“Sometimes you don’t feel your soul at 7 P.M.” These were the words of Sly Stone, singer, bandleader, and, for the last three decades or so, MIA drug casualty. He made that pronouncement in the early 1970s, to explain, in his own cryptic way, why he had begun to be a no-show at his own sold-out shows.
What does Sly Stone have to do with Rafael Nadal? Nothing at all, except that watching Nadal play the first two sets against Italian unknown Paolo Lorenzi today, the strung-out singer’s words went through my mind. In a cynical way, Stone had a point—putting on a performance requires not just a physical commitment, but an emotional one as well. As a pro, you’re supposed to go out and do your job at the appointed hour. But there’s still a very good chance you won’t be in the mood, or you won’t be able to summon your soul on command.
The same is true in tennis. As we’ve heard and read many times, there’s no place to hide in this individual sport, no teammates to pick up the slack if you have an off day, if you’re in a bad mood, if you're mind is wandering. A good portion of tennis players' lives is spent making sure they have body and soul in peak condition at the time they’re supposed to perform. They need all to have all of their energy marshaled for a two-hour period each day, which means they must expend as little as possible over the course of the other 22. This is an even bigger commitment than Sly Stone ever had to make; he had to have his soul, but not his body, in shape for his shows. Tennis players sacrifice everything to make this happen. Jimmy Connors spent his down time napping and watching TV, storing up his rage for his time on court. Andre Agassi said he couldn’t think of a better way to spend a day off in Paris during the French Open than to sleep for 12 hours. Bjorn Borg liked to take the same route from a hotel to a tournament each day so he wouldn’t be distracted by seeing anything new or surprising along the way.
Such is the life, by necessity, of a professional tennis player. But despite their best efforts, they must remain human. They must have moments when they can’t summon, not their best physically necessarily, but their best mentally, when they can’t get into the right frame of mind to compete for those two ours—it’s not like anyone walks around in that frame of mind all day (other than, perhaps, John McEnroe). Personally, I’ve often found that my biggest problem in any given match is not that my shots aren’t working, but that I don’t happen to have that sharp predatory instinct that particular day, the instinct not just to hit the ball well, but to win, which is a very different and more complex mentality. Getting everything right at the moment you’re supposed to walk onto the court is like walking a tightrope. Last year, looking back at Roger Federer’s comeback from two sets down at Wimbledon against Alejandro Falla, I said that, taking it from the wide view, it wasn’t the fact that Federer fell behind that was surprising, it was it doesn’t happen more often to the top players. This has been especially true in the last half-decade, when form has held to an astonishing degree, so astonishing, in fact, that by now we take it for granted.
Nadal had his Falla-esque moment today against Lorenzi. He lost the first set and was down 30-0 on his opponent's serve at 4-4 in the second. Nadal himself said later that he thought he might be “going home.” Would it have been the biggest upset in tennis history? It would have been right up there. The Italian was stunningly successful at the net—at one point he had won 14 of 16 points coming forward, which must be some kind of record against Nadal on clay. But nerves finally got to him; he missed a makeable volley at 4-4 and didn’t win another game.
Nadal’s forehand was way off. He hit returns of serve that landed on his side of the court before they got to the net. More embarrassing, he struggled with his overhead, a shot he has gone entire seasons without missing. Today he flubbed a fairly easy one (in the wind, yes) to lose the first set, and the one that he made to close out the second was also a little wobbly. All of that was surprising, but what was almost unpredecented, in my mind, was how ordinary Nadal looked from an emotional standpoint. He exhibited few of his usual signs of nerves or stress, no lips curls or hands to the head or eyes clamped shut in disappointment; and on the flip side, for the first set and a half I didn’t hear any scratchy vamoses or see even a hint of a pumped fist. Nadal just went about his business of making a shot here, shanking one there, blowing a break point here, and, most surprising to me, sending his passing shots right back at his opponent in the middle of the court instead of curving them inside the sideline for winners.
Afterward, Nadal said he was tired and had had trouble adjusting to the lower altitude in Rome after Madrid. It could be that he didn’t show much emotion early on because he realized that he was playing Lorenzi, and that, as Andy Roddick likes to say in these situations, at some point he was going to find out why the guy was ranked outside the Top 100. But what made it a remarkable match to me was not Nadal’s form It was his emotional state—he looked like any other player.
In that sense, we got to see today what makes Nadal special, what lifts him above his opponents on most days. Yes, it’s the forehand, and the passing shot, and the overhead. But it’s also the hands to the head after an easy miss, the eyes clamped shut, the snarl, the vamos, the fist-pump, the words of determination spat out at himself as he walks back the baseline after a winning point. What Nadal typically plays with is fear, a fear that he shows us, and that he tries desperately to turn into his favorite word, “calm.” If he played with fear today—and he did seem to believe he could lose—he didn’t show much of it. But really, like Sly Stone might say, there must be some days when you can’t find your fear at 1:00 P.M. Fear is a tough thing to live with; there must be some days when you don't want to find it.
We’ll see whether this match is a sign of anything for the future for Nadal, of a loss of confidence or a general fatigue from a lot of clay-court tennis. It’s just as likely to mean nothing, to be a bad day. That’s something that for the majority of us, and in the majority of tennis eras, would be the most normal thing of all.