You didn’t really expect Rafael Nadal to win his first tournament back after seven months away, did you?
I have to say: I did. Yes, there were reasons to doubt it through the week in Viña del Mar. “The knee” and “the body,” as Rafa said, remained question marks. His first step wasn’t as quick as we remembered, especially when he went after a drop shot. And there was a layer of rust—thin, but noticeable—on most of what he did. But this was clay, this was Rafa, and there wasn’t a whole lot, draw-wise, that appeared to stand in his way. By the time he had won his third match in straight sets, and stood ready to serve in the final against 73rd-ranked Horacio Zeballos, a man with fewer career match wins (33) than Nadal has career titles on clay alone (36), I’ll bet you were thinking that Rafa was going to win his first tournament back as well.
Maybe it was a sign that things weren’t going to go exactly as planned that Nadal double-faulted on that first serve of the match. More likely the real sign of trouble came in the next game, when Zeballos hit three straight aces to hold. The Argentine has a reputation as a doubles player, but was unheralded in singles; at the U.S. Open last year, he lost in the first round of the qualies to 188th-ranked Yuki Bhambri. And if his description of the Viña del Mar final as a match that he would be playing against “God” was any indication, some part of him was intimidated about going up against Rafa. But he never showed it, or played like it. Zeballos wouldn’t face a break point until the second set, and wouldn’t be broken until the third.
It was close all the way, and much of the time Zeballos was the dominant presence on serve and at the baseline; Rafa managed to win just 29 percent of points on the Argentine’s second serve. Still, Nadal did what we expected. He upped his game to win the first set tiebreaker, and played his best point of the match to save a set point in the second-set breaker. After a wild up-and-back rally, Rafa stunned Zeballos with a backhand drop shot that brought the crowd to its feet. “Ah ha!” they might have thought—there was a vintage Nadal point at last, scrambling effort with a tactical twist on top. When Rafa leveled at 6-6 on the next point, Tennis Channel commentator Justin Gimelstob said what many of us thought: Zeballos had reached ze end.
It turned out that Rafa hadn’t shaken off the rust completely, and you could see it—thin but noticeable, and costly—on the next point. The pros like to talk about “hitting their spots” with their serves. You and I are happy to get ours in, and we aim, in a general way, for one corner or the other. They think in terms of inch-specific locations. Suffice it to say that, at 6-6, Nadal didn’t hit his spot with his first serve. And Zeballos didn't let him get away with it. He knocked off a backhand return winner and followed it up with a forehand winner for the set.
Nadal likes to talk about how little separates pros of seemingly very different levels, and that what does separate them is mostly mental. This moment, and this match, showed again what he means. Rafa wasn’t at his best, with his return game, his movement, or his court positioning. Afterward, he chalked much of it up to the physical deficiencies that come with being away for so long.
“I lack reaction speed,” he said, “energy when returning, power in my legs so that the ball goes deeper.”