Rafael Nadal and the definition of sacrifice

PRESS CONFERENCE: Rafael Nadal's remarks after his Australian Open

The "sacrifice" word is not like this. When you do things that you like to do, at the end of the day, it's not a sacrifice. You are doing the things that you want to do. Rafael Nadal, following his second-round loss at the Australian Open, when asked where gets the motivation to repeatedly work his way back from injury to compete.

When it comes to fatuous cliches about tennis, it’s pretty hard to beat the one about the great “sacrifice” players make in order to achieve their goals. Thankfully, there are people like Nadal, that clear-eyed rationalist, to keep us wary of such melodramatic and ill-considered tropes.

Ironically, Nadal’s serial struggle with injuries at this late stage of his career almost warrants use of the “S” word. After all, it’s hard to imagine that Nadal enjoys being locked into a seemingly endless cycle of injury, recovery and rehab. But the S-word is much more often used in reference to decisions made by parents in order to advance the careers of their offspring, or the things that promising young players usually have to forgo: the scholastic environment, close school friends, team sports, proms—even an education.

As Novak Djokovic said a few years ago at Wimbledon, referring to an immersion in tennis that precluded a conventional education: “[School is] probably the only part I would probably say I. . . don't regret. . . but I just miss, probably more than anything else.”

Parents who are forced to uproot, quit jobs, or otherwise apply their energies to helping their talented children become tennis stars—think Yuri Sharapov, father of Maria Sharapova—are a unique breed. They use tennis to lift themselves and their kin to a higher station in life. There’s nothing wrong in that, but to call it a “sacrifice” leads to the question, “What exactly are they giving up?”

Many of those parents who rolled the dice with dreams of their kids making it big overlap with the infamous group we’ll call “pushy tennis parents.” But for all the well-founded concern about the sacrifices imposed on their offspring by the PTPs, one of tennis’ great secrets is that the success rate of the PTPs is very low. Successful prodigies make it less because they are pushed than because from the earliest age they are pushing. They are little monsters who can’t get enough of the game, and their parents figure out how to manage that appetite to everyone’s benefit.

It's not like I never partied. It's not like I hated my life on tour in the beginning. It's definitely a bit of a more unusual route to adulthood. Roger Federer

I had a conversation with Karolj Seles on the day his daughter Monica broke through in 1990 as a 16-year old French Open champion. He spoke no English, but told me in his native Hungarian that he and his family were overwhelmed by everything they were going through. Trying to get Monica to take it slow was like trying to hold a tiger by the tail. He also feared that her intensity and ambition might be harmful to her long-term emotional well-being. But they were locked in by her ambition and commanding talent.

The S-word is most often employed to challenge the way developing players are denied a “normal” life. But what exactly is “normal,” anyway—and if it’s synonymous with “conventional,” then who needs it? Certainly not the millions of kids who start rock-and-roll bands, or fall in love with them. Henry David Thoreau observed, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I don’t believe it was an endorsement.

Truth is, the bulk of successful tennis pros have no regrets, apart from caveats like the above one issued by Djokovic. At Wimbledon in 2019, Roger Federer allowed that leaving home at age 14, to train and live for two years among French speakers while living with different families, was rough. But he got through it.

“In the beginning [of a career], you get a lot of questions about, ‘Do you feel like you regret so many things because you left school at 16, went on the road, couldn't party like a rock star.’ I don't know," he said. "I'm like, It's not like I never partied. It's not like I hated my life on tour in the beginning. It's definitely a bit of a more unusual route to adulthood.”

Most of the top stars share Federer’s attitude. Alexander Zverev, who has more than made up for any parties he may have missed at 16, said at the 2021 Madrid Masters: “I think you miss out on the normal teenage life. . . But I was always very determined. I knew what I wanted. I knew that I had to be disciplined and work extremely hard for the things that I wanted to achieve, because if you want to have both, you're not gonna be as successful.”

Zverev’s point is that success is transactional. You aren’t really sacrificing things as much as agreeing to certain trade-offs. Most players have long made their peace with the process by the time they become stars because, like Nadal, they love what they do. The ones that don’t feel that affection—think Nick Kyrgios, currently—can end up struggling with the trade-offs and resenting the sport, convinced that it asks too much of them.

But it always comes back to the same thing: Given a choice between experiencing enormous success at a young age and leading a “normal” life, who is going to choose Door B?