Compelling rivalries are the glory of one-on-one sports like tennis. The problem is they’re far too rare. At the moment the world’s two best men, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, are producing one that has all the hallmarks of a classic.

By Stephen Tignor
Photos by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images, Pascal Guyot/Getty Images, Michael Steele/Getty Images

When tennis fans claim that the pro game is in decline, what is it that we miss from the old days? One week it’s serve-and-volleyers, the next it’s wood racquets. We can’t agree on much, but most of us acknowledge that from roughly 1975 to 1985 our sport experienced a golden decade. And while tennis was going through plenty of changes then (the advent of the oversize racquet, the rise and fall of the headband), the period’s defining characteristic was its fierce, famous rivalries. On the men’s side, there was the warring triumvirate of Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe; on the women’s, there was the greatest matchup of all, Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova.

In other words, fans want to see drama no matter what style of play or type of racquet is used to produce it. Tennis lives and dies on the competitiveness of its matches rather than the individual skill of even its greatest champions. Just ask Pete Sampras. It wasn’t enough that he was the best player anyone had seen in a generation. Unless he was facing Andre Agassi, Sampras was accused of driving people from the game with his dull excellence. “A rivalry raises the visibility of an individual sport,” says Paul Annacone, Sampras’ former coach. “There’s no team to get behind, so it’s the quality of competition that matters.”

Roger Federer, Sampras’ would-be successor, has thus far avoided the “boring” label. His talent is too dazzling for people to be bothered that he’s winning everything in sight. Still, as 2006 began the No. 1 topic in the men’s game was whether Federer, after dismissing all other contenders over the last two years, was finally going to get a worthy rival. Fans had reason to hope. In 2005, Federer found an unlikely foil in the muscular figure of Rafael Nadal, the teenager who fist-pumped his way from No. 51 all the way to No. 2. His season was a mirror image of Federer’s. They split the first eight Masters Series titles. Federer went 50-1 on hard courts; Nadal was 50-2 on clay. Each won 11 titles in 12 finals, and they were 1-1 in head-to-head matches. The only major difference, literally, was that Federer won two Grand Slam titles to Nadal’s one.

The two picked up where they left off in 2006. Federer won the Australian Open, Indian Wells, and Key Biscayne, while Nadal handed Federer his first two losses of the year, running his record to 4-1 against the world No. 1. By May, the two had won 11 of the last 12 Masters events and the last four majors. They were threatening to enter a stratosphere that hadn’t been visited since Sampras and Agassi traded the top ranking in the mid-1990s and briefly put the game on their backs. The question now is, Can Federer and Nadal do the same?

The sport’s great duels are supposed to be between polar opposites. The iconic image of a tennis rivalry is McEnroe the Punk, rushing the net and screaming at officials, and Borg the Iceman, silently roaming the baseline. Evert vs. Navratilova and McEnroe vs. Ivan Lendl, both long-running struggles between an American and a Czech, added Cold War overtones. But it isn’t always black vs. white. Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, who sparred for decades, were products of the same Australian developmental system and played similarly crisp all-court games. Sampras and Agassi, while their personalities and playing styles differed, were both American immigrants’ sons who had known each other since they were preteens.

Where do Nadal and Federer fit in this history? They’re shaping up as a European version of Sampras and Agassi—opposite sides of the same coin (or the same big white Nike headband). Both are middle-class and from relatively small cities—Federer is from Basel, Switzerland; Nadal is from Manacor, on the Spanish island of Mallorca—and live near their birthplaces. They don’t seek the limelight. When Nadal’s away from the tour, he goes fishing. Federer likes to spend his downtime “washing my cars.” Their playing styles, while contrasting, are variations on the same power-baseline tennis that rules the tours today.

But if the two are similar in the big picture, they couldn’t be more different in the details. The 24-year-old Federer grew up at the center of an increasingly borderless Europe and speaks English, French, German, and Swiss-German. During his time at No. 1, he has raised his global profile and polished his image. After years without an agent, Federer now employs industry behemoth IMG. This year he became the first tennis player to be named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and he was even declared an “International Man of Sexiness” by no less an authority than People magazine.

Nadal, at 20, remains an islander. He lives with his extended family, in a fivestory apartment building. When asked to name his favorite places around the world, he mentions Paris, New York— and Mallorca. His English is a series of monosyllables. While he’s a born showman on court, away from it he’s guarded.

Even Nadal’s smile can look tentative, as if he thinks he’s giving too much away. As with all great athletes, Federer’s and Nadal’s playing styles flow from their personalities. Federer may be the smoothest player in history, at ease with every shot and casually confident in every situation. At 6-foot-1, 177 pounds, he has the perfect body type for tennis (Sampras is also 6-foot-1 and weighed 170 in his playing prime). Federer has been groomed in the vaunted Australian coaching tradition— his childhood mentor was an Aussie, Peter Carter, as is his coach today, Tony Roche. While he plays with unique flair and artistry, there’s nothing unorthodox about his game. Even on the run, he’s never off-balance, and he’s a one-man clinic in how to watch the ball. Federer takes the textbook and updates it.

Nadal’s game, by comparison, is homemade. His uncle Toni has been his coach since he took up the sport at age 4. They stayed in Mallorca rather than moving to Barcelona, the capital of Spanish tennis. Nadal, like the homeschooled Williams sisters, essentially skipped the juniors—in 2001, he became only the ninth player to win an ATP match before his 16th birthday. While Federer has a tennis-player’s body, Nadal’s thick legs could be a soccer player’s. That’s not surprising—another uncle of Nadal’s, Miguel Angel, played on Spain’s World Cup team and was known as a strong, bullish defender.