Nadal gets to the heart of what so many of us are feeling right now

So far during the lockdown, Rafael Nadal has grown a beard and shaved it, played backyard volley games with his sister, helped raise money for the Red Cross, backed the idea of an ATP-WTA merger, and been trounced by Andy Murray in virtual tennis. Even on cyber-clay in “Madrid,” he managed to win just one point.

Despite these efforts to keep busy and distract himself, and despite his star-athlete status, Nadal can’t shake the anxieties and frustrations that have burdened so many of us over the last two months. As he showed in a video interview with Spain’s national sports daily, Marca, this week, he’s also candid enough to admit it. You wouldn’t expect anything less from the most energetic stoic in sports.

“Do I want to compete?” Nadal said, as he searched for an answer to a question that never would have seemed complicated in the past. “Yes, but to some degree, right now, I think I’ve internalized the issue, and since I don’t see a quick solution, I’m not in that mindset where I want to compete.”

In a world where so many want and wish for a quick solution, Rafa isn’t afraid to douse those hopes with the hard truth: There probably isn’t going to be one.

“I believe that difficult times are coming,” Nadal continued, sounding as if he’s confronting the toughest opponent of his career. “[I’ll] prepare for what’s coming, all the adversities that the future may come with, to find solutions, and be ready.”

As The Guardian’s Tumaini Carayol wrote on Twitter, “Nadal’s sober honesty over the past month and a bit has been appreciated….Not every athlete/player sounds as tuned into reality in this moment.”

In short, if Rafa can admit that this problem isn’t going to be solved soon, and find a way to deal with that fact, we can, too.

Nadal went on to talk about what his most immediate concerns and hopes are.

“I think now my wish is to see my whole family and my friends,” he said. “Make a party, go to the sea, swim a little bit, have the feeling of freedom.

“To hug someone else…I can’t conceive of a future without being able to hug someone from the circuit whom I haven’t seen in months.”

Here Nadal gets to the heart of what so many of us are feeling right now, and what’s so uniquely terrible about this time period. COVID-19 is a disease of separation. It keeps people from visiting their loved ones in the hospital, keeps them from sharing their grief with an embrace, keeps them from mourning them together at their funerals. Yes, we want and need to work again, and for professional athletes that means competing again. But first we want to hug, dance, high-five, talk face to face—“make a party,” as Rafa says.

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We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone—that phrase will never not be true. But did you ever think there would be a time when you couldn’t go wherever you wanted to go, or gather with whoever you wanted to gather? At Thanksgiving, when you thought about what you were grateful for, did those fundamental aspects of life ever cross your mind? Now those are the aspects of life that Nadal, and the rest of us, want back first. “To see my whole family and my friends…make a party…go to the sea, swim a little bit, have the feeling of freedom.” Things so simple, we’re only realizing what they mean to us now.

When sports leagues began to shut down in March, I knew I would miss watching the star players compete. What I didn’t anticipate missing as much were the fans, the sight of them filling arenas, the sounds of their celebratory roars and crushed silences, their rolling waves of emotion coming through my TV set. For years before the coronavirus arrived, we heard laments about how virtual the world had become, about how we stared at our phones instead of talking to each other. But sports always remained live and in person, an arena where we could meet in the flesh. It turns out that, even when we’re watching on TV, our games are about people, and about what happens when we’re free to gather together.

Nadal has spent half his life at the center of those crowds, yet separated from them. Maybe it makes sense that, instead of wishing for a chance to be back in front of them again and hearing their applause, he wishes for personal, physical contact. Instead of wishing he could compete against his fellow players again, he wishes he could hug them. Nadal is a star, but he’s human, too.