MELBOURNE—It was the middle of the 2011 French Open and Rafael Nadal was in a press conference, talking at length about something that I couldn’t quite follow. I knew that winning this title meant a lot to him. It would be his sixth at Roland Garros, tying him with Bjorn Borg, and it would stop the slide that had begun with his four losses to Novak Djokovic that spring.
But Nadal wasn’t going on about his game, or his draw, or Borg, or Djokovic, or anything remotely related to the tournament. He was explaining a system he had devised to shorten the length of the season for the players who wanted it shortened—i.e., the top guys—while keeping it the same length for the guys who wanted it that way—i.e., everyone else. Nadal talked about ending the mandatory Masters 1000 events sooner and reserving the end of the year for the smaller 250-level tournaments. It got pretty complicated for a post-match presser after a routine win. On the one hand, you had to hand it to Nadal for actually trying to work out a way to change the sport rather than just lobbing out a complaint. On the other hand, you had to wonder why he bothered himself with it to that extent. Did he really believe tennis could be changed?
I’ve often wondered why Nadal, who isn't a politician, or a revolutionary like Billie Jean King, or even a rebel like Andre Agassi, has thought and talked so much about making changes to the tour. From the start, I'd thought of him as a kid wrapped up in a kind of competitive trance, who just wanted to play the game and leave the outside stuff to other people. But he's persisted, offering fixes for Davis Cup (make it a World Cup type of event every two years) and the ranking system (make it over two years as well, so players don’t hurt themselves trying to defend points). This week, in an interview with the Sydney Herald-Sun, Nadal seemed ready for a new quest, to reduce the number of tournaments played on hard courts. They’re killing his knees and he doesn’t want to have to retire at 30 and be hobbled for life.
It all came to a head over the last few days. First the London Times reported that Rafa was ready to resign his vice-president’s position on the ATP’s Player Council because he wasn’t getting anywhere with his concerns. Then, in a press conference at the Australian Open today he was asked about his role in the players' meeting that was held Saturday night, and whether he would be leading the charge on the issues he has championed. Nadal, with some agitation, said that he was tired of being a public face for the complaints, that a lot of players agreed with him, but that the “right guys” weren’t in the positions “to fight for us.” It seemed that he had finally had enough with politics.
As Nadal switched from questions in English to Spanish, you could see his agitation level rise. It turned out that he had at least one more public statement to make, and it was at the expense of his friend, rival, and the president of the Players Council, Roger Federer. Nadal criticized Federer for doing too little to improve the game and letting other players “burn” in public with their complaints, while he came off as a “gentleman" by comparison.
If [Federer] finishes his career as a rose,” Nadal said, “it's because he has an extraordinary body, but neither Murray nor Djokovic nor I will end up roses."
According to Nadal, a majority—“supermajority” in his surprisingly wonky term—of the rank and file agreed with his ideas (the ranking system, I'm guessing), but that “the structure” keeps it from happening. You have to wonder if, when he said that the tour didn’t have the right guys in there to fight for them, he meant President Federer. I’d never heard that a majority of players favored a ranking system change, or that most of them wanted the season shortened or Davis Cup revamped. A majority of top players, probably—but I assume Nadal has his reasons for saying that it goes beyond them.
This isn’t fair to Federer. While he may come across as above-it-all, Federer believes individual players shouldn’t go public with their grievances unless they’re shared by others, and as the top guy he has to weigh the concerns of everyone. Federer is also older than Rafa, and must see more limits to what can be changed by the players than the younger, reluctant firebrand. And Federer is a traditionalist at heart; he still looks at the otherwise universally accepted Hawk-Eye warily. As Nadal said today, both guys like the tour and have profited by it, but where Rafa sees ways to make it better, Federer sees negativity and bad public relations.
On the surface, you might say that Federer has the broader good in mind, while Nadal has Nadal and his knees in mind. But even while they were uttered in frustration, and will likely be regretted, Rafa’s words today did finally make me realize why he keeps tilting at windmills: He’s desperate to do anything to save his body and lengthen his career, even if he has to "burn" for it. To keep playing, he can't just leave everything else to other people and stay in his competitive zone. While Rafa was wrong to commandeer Murray and Djokovic in his cause and pit them against Federer and his “extraordinary body," Nadal does believe that he’s fighting for all players to have longer careers and, as he put it “be able to play soccer and go skiing with [their] friends” after they retire. Whether a supermajority of them agree with him as much as he thinks they do, I dont know.
Nadal has always played tilt-at-windmills, nothing is impossible tennis. He has been, for one, the only player not to accept defeat at some level to Roger Federer. But while he’s right to fight for his opinions—I agree with Rafa about the schedule and Davis Cup—he’s wrong to fight Federer this time, at least in public, and to characterize him the way he did. There’s only so much change the complex sport of tennis is going to take, no matter who runs the player council.
Besides, as much as Nadal should be able to say what he wants to say, and as much spice as a Fedal feud would bring to the Aussie Open, don't you want to see these guys get along? They can probably both agree that that's good for the game.