Great article about Nadal losing the 2012 AO final!

MichaelNadal

Bionic Poster
And it's written by a Federer fan. I've bolded the parts I thought were awesome of him to observe or I really liked.


-You have just played the match of your life, or one of them, one of the many matches of your life, in the Australian Open final, where you fought back from the brink of defeat against one of the most dominant athletes on Earth. You fought for almost six hours, clawing at chances, screaming at yourself and scowling, until your opponent, who never shows weakness, visibly started to weaken. While he gasped for air and crumpled to the ground after rallies, you somehow got stronger. (But then, that's what you always do: You get stronger.) The power of your ground strokes, as measured by their average speed, was higher in the sixth hour of tennis than in the first. You broke the unstoppable champion early in the fifth set. The crowd believed in you. You had control of the match. And then, in a way that managed to seem both impossible and unsurprising, the champion got a second wind, and you lost.

How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today? The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men's tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them. We've seen Roger Federer, probably the most effortlessly brilliant tennis player who ever lived, shattered and weeping on the court after losses that seemed to groan up from the Old Testament. We've seen endless variations on "Andy Murray having his heart handed to him," to the point that his career increasingly seems to be in the hands of some demented opera composer. Murray's five-set loss to Djokovic in the semifinals last Friday was clearly both the best match and the most painful moment of this year's Australian Open — or it seemed that way, until we saw Nadal play a match for the ages and still lose to Djokovic on Sunday.

Six hours! It was the longest Grand Slam final ever, a match that felt like old-school naval warfare, just two ships cannonading each other until they both started to sink. Losing a final like that should be a bigger honor than winning the tournament under less amazing circumstances. But that isn't how it works. After the match, the commentators instantly started eulogizing Djokovic — how much he'd proved, how much he'd learned about himself — while agreeing that Nadal might need months to recover from the spiritual devastation of the defeat. You win, in our sports culture, or you're not a winner. That's the consequence of one slightly mishit down-the-line backhand in a six-hour match. How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today?

Until this tournament, I never fully realized how much Nadal means to tennis. I knew he was a great player, obviously. But I'm a goner for Federer, and Nadal has often felt to me like an infuriating obstacle, a berserk dervish with the demonic power to out-frenzy Roger's grace and lucidity. His tennis was a bludgeoning adrenaline rush, a Ramones song that lasted four hours. Had he never been born, Federer would have won the 20 majors he seemed destined for in 2007. I admired what Nadal had done, and I loved the insanity at the top of the men's bracket. But deep down, in some atavistic corner of my sports fan's heart, I kind of wanted him gone.One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It's a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They're not even in danger. There's absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it's not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can't freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you've been primed to think they're invincible.

Isn't that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years. The occasional Jo-Willie Tsonga crack-up aside, those three and Andy Murray are practically guaranteed to meet in every semifinal. They spend the early rounds of the tournament scything down ranks of lesser players, and when they finally play each other, you can't freaking believe how intense it is. They're all larger than life. They all seem essentially invincible.

What I realized during this Australian Open is that Nadal sets the tone for this state of affairs more than anyone else, certainly more than Federer. Roger is so cool and frictionless that, most of the time, he seems less like a prism of epic intensity than a dispassionate analyst of it
. Djokovic, since his ascent, has been so much better than everyone else that he's largely been able to act like a careful clinician, the administrator of his own talent. And Murray has lost to the other guys so often that his anger and frustration seem basically inconsequential. In other words, the game may be epic for the fans, but you won't always catch that ground note of holy-**** intensity if you only watch the other three players. Left to themselves, they don't exactly project deep contact with the secret fires of time.

Nadal, though? He plays like he's fighting giants. It's not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he's whipping the team pulling his chariot. It's also that frantic tenacity that used to drive me so nuts. Federer seems devastated when he loses but he also seems to sense losses coming and accept them before they arrive. When Nadal falls behind, he turns the match into life and death. He gets mad. He hesitates less. He hits the ball harder. He doesn't look sad or scared. He looks defiant, and he plays like he's possessed.. As a result, he carries matches to a higher plane than they have any business reaching. Djokovic could and should have won the Australian final in four sets, but Nadal refused to surrender, played lethal tennis, and took Djokovic to a place he'd never been. Instead of notching a routine victory, Djokovic had to tap into the same well of inspiration that Nadal was already drawing from. You could say that all these guys have learned what it means to fight on the plains of Troy because Nadal does it in every match. And we see him do it, so we know what it means, too.

Of course, the terrible thing about tennis, as opposed to mere epic warfare, is that you have to do it again next week. Ultimately, I think what's clued me in to Nadal's greatness is that, ever since Djokovic's rise, he plays this way and still loses. Our sports culture may value winning over everything, but there's nothing more epic than tragic defeat. There's a moment in David Winner's book Brilliant Orange, a history of the Dutch national soccer team, when one of the players from the immortal Dutch squad of the '70s — the group that finished second at two straight World Cups — describes his team as "second but imperial." No one in sports is more imperially second than Nadal right now.

But is that any consolation? How does it feel to die at the end of the book, this many times in a row? I mean, think about it. You spend years in the shadow of your rival. You never stop working or believing. Finally it all comes together: you surpass him. For a year, maybe two, you win everything. You turn the game upside down, and your bottomless reserve of will makes you seem unstoppable. All the records are going to fall. Then, more or less suddenly, a guy you used to beat comfortably surpasses you. Long before your reign was supposed to end, you find yourself overshadowed again. You lose five straight, six straight, seven straight to the new champion, all in finals, three of them in majors. You're 25, in what should be the peak of your prime as an athlete, and you're right back where you started. It turns out that your relentlessness isn't an unstoppable force. But — precisely because you have it — you keep going as if it is.

"I'll keep fighting," Nadal told the crowd in Melbourne. It's a marvelous thing to watch.

But how does it feel?

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id...el-nadal-novak-djokovic-australian-open-final

The beauty of being a Rafa fan, is every time he's supposed to be done, he comes back stronger :)

_70181035_70181034.jpg
 

Crose

Professional
Brilliant article, especially after seeing what he's done this season.

7 month injury layoff to the best in the world again. Just incredible.
 

MichaelNadal

Bionic Poster
Brilliant article, especially after seeing what he's done this season.

7 month injury layoff to the best in the world again. Just incredible.

It really is. I'm ready to see what this guy does next. It's incredible. You just never know with Nadal :)
 

Graf=GOAT

Professional
One thing that I have to give to Nadal is that he's the fiercest competitor I've ever seen. Even "ice-man" Borg quit in the face of adversity that was McEnroe. Nadal waited for his chances and came back stronger. The USO 2013 was probably the sweetest slam of all for him.
 

TheTruth

G.O.A.T.
And it's written by a Federer fan. I've bolded the parts I thought were awesome of him to observe or I really liked.


-You have just played the match of your life, or one of them, one of the many matches of your life, in the Australian Open final, where you fought back from the brink of defeat against one of the most dominant athletes on Earth. You fought for almost six hours, clawing at chances, screaming at yourself and scowling, until your opponent, who never shows weakness, visibly started to weaken. While he gasped for air and crumpled to the ground after rallies, you somehow got stronger. (But then, that's what you always do: You get stronger.) The power of your ground strokes, as measured by their average speed, was higher in the sixth hour of tennis than in the first. You broke the unstoppable champion early in the fifth set. The crowd believed in you. You had control of the match. And then, in a way that managed to seem both impossible and unsurprising, the champion got a second wind, and you lost.

How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today? The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men's tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them. We've seen Roger Federer, probably the most effortlessly brilliant tennis player who ever lived, shattered and weeping on the court after losses that seemed to groan up from the Old Testament. We've seen endless variations on "Andy Murray having his heart handed to him," to the point that his career increasingly seems to be in the hands of some demented opera composer. Murray's five-set loss to Djokovic in the semifinals last Friday was clearly both the best match and the most painful moment of this year's Australian Open — or it seemed that way, until we saw Nadal play a match for the ages and still lose to Djokovic on Sunday.

Six hours! It was the longest Grand Slam final ever, a match that felt like old-school naval warfare, just two ships cannonading each other until they both started to sink. Losing a final like that should be a bigger honor than winning the tournament under less amazing circumstances. But that isn't how it works. After the match, the commentators instantly started eulogizing Djokovic — how much he'd proved, how much he'd learned about himself — while agreeing that Nadal might need months to recover from the spiritual devastation of the defeat. You win, in our sports culture, or you're not a winner. That's the consequence of one slightly mishit down-the-line backhand in a six-hour match. How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today?

Until this tournament, I never fully realized how much Nadal means to tennis. I knew he was a great player, obviously. But I'm a goner for Federer, and Nadal has often felt to me like an infuriating obstacle, a berserk dervish with the demonic power to out-frenzy Roger's grace and lucidity. His tennis was a bludgeoning adrenaline rush, a Ramones song that lasted four hours. Had he never been born, Federer would have won the 20 majors he seemed destined for in 2007. I admired what Nadal had done, and I loved the insanity at the top of the men's bracket. But deep down, in some atavistic corner of my sports fan's heart, I kind of wanted him gone.One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It's a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They're not even in danger. There's absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it's not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can't freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you've been primed to think they're invincible.

Isn't that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years. The occasional Jo-Willie Tsonga crack-up aside, those three and Andy Murray are practically guaranteed to meet in every semifinal. They spend the early rounds of the tournament scything down ranks of lesser players, and when they finally play each other, you can't freaking believe how intense it is. They're all larger than life. They all seem essentially invincible.

What I realized during this Australian Open is that Nadal sets the tone for this state of affairs more than anyone else, certainly more than Federer. Roger is so cool and frictionless that, most of the time, he seems less like a prism of epic intensity than a dispassionate analyst of it
. Djokovic, since his ascent, has been so much better than everyone else that he's largely been able to act like a careful clinician, the administrator of his own talent. And Murray has lost to the other guys so often that his anger and frustration seem basically inconsequential. In other words, the game may be epic for the fans, but you won't always catch that ground note of holy-**** intensity if you only watch the other three players. Left to themselves, they don't exactly project deep contact with the secret fires of time.

Nadal, though? He plays like he's fighting giants. It's not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he's whipping the team pulling his chariot. It's also that frantic tenacity that used to drive me so nuts. Federer seems devastated when he loses but he also seems to sense losses coming and accept them before they arrive. When Nadal falls behind, he turns the match into life and death. He gets mad. He hesitates less. He hits the ball harder. He doesn't look sad or scared. He looks defiant, and he plays like he's possessed.. As a result, he carries matches to a higher plane than they have any business reaching. Djokovic could and should have won the Australian final in four sets, but Nadal refused to surrender, played lethal tennis, and took Djokovic to a place he'd never been. Instead of notching a routine victory, Djokovic had to tap into the same well of inspiration that Nadal was already drawing from. You could say that all these guys have learned what it means to fight on the plains of Troy because Nadal does it in every match. And we see him do it, so we know what it means, too.

Of course, the terrible thing about tennis, as opposed to mere epic warfare, is that you have to do it again next week. Ultimately, I think what's clued me in to Nadal's greatness is that, ever since Djokovic's rise, he plays this way and still loses. Our sports culture may value winning over everything, but there's nothing more epic than tragic defeat. There's a moment in David Winner's book Brilliant Orange, a history of the Dutch national soccer team, when one of the players from the immortal Dutch squad of the '70s — the group that finished second at two straight World Cups — describes his team as "second but imperial." No one in sports is more imperially second than Nadal right now.

But is that any consolation? How does it feel to die at the end of the book, this many times in a row? I mean, think about it. You spend years in the shadow of your rival. You never stop working or believing. Finally it all comes together: you surpass him. For a year, maybe two, you win everything. You turn the game upside down, and your bottomless reserve of will makes you seem unstoppable. All the records are going to fall. Then, more or less suddenly, a guy you used to beat comfortably surpasses you. Long before your reign was supposed to end, you find yourself overshadowed again. You lose five straight, six straight, seven straight to the new champion, all in finals, three of them in majors. You're 25, in what should be the peak of your prime as an athlete, and you're right back where you started. It turns out that your relentlessness isn't an unstoppable force. But — precisely because you have it — you keep going as if it is.

"I'll keep fighting," Nadal told the crowd in Melbourne. It's a marvelous thing to watch.

But how does it feel?

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id...el-nadal-novak-djokovic-australian-open-final

The beauty of being a Rafa fan, is every time he's supposed to be done, he comes back stronger :)

_70181035_70181034.jpg

That's a great article. It really is the beauty of Nadal. He's the common denominator in so many great matches, because he cares. And because he cares, we care. Tennis was dimmed during his absence.
 

oneness

Professional
Amazing article.
A while back I read a comment in a tennis forum. " I watch sports more for the competition than for the exhibition of skills.". That resonated with me.
No one competes like Rafa. The guy has been so great for this sport, as Murray said the best thing thats happened to tennis..
 
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Graf=GOAT

Professional
Nadal's choke in AO 2012 was hilarious. Easily as bad as Fed's USO 2009. Credit to both for coming back and winning slams after that.
 

oneness

Professional
Here is an other article that kind of talks about what Nadal means to a tournament.


http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/29/sports/la-sp-dwyre-us-open-20120830

U.S. Open seems a little flat without Rafael Nadal

BILL DWYRE

This year's U.S. Open tennis tournament is a party without the balloons. They are serving cake with no frosting.

He is the bombast in a tournament, the street fighter, the guy who gets off the canvas, time after time, bloodied and battered, and still lands the final haymaker. Much of the game around him, and across the net from him, is vanilla. Nadal's game is chocolate strawberry pistachio, an abundance of flavor that has become an acquired taste for tennis fans.

The U.S. Open swallows up much of a tired field in its parched August and September days, with its unrelenting rock music and carnival-barker atmosphere. Nadal is swallow-proof. He was made for this, for bullying the bully, for mentally handling the challenges of bad weather, huge and unruly crowds and a stadium court built in the image and likeness of the Grand Canyon.

.......

The U.S. Open will grind on to its conclusion. There will be drama and excitement. But there will be no Rafa, and that makes this Grand Slam a tad less grand.
 

MichaelNadal

Bionic Poster
Here is an other article that kind of talks about what Nadal means to a tournament.


http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/29/sports/la-sp-dwyre-us-open-20120830

U.S. Open seems a little flat without Rafael Nadal

BILL DWYRE

This year's U.S. Open tennis tournament is a party without the balloons. They are serving cake with no frosting.

He is the bombast in a tournament, the street fighter, the guy who gets off the canvas, time after time, bloodied and battered, and still lands the final haymaker. Much of the game around him, and across the net from him, is vanilla. Nadal's game is chocolate strawberry pistachio, an abundance of flavor that has become an acquired taste for tennis fans.

The U.S. Open swallows up much of a tired field in its parched August and September days, with its unrelenting rock music and carnival-barker atmosphere. Nadal is swallow-proof. He was made for this, for bullying the bully, for mentally handling the challenges of bad weather, huge and unruly crowds and a stadium court built in the image and likeness of the Grand Canyon.

.......

The U.S. Open will grind on to its conclusion. There will be drama and excitement. But there will be no Rafa, and that makes this Grand Slam a tad less grand.

Love it! Thanks for sharing. Rafa is really Mr. Excitement when it comes to a tournament, for many people. There's really no other player like him. Bamos.
 

The_Order

G.O.A.T.
I remember this loss quite well, I was there!

What an epic encounter it was and by the end of it we knew we just witnessed something special. The whole crowd was just in awe of the effort and willpower from both players.

A lot of people were saying this is it, no way Nadal's ever going to win a major off clay again, Djokovic is unstoppable. But I had just felt like Rafa was so close that time, he'll have his chances in the future.

As a Rafa fan, it was a shattering loss, but after a while you get over it and realise just exactly what he put himself through to try and win that match.

After 2010 it looked like he was going to beat the slam record for sure.

After 2011 and 2012 it looked like he'd never win another major apart from RG and even that looked like it might be slipping away after the 7 month layoff.

Now after 2013 it looks like he'll be unbeatable in majors again. Truth is we know is isn't unbeatable and to back up 2013 with another multiple slam season will be a massive challenge.

Rafa's attitude is what gets him through this though, he takes it one tournament at a time, he doesn't look too far ahead and he knows that he needs to continue to work hard if he wants to add to that slam total.

Honestly, whatever he adds to his resume is a bonus from now on, he's already stamped himself as a legend of the sport.
 

vernonbc

Legend
Brian Phillips over at Grantland is a fabulous writer and all his articles are enjoyable even if they aren't about Nadal but as a Rafa fan, I love his Rafa articles. Did you read his columns from this year's USO? Really funny and great stuff.
 

Crisstti

Legend
Wow, a little late in commenting, but what a brilliant article :)

Thanks for posting it Mike. Awesome.

I'd like to highlight another part:
"[...] You're 25, in what should be the peak of your prime as an athlete, and you're right back where you started. It turns out that your relentlessness isn't an unstoppable force. But — precisely because you have it — you keep going as if it is."
 
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