Culture
Rafael Nadal is retiring from tennis right on time
For more than 20 years, Rafael Nadal leaned into his reputation for authenticity.
Roger Federer was the tennis politician, an artless beacon of neutrality. Novak Djokovic was fated to manage the difficult task of fitting into a sport that the Nadal-Federer rivalry had come to define, by trying on a series of identities. He has only recently settled into his best fit: a tennis statesman prone to releasing the antagonistic tennis demon that he so relishes and which always lurks within.
Rafa just did Rafa. He was never afraid to be painfully honest with what was unfolding in front of his eyes or around him. Sometimes he used his words, punctuating a sentence with his trademark, “that is my true.” Sometimes it was one of those eyebrows, arched with the curve of his forehand, or the sarcastic grin that barely held back his disbelief.
“Really, amigo?” he might have said as Federer played on until 41, essentially on one knee in his final go-rounds, or as Andy Murray gamely tested rackets and tried to defy spinal surgery this spring and summer. Nadal shared with them the desire to have nothing left to give, but his decision to call it quits at 38 after the Davis Cup Finals in Malaga this November feels downright speedy by comparison even with the halting physical uncertainty of his last two years.
Nadal collected all the data he needed to conclude his time had passed in 16 matches over four months, all of them on red clay, the surface where besting him had once been arguably the toughest task in any sport. He won 10 and lost six, including two painful and somewhat lopsided defeats to Alexander Zverev and to Djokovic on Court Philippe-Chatrier at Roland Garros, his supposed living room. That was that, regardless of that raging-bull, never-quit mentality that has awed friends and foes alike for ages.
Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic’s last meeting was a signal to him that it was time. (Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)
“He’s the strongest player I’ve seen, mentally, and I’m not talking just about tennis, I’m talking about all sports,” his friend and compatriot Feliciano Lopez said in an interview Thursday.
The mentality was never his doubt. Nadal wanted to play without physical limitations. He couldn’t.
“It’s obviously a difficult decision, one that has taken me some time to make,” he said in his retirement video.
“Everything in this life has a beginning and an end. I think it is the appropriate time to end a career.”
How Rafael Nadal will leave tennis
It’s true that this has been in the works for something on the order of two years, ever since Nadal pulled up while chasing a forehand in Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open in January 2023. He glared up at his box in mid-stride, his eyes so wide it looked like someone had stabbed him in the hip.
In June of that year, he had surgery to repair two muscle tears, then embarked on one last comeback, enduring another series of setbacks each time he began to feel like his game might still be within reach. Ultimately, Nadal proved incapable of deluding himself that he could ever compete with the best players in the world again.
In retrospect, it probably didn’t even take that long. At the top level of tennis today, players need to be able to collect a certain number of easy points on their serve. This was especially true for Nadal, no longer with the speed or the ability to chase down balls for four hours through five sets as he had for 20 years.
He could no longer inflict the same damage on his serve, a shot that was always something of a limitation, even as he had managed to turn it from a real weakness into something of a weapon. He could no longer lift or torque his body as he once had, and he was essentially hitting two second serves every time he stepped up to the line. That would not change, even while skipping hardcourt tournaments and the Wimbledon grass, prompting thoughts of one last trip to the French capital where he, the boy from Mallorca, has his statue.
Rafael Nadal’s final French Open saw him dealt a cruel hand by the draw in the shape of Alexander Zverev. (Alain Jocard / AFP via Getty Images)
If he couldn’t go there with the dream of doing something important, he wasn’t going to bother. He didn’t need another afternoon of adulation and parting gifts if the match that preceded it would be little more than valediction.
“I prefer to stay with all the amazing memories that I have,” he said during a news conference ahead of the 2024 French Open.
Hubert Hurkacz, who also served Federer the humiliation of a Wimbledon bagel, pummeled Nadal at the Italian Open 10 days later. Nadal blew off a post-match celebration and didn’t mince words about the performance.
“I did a disaster,” he said after the match.
A spell of good health and a solid week of training ahead of that final French Open gave him some hope, but the draw delivered Zverev in the best form of his life. Nadal said he had felt good enough to perhaps improve with each match, but the pairing didn’t allow for that. Given where his ranking stood, and the state of his health, the draws probably wouldn’t have helped him again.
And then the final data point came at the Olympics in a second-round match against Djokovic, his longtime foe. In their 60th meeting, Djokovic won 6-1, 6-4 in a match that wasn’t as close as even that scoreline implies.
GO DEEPER
Game, Set, Match: Novak Djokovic sees off Rafael Nadal at Paris Olympics
Just as with Hurkacz, Nadal was cold and clear-eyed in his assessment of what had unfolded on that afternoon. He knew where his tennis stood. Djokovic had controlled the court all day, playing from all the comfortable positions, punishing Nadal on his serve and taking away his legs, as Nadal had done to so many on that red dust for so long.
“He was much better than me,” Nadal said then.
He could have played on. In an individual sport, no one cuts you from the team. Especially not tennis, and especially not tennis with Nadal, whose tournaments would dole out wild card entries to him as long as he could ask for them. He could have spent the next year enduring beatings like the ones from Hurkacz and Zverev and Djokovic, then letting crowds across the globe fete him in his anguish.
He didn’t need that. As he put it back in the spring, he preferred to stay with all his amazing memories.
(Top photo: Julian Finney / 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
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