!99604358 by Pete Bodo
Howdy. Have your eyes adjusted to green yet, after so many hours spent staring at the scuffed orange surface of all those European clay courts? Frankly, I was surprised that Rafael Nadal did not pull out of the tournament at Queen's Club, given the number of matches he's played on clay and the intensity he brought to bear in the Roland Garros final. But you saw the score: Nadal def. Marcos Daniel 6-2, 6-2.
When Nadal was asked in his final post-match press conference in Paris if he would "celebrate" in the evening, he replied: "Difficult to have a big celebration if you have to practice tomorrow. . . I gonna have time, eh? At the summer at home after Wimbledon, Mallorca is unbelievable celebration to do. . ."
I believe Rafa is hoping to kill two birds with one stone, the way your friends and family like to do it if your birthday falls near Christmas, or Mother's Day, or the Fourth of July. You know, unwind after Rafa has completed a Channel Slam for the second time in his career by winning the French Open and Wimbledon back-to-back, as he did in 2008.
A number of people might have something to say about that during the Wimbledon fortnight, of course, but one thing that seems certain is that he isn't going to do anything to diminish his chances. For the big long-term, or at least the longer-term takeaway from Roland Garros is that Nadal is back in the grip of that passion with which we'd grown so familiar until that wet, dreary day in Paris when he lost in the fourth round to Robin Soderling in 2009.
Nadal's stutter-steps through the latter half of last year, and even the 2010 season leading up to the European clay-court circuit, raised legitimate doubts about whether he can get back into the position he occupies today.
During the just completed clay-court season, Nadal proved that he has the drive, both in his legs and his spirit, to reclaim the No. 1 ranking that had been stripped from him. The past few months have been, in more ways than one, his homecoming. His return to the wellspring. Let's go back and see if I can still find my A game, his reasoning seemed to go, and then see if that game is still good enough.
Check, on both counts.
As he said: "The confidence is always the most important thing. So winning here and winning the last 22 matches on clay is always very good preparation for grass. So tomorrow in the afternoon I gonna be practicing at Queen's, for not a long time. For 45 minutes. Maybe I will love to play doubles on Tuesday there, to prepare." And later, "Sure I gonna play, I think, singles on Wednesday."
Rafa is not the first person to prepare for Wimbledon on clay. Bjorn Borg was pretty good at that, too, and we saw what it netted him: a channel slam in each of three successive years starting in 1978.
I'm surprised Rafa was willing to wait until Wednesday to play his first match at Queens. I wouldn't put it past this guy to have requested an early start, and Nadal's actions are an indirect comment on the degree to which fatigue is a condition that sometimes has as much to do with the state of your mind and aspirations as it does your body. At times, it has nothing to do with either. If anybody had earned the right to feel "tired," to complain about the calendar, to bitch and moan about the hardship of facing quality opponents, day-after-day, week-after-week, it's Nadal. How encouraging it was to observe and track a guy who clearly enjoyed what he was doing for weeks on end, if "enjoy" is the right verb to describe the sum total of the enthusiasm, appetite and focus he personified right up to match point in the French Open final.
All of this is probably difficult news for Roger Federer, and it can be interpreted as an inadvertent warning shot across his bow. He'll have to get his game in full working order, should the anticipated showdown with Nadal on grass come to pass. That's no sure thing; either man could lose before the Wimbledon final, and it wouldn't necessarily undermine the emerging narrative. Sometimes, the skies grow dark and the air electric, but the storm never breaks - at least not where you expect it. And both Federer and Nadal will have plenty of difficult questions to answer before finding themselves ready to perform a reenactment of that epic 2008 final.
But the Roland Garros final made it crystal clear that the hardships Nadal endured over the past 12 months did not break him; if anything, they re-made him. What next, sleeveless shirts and piratas again?
The last ball Nadal hit in that recent final landed not in the court of Soderling, but Federer. Nadal could just as soon have grabbed a marker and scrawled See you July 4th on it. And the onus will be on Federer to demonstrate that he wants to make that date.
Right now, Federer appears to be having trouble getting the same degree of motivational traction as Nadal. The big question, as Federer prepared to defend his Roland Garros title, was whether he could rise above his fitful tendencies and show us that he can rally the mental and physical resources required to take his game up a few notches on the most important occasions. He was, to some degree, playing with fire.
In Paris, Federer was unable to transcend his vacillations. There's a good chance that he's suffering from a degree of burn-out, without even recognizing it in himself. It's no shame to lose to Soderling at any major, and there's no question that the Swedish terror was far more convincingly on top of his game when he played Federer in Paris than when he finally met Nadal. Still—Grand Slam encounters between Soderling and Federer had become a value-added component at most majors in 2009, much to Soderling's misfortune. And in Paris, Soderling turned the tables. Did it tell us more about Soderling, or Federer?
Had Soderling beaten both of the top-ranked men in Paris, he would have become something like the new Novak Djokovic (and we sure need something like that, and hope Novak himself can reprise the role)—the third-wheel, an equal opportunity spoiler. But the fact that Soderling beat Federer only to lose to Nadal only increases the sense that the big loser among the three is Federer. The only saving objection is that the matches took place on clay, and we all know that Federer is a different player on turf.
So what we have, approaching Wimbledon, is a challenge for Federer to do in London what Nadal did in Paris. He doesn't need to remake himself; a guy with 16 Grand Slam titles to his name doesn't need to do a danged thing, beyond making an effort to not let it all go too much to his head. But he can squelch the growing sentiment that his game is slipping by re-establishing his authority on grass. But this also is when all those titles, and all those additional years and the mileage they represent (he's got almost five full years on his 24-year old rival, demonstrating again that tennis is a young man's sport), is a handicap for Federer.
Why should he rise to the threat represented by Nadal, at this point in his life? No matter what he says, there's scant reason for him to get a good hate on, or even to feel threatened by Nadal. Besides, he's not the kind of guy given to such preoccupations. Never has been.
And that puts Federer in a tight spot, with the freight train that is Nadal bearing down on him.