready to play again. In America. On hard courts. Should he?
For more than a month, the smoke signals out of Rafael Nadal’s camp have kept the tennis world on its toes, sparking predictions of everything from a triumphant spring on the red clay of Paris to him never playing another competitive match following yet another hip injury in Australia in January.
The only thing that seemed clear was that the 22-time Grand Slam champion was prioritizing the clay court season in Europe this spring. Nadal said as much in January when he returned following a year-long layoff because of hip surgery.
Sure, he was happy to be back and competing in Australia, where he won the year’s first Grand Slam as recently as 2022, but he was singularly focused on being in top form — or, at least, as close as he can get to it at this point — in three months when the red clay tournaments begin in earnest.
That was part of why he skipped the Australian Open once he suffered a small muscle tear near his hip three matches into his latest comeback. Logic suggested Nadal would wait until tennis returned to the organic surfaces that are far less taxing on the body and where an ageing, injury-prone player like Nadal, who is 37 and plays the most physical style of tennis, would have the best chance of staying healthy.
Few were surprised when he announced this month on social media that he was pulling out of a hard-court tournament in Doha. It was the second sentence of that post that caught some off-guard.
“I will focus on keep working to be ready for the exhibition in Las Vegas and the amazing Indian Wells tournament,” Nadal wrote on Valentine’s Day.
That would be an MGM Resorts exhibition match against the 20-year-old Spanish sensation Carlos Alcaraz this weekend in Las Vegas, which will be streamed on Netflix, and then the BNP Paribas Open in nearby Indian Wells, California, which begins next week.
Now that struck some as odd. Still, there was plenty of time for him to pull out of those events and spend another few weeks in Spain preparing for the clay.
And then, last week, Novak Djokovic posted a picture of him and Nadal on the same flight as Nadal made his way to the United States. “Vamos”, Djokovic wrote. Game on — at least, in theory.
Great company on the way to USA 🇺🇸 😎💪🎾 @RafaelNadal #idemooo #vamos @atptour #TennisParadise pic.twitter.com/UDB13mp4Ux
— Novak Djokovic (@DjokerNole) February 23, 2024
The question, though, is why?
“If he is fit, he wants to play,” his longtime spokesman, Benito Perez-Barbadillo, said on Monday. “He is a tennis player and wants to play at the biggest tournaments. And he loves Indian Wells.”
As Patrick McEnroe, the commentator and former player calling the match against Alcaraz, pointed out, Nadal often thrives on the slow hard courts of Indian Wells, where he has won three times and made the finals on two other occasions.
Injuries in exhibitions are extremely rare, but will an exhibition and a hard-court tournament in March, even one Nadal loves as much as Indian Wells, improve his chances of being fit enough to compete for the title at the French Open in May and June, where he has won 14 times and there is a statue of him swatting his bull-whip forehand outside the main stadium? In recent years, Nadal has shut himself down after Indian Wells for roughly three weeks to begin honing his timing and conditioning for two months of clay court tennis, where the timing and style of play are markedly different from hard courts.
Welcome back, champ 👋
📷: @RafaelNadal | #TennisParadise pic.twitter.com/oVdoxv5JH0
— BNP Paribas Open (@BNPPARIBASOPEN) February 26, 2024
The elephant in the room here is money.
It’s always uncomfortable to count other people’s money, to suggest what should be enough. That is especially the case with professional athletes, whose careers are generally over by 40 and who have grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle.
That said, Nadal has won more than $134million in prize money during his 20-plus-year career. He has collected tens of millions, maybe more, in sponsorship and appearance fees. Terms of his deal with MGM and MGM’s deal with Netflix are not public, but he is likely to collect at least $1million for the Alcaraz match given how much he and other players of his caliber have earned for playing similar events
Nadal won’t receive an appearance fee to play at Indian Wells, since it is a mandatory tournament for healthy players. He has other incentives. Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle who owns the tournament, has become a friend and hosts Nadal at his private resort.
There, Nadal can pursue his other passion — golf. He has been known to play 18 or even 36 holes a day during his time in the desert and he’s already been out on the links in California.
(Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)
It’s a good life. The question is whether he is risking the clay season, where he likely has his best chance to win a 23rd Grand Slam singles title. Nadal would likely try to dismiss that thinking or anything that might suggest he is some kind of clay court specialist.
“I think it’s fine,” said Paul Annacone, the longtime coach (Roger Federer, Taylor Fritz) and commentator. “He’s in California practicing already, getting acclimated. So the only issue is if he’s not 100 percent. Then don’t go. But I don’t think he’d be here in California if he wasn’t close to 100 percent and ready for Indian Wells.”
Days after pulling out of Doha, Nadal posted a video of himself practicing slow service returns with the caption, “Work in progress.” There have been more videos since he arrived in Indian Wells, but no footage of anything approaching intense.
All of this has only added to the larger mystery surrounding when Nadal might call it quits for good. Last year, not long after his hip surgery, he suggested that 2024 would be his last season and serve as a kind of farewell tour as he visited the tournaments and cities that had meant the most to him during his career.
Then he showed flashes of his old self during his three matches in Australia and got a taste of the competition he craves. He has not committed to any hard-and-fast timetable since, insisting he is taking it day by day.
The Olympic Games tournament will take place at Roland Garros this summer, the site of the French Open. There had been speculation that might serve as his walk-off. Then he signed a deal to serve as an ambassador with Saudi Arabia’s tennis federation and to play in an exhibition in Riyadh in October with Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev, Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Holger Rune. That setting would seem like an odd choice for his final matches.
The Davis Cup finals will take place in Spain one month later. Perhaps then? That is, assuming he can make it that far without another serious injury.
For now, and for better or for worse, he has a big payday in Las Vegas and a hard court tournament (and plenty of golf) in the California desert to focus on.
(Top photo: William West/AFP via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Detroit, MI3 minutes agoFrankie Valli cancels tour. Why Four Seasons won’t be back in Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA15 minutes agoLive From Microsoft Build 2026 San Francisco
-
Dallas, TX18 minutes agoDallas Cowboys Full OTA Schedule Ahead Of 2026 NFL Season
-
Miami, FL23 minutes agoThese Miami pizza spots rank among America’s best
-
Boston, MA30 minutes agoNew England’s most welcoming towns and best summer escapes
-
Denver, CO33 minutes agoA Writer Goes Down the Rabbit Hole at Denver’s First Microdosing Cafe
-
Seattle, WA38 minutes agoMan injured during stabbing attack in Seattle’s University District
-
San Diego, CA45 minutes agoMore Thoughts on ‘Yes on A’
