What If

Tennis is famous for its “If–.” Two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem of that name greet every player who walks on to Centre Court at the All England Club. You know the words, the ones about triumph and disaster. A few years ago, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer were filmed reading that verse and others from the poem—while trying hard, it appeared, not to laugh—for a gauzy Wimbledon promotional video.

Now it seems that Nadal has had enough of “if.” Yesterday, after his 6-2, 6-0, 7-6 (5) loss to Tomas Berdych at the Australian Open, he officially banished the word from the game.

“‘If’ doesn’t exist in sport,” Nadal said when he was asked whether he thought winning the third set would have led to a comeback victory. “That’s the real thing. If, if, if—never comes. The thing is, you have to do it. I didn’t have the chance to play the fourth. I lost the third, so that’s it.”

Nadal is right, of course, and his attitude is the only one a tennis player can have and still maintain his or her sanity. Instead of treating triumph and disaster just the same, you have to forget the disasters entirely.

So forget “if.” Let’s move onto a word that does matter: “Why?” Nadal had won 17 straight matches over Berdych dating back to October 2006. As I wrote after Roger Federer’s defeat at the hands of Andreas Seppi last week, his first in 11 matches against the Italian, if you stick around long enough, the law of tennis averages says that you’re going to lose to a lot of people you normally beat. For Federer, the process began when he was 28; Rafa, who is 28 now, seems to be following in his rival’s footsteps. Last year he lost to Stan Wawrinka, Alexandr Dolgopolov, and Nicolas Almagro, among others, for the first time; yesterday Berdych, his most reliable whipping boy, finally turned the tables.

We should start by saying that the Czech, sometimes known the "The Choke" to the London press, played some of the best, smartest, and calmest tennis of his career to do it. He and his new coach, Dani Vallverdu, had a plan, and it was executed to perfection. What it was, exactly, Berdych wouldn’t reveal, but there was a Djokovichian quality to the way he set up rallies against Rafa—he powered his backhand crosscourt, stretched Nadal wide on the forehand side, and moved in for the short ball.

Just as important, he had Novak’s patience. Berdych's hair-trigger shot selection has always gotten himself in trouble against the top players; in this match, he didn’t go for the winner until it presented itself. At times, the way Berdych was throwing himself into his crosscourt backhands reminded me of how Djokovic hits that shot when he plays Nadal.

“It feels great,” said Berdych, who reached his fifth Grand Slam semifinal. “The really good thing is, the plan that we put together was the right one. Everything was working.”

From a stats perspective, “working” is an understatement. Berdych finished with 10 aces, no double faults, 41 winners, and 26 errors. He and Vallverdu have focused on his forehand and second serve in particular, and they both made a difference. (For more on Berdych on TENNIS.com, go here and here.)

On second glance, though, do those stats make this match sound a little too easy? Should Berdych, even on his best day, really be that dominant against Nadal? For every winner’s story, there’s a loser’s, and no game plan is executed in a void. Rafa, as he admitted, did his share to help.

“Is obvious,” said Nadal, who hadn’t faced a Top 10 player since last year's Roland Garros final, “that before [the third set] I didn’t play with the right confidence, with the right intensity, losing court, playing very short. I make him play very easy. You cannot expect to win matches in quarterfinals of Grand Slam helping the opponent to play well. That’s what I did....He played well, obvious. But my feeling was that I help him a lot in the beginning, no? Is easier to play well when you’re up one break, two breaks, from the beginning of each set.”

Nadal’s performance, until his desperate charge down the homestretch, was something of a mystery. He started very defensively, far back in the court, and while we know his shots land short when he’s tight, this time it was even worse—they were landing in the net. By the second set, he looked resigned to defeat in a way you don’t often see from him. You knew he was in trouble in the second game of that set, when he went down 0-40, fought back to 30-40, had an open backhand to make it deuce, and flipped the ball into the net. We’re used to seeing Nadal make that shot and come back to hold in that situation.

There were hints of a right thigh injury; he rubbed it during changeovers, stopped running for hard-hit balls at the end of the second set, and took a pill early in the third. He may have given up on a few shots because, after all of his other ailments, he feared making this one worse. Rafa denied that he was affected by any physical issue, and his movement, as well as his serve speed, returned to normal again early in the third set. While an injury may have contributed to the second-set bagel—a rarity for Nadal—Berdych won the match, and finished a tense third-set tiebreaker, with his own strong play.

It may have been a surprising performance from Nadal, but it wasn’t an unfamiliar one to Aussie Open fans. At the 2010 event, he retired to Andy Murray in the quarterfinals with a leg injury; in 2011, he lost to David Ferrer in the quarterfinals after pulling his hamstring; and last year he lost to Wawrinka in the final after spending an hour or so working through a back injury. As Nadal said when he got to Rod Laver Arena last week, “This has been a tough court for me.”

Can we predict anything about Nadal’s immediate future by looking at those past Aussie losses? The precedents are, for the most part, positive. In 2010, he recovered from his loss to Murray to win the three remaining majors and finish No. 1. In 2011, he might have done the same thing had it not been for Novak Djokovic, who beat him in the finals at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. And last year, Rafa recovered well enough to win Roland Garros before hurting his wrist over the summer. (If he wants to change anything, he might consider his trainer(s)—how many different body parts can he injure?)

On the one hand, you could say that the inevitable decline of a champion has already begun. Nadal, who will be 29 in June, has won just once major outside of Paris since 2010 (the 2013 U.S. Open), and he hasn’t been past the fourth round at Wimbledon since 2011. On the other hand, as recently as 2013 he was the best hard-court player in the world, with a major and three Masters on the surface. This was also just his fifth match since he had his appendix removed in November. Nadal’s career has always gone in waves. Is it time for another upsurge, or is the tide slowly going out?

Rafa has a reputation for being, perhaps deliberately, pessimistic about his chances. But I've always thought he was a pretty good self-prognosticator, to the point where his expectations can seem to dictate his results. He said before his loss to Berdych that reaching the quarterfinals in Australia after a few months away would be a “great result for me,” and he repeated that afterward. We’ll see what happens, but his attitude so far this year has reminded me of the way he talked in the early part of 2010. While everyone else thought he was struggling, he insisted—rightly, it turned out—that he was getting better with each match.

“The season is long, I know," Nadal said yesterday. “Beginnings are tough. I need to be ready to accept the situations that’s going to happen and try to be strong, accepting everything, and working hard to be back the way I want to be. When I say ‘be back,’ I don’t mean win or lose, I mean have the feeling in court that when you are there you feel confident, you feel you can compete against everybody with equal conditions.”

Rafa is sick, in other words, of having to start over again every six months. In this sense, the most important aspect of his loss to Berdych is that he didn’t injure himself further. Hopefully we’ll get a chance over the next few months to see how he does when he’s not making a comeback. For now, he leaves Australia with positives and negatives: Yes, he lost to a player he has owned, but his health seems to be intact, and South American clay in his immediate future.

Did Nadal’s last words, about not caring whether he wins or loses, only about “competing against everybody with equal conditions,” reminded you of anything? To me, they sounded a little like Kipling's verse over the entrance to Center Court, about meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same. Nadal realizes that playing well comes before winning, and he sounds confident that when he's at full strength, he can still compete with anyone.

Rafa is right that “if” is a word you don't want to use when you've just walked off the court a loser. But he also seems to know that the words to “If–” are still worth remembering when you’re walking on court, or starting a new season.