Back to the Struggle

Fifth in a series on players to watch in 2012.

As the new year begins, there are two very different ways of looking at Rafael Nadal. On the one hand, there's isn't much to say about him and his future that hasn’t been asked and answered before; on the other hand, he remains the game’s most popular object of speculation. For the better part of 2011, the tennis world wanted to know: What was wrong with Rafa? How did Novak Djokovic solve the man we thought was going to be the sport's next king? Was Nadal declining, slowing down, losing his serve, losing his motivation, losing his hair, ready to snap, ready to pull a Borg and walk away forever? What could he do to turn it around?

Other than the hair loss bit, which is a definite, there aren’t any good answers out there. It’s even difficult to decide whether Nadal’s 2011 was good or bad, a success or a failure. He essentially lost to one other player. On earth. He won a Slam, reached the finals of two others, and clinched the Davis Cup. As for the final-round losses to that one other player, Nadal was still proud, as he said after the last of them, at the U.S. Open, that he had made it, that he was there. At the same time, it was obviously an unsatisfying season for him, especially coming off his banner 2010. Nadal surrendered his Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles and couldn’t even defend his clay turf in Madrid and Rome—that really was a new low. At both the start of the season and the end, Nadal admitted that it was tougher now for him to find the motivation on a daily basis.

So can he turn it around in 2012, and if so, how? That question is also impossible to answer, until he plays Novak Djokovic, or at least until he wins another major. Nadal can add weight to his racquet, hit his serve 10-m.p.h. harder, take his forehand earlier, crack his backhand flatter, and beat every other player in the world love and love, but he won’t have done anything more than what he did in 2011 unless and until he dethrones his nemesis. It’s an odd position to be in: No matter how well Rafa thinks he’s playing, he won’t have any idea whether he’s getting closer to his goal until he actually sees Djokovic on the other side of the net.

Just as discouraging as the losses to the Serb is the fact that at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open Nadal had played himself into top form as the tournament progressed, thrashed Andy Murray in the semis with some of his best tennis of the season, made many people believe that this time he was going to end the Djoker’s run, and then still lost. Badly. With that in the back of his mind, it's going to be tough for Nadal to feel confident that he's making any progress as long as Djokovic is still in the draw.

Given that peculiar psychological situation, all Nadal can do for now is try to improve his game piece by piece, with a distant eye toward the ever-looming Nole. He’s begun to do that, by adding weight to his racquet so he can “have more winners,” by at least talking about playing closer to the baseline, by being more aggressive with his backhand to try to counter Djokovic’s superior two-hander, by getting the “coordination” back on his serve and the miles per hour he had with it in 2010. (He might want to re-watch the video below of himself with Uncle Toni and Oscar Borras fixing his take-back in 2010; go to the 4-minute mark to see a skeptical Rafa getting a serving lesson).

We’ll see if any of it works, once Nadal and Djokovic finally play. The Serb had all of the answers last year; he won by attacking, he won by defending, and he even trumped Nadal’s trump card by outlasting him in rallies. At this point, there’s isn’t a ton that Nadal can change. In the past, he used to say that he was always looking to improve, and he tweaked his game regularly to do that. But as of 2011, he no longer seemed to believe that. He said that there wasn’t much chance left for him to get significantly better. "I have my game," he said, and he had to live and die with it.

That may sound pessimistic, but it also sounds about right. Nadal is generally his own best analyst, and there really is a point when your game is your game and your strokes are your strokes. Of course, this doesn't mean that Nadal is thinking about Djokovic all day, or carrying a voodoo doll of him on the road. He still has to play everyone else. What did his loss to Gael Monfils today signal, if anything? Rafa claimed that he was generally happy with his game (though he did have to add the word “seriously” at the end of his statement, as if the reporter he was answering was giving him a look of disbelief). The good news is that Nadal appears to be hellbent on staying positive and being more aggressive, even if the latter costs him some early matches. The bad news is that Monfils, who had only beaten him once in nine previous matches, appeared to have watched and maybe even learned something from Djokovic’s wins over Rafa. The Frenchman served him wide in the deuce court, and took him even wider into the ad court with his two-handed backhand—très Nole.

All we can do now is watch what happens in Australia, where there will be a lot of other players who have learned the Djokovic Rules for playing him—that includes Murray and Roger Federer, each of whom won their last matches with Nadal, and threw in bagel sets for good measure. The only thing we know for sure is that Nadal will make it worth our while to keep watching him. He’s no longer No. 1, but he’s used to that. He’s no longer on the young side of the sport, but he’s resigned to that. He’s struggling and suffering again. If the past is any guide, he's going to like that.