The scene has played out the same way twice this week. A player is spotted in the tunnel leading into Rod Laver Arena before a night match. He’s there by himself, hopping a little, stretching a little, trying to stay loose. Frankly, he looks like he doesn’t know what to do. Everyone waits. The TV camera waits. The TV commentator who’s going to interview the players as they walk on the court waits. The public address announcer waits. Then a door opens and Rafael Nadal comes out of a room, presumably a bathroom, with his huge racquet bag over his shoulder and customary single Babolat in his left hand. The proceedings can begin.
Hold it, not quite yet. While the other player puts his bag down and walks out to meet the chair umpire for the coin toss, Nadal fiddles with various things, gets a tube of something out and sucks it down, takes a sip of something and then a sip of water, lines the bottles up just so, and for good measure wipes a towel over his arms, even though its hard to imagine what he’s done to start sweating at that point. While this is happening, the other player and the umpire say hello, then look at the court, then smile awkwardly. The player again tries to stay loose, but there’s really not much he can do. Finally, Nadal is ready. He runs out and starts jumping up and down in front of his opponent, who stares at his strings.
I first saw Nadal go through this routine on the Grandstand at the U.S. Open in 2003, when he was 16. He kept his opponent, the umpire, and the crowd waiting just as he does today. I remember thinking something like, “This is one willful kid,” There was something impressive about the way he went about his business on his own terms even then.
I’ve always been impressed, from a competitor’s standpoint, with the way Nadal controls the tempo of a match, even before the players take the court. It gives him a huge, if subtle, mental edge—“this match goes at my pace,” is the message. I’m not even sure how much of it is gamesmanship, and how much of it is just a ritual that he learned very early, and that he simply must perform now or risk thinking he’s jinxed himself out of the match. Nadal is a man of rituals and superstitions. This is a guy who, when he’s walking across the back of Laver Arena after toweling off, goes out of his way to step all the way through the Melbourne logo at the back of the court.
But I haven’t liked seeing those two players—Bernard Tomic and Marin Cilic—waiting in the tunnel for him, looking slightly forlorn. And as much as I admire Nadal’s competitive intelligence, I’ve never liked seeing his opponents standing out with the umpire, fiddling around, looking awkward. Tomic was asked about it after their match, and he said Nadal’s routine didn’t bother him, that the Spaniard just “has his thing.” No doubt there are other players who feel this way; Nadal was voted the winner of the Sportsmanship Award in 2010, which means his colleagues can’t be too annoyed by him.
That doesn’t include Robin Soderling, naturally. At Wimbledon one year, he refused to come out of the locker room until Nadal was ready to walk onto the court. Jurgen Melzer and Roger Federer, among others, have sat on the sidelines waiting for him to get his water bottles aligned before heading out for the coin toss. Cilic complained to the chair umpire on more than one occasion about Nadal's slowness on Monday. And Tomic took a conspicuously long time himself getting ready on the sidelines on Saturday. For a minute, it seemed that both players were never going to come off their chairs, and that the match would never be played.
Waiting it out is not really an effective strategy for combating Nadal’s tempo-control. If you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs while he gets ready, you’re still playing at his pace. Is this unfair? A poll of the players would have to be taken to find out. How much do they mind it? Does it affect how they play? Do they wish they could invent their own, even longer pre-match ritual?
The next question is, What would you do about it, anyway? Do we want to start timing the coin toss, or the walk down the runway? What would the penalty be for going over those limits, considering that the match hasn’t even begun? If the players thought it necessary, I could see there being an unstated rule that when the chair umpire calls the two opponents for the toss, they have to be out there immediately.
Or I could see Nadal altering his rituals a little and taking less time, especially in the tunnel. Do what you need to do earlier. Eat your tube of whatever it is and sip your sips in the locker room. Have a lackey come out and put your water bottles in the right position for you before you get out there. When he was young and coming up, I admired Nadal’s willfulness and obliviousness to everyone but himself and his rituals. I still admire his competitive intelligence and ability to control his surroundings. But now that he’s No. 1, his pre-match stall session has started to seem like too much. It has started to seem like bad sportsmanship, from a guy who is a good sport in many other ways, and a guy I like for so many other reasons. There’s no need to make your opponents feel awkward before the match, Rafa. You know you can do that once it starts.