The sporting elite – meaning the very best of the best – experience life through a prism during the years at their peak.
Few of us wake on a given morning knowing that this is the most important day of our professional life; that what is won or lost on this day will define our career.
But the rarefied few who experience such things must, further down the line, face another morning – one which may follow a sleepless night, after the kind of defeat that only the greatest achievers can understand.
It is a morning that brings the dreadful knowledge, never previously understood, that the best years are over; and that no amount of hard work may restore the powers which once were yours.
Quite probably, that is the morning to which Rafael Nadal awoke today, the first Friday of Wimbledon.
So difficult has 2015 been for him that there is a large sense in which a second-round defeat for him here did not truly amount to a shock – which is not, of course, to deny that Dustin Brown’s serve-and-volley tactics were brilliantly devised, perfectly executed and thrilling to watch.
But even before Nadal embarked on this year’s clay-court swing, doubt surrounded him as never before. Two years ago he was able to come back from a lengthy injury lay-off and put together an astonishing sequence of results; but time makes fools of us all.
By the end of March the nine-time Roland Garros champion had already lost five times this year, to candidates who had previously never stood a chance.
The worst of all came at the French Open itself, where he was dismissed in straight sets by Novak Djokovic, whom Nadal had defeated six times previously on the Parisian clay. It was 3rd June – Nadal’s 29th birthday.
One month later at Wimbledon, for the fourth successive year he has suffered an early defeat to an opponent ranked in the hundreds.
At Roland Garros for round after round he was questioned constantly about the looming possibility of losing his crown; when the moment came, he was outwardly philosophical, insisting his priority was to complete the season without injury.
But on Thursday night, while he fronted up to the hideous business of media interviews with his customary grace, there were times when he could barely trust himself to speak. He looked and sounded like an eye witness to some catastrophic event from which there could be no recovery.
Now of course a great cacophony of voices are raised with loud suggestions about What Must Happen Next.
Three-time Wimbledon champion John McEnroe has said Nadal must fire Toni Nadal, the uncle who has coached him for his entire life, to inject new life into his game. A more fantastically unappetising scenario would be difficult to devise. For one thing, there would be no guarantee that anybody else would be able to resurrect physical powers that may simply be fading in the way that all such powers must, sooner or later; but also to sack the blood relative who has been his lifetime sounding board would surely create a personal tsunami of emotional chaos amid which no player’s game could thrive.
Others are joining the predictable chorus advocating retirement. Many other players have heard it before Nadal. We who watch the elite have a habit of demanding that they leave the stage the instant their dominance begins to reduce; we rarely consider that the sporting elite spend their entire lives up to that point in the near-manic pursuit of victory, and to insist they should simply stop at once is the very worst that can be asked of them. It removes at a stroke almost every defining pillar of their daily lives.
Amid the clarion calls surrounding Nadal for sackings and retirement, perhaps we might all remember Wimbledon 2002, when 28-year-old Pete Sampras came to SW19 with his form faltering, and lost in the second round to George Bastl, ranked No.145. The most respected and intelligent voices in the game were heard demanding that Sampras retire. The word “embarrassment” was bandied about.
Ultimately Lleyton Hewitt lifted the trophy here that year, and in a press conference following one of the Australian’s early rounds, this reporter asked Hewitt if he thought Sampras could win another Grand Slam. I still recall the expression on Hewitt’s face – it was the sort reserved for those thought to be not in possession of their faculties – and he answered, shall we say, most positively in the affirmative. Three months later Sampras was the US Open champion.
That was his last Slam win, and although he did not play again in anger after that tournament, it was a full year before he could bring himself to confirm his retirement.
Each player must make their own calculation on this most awful of questions. What is right for one will not be right for another – but what matters is that it is right for that individual.
We can only guess what level of pain is deemed quite normal by Nadal, and how bad things must be with his famously troublesome knees before he considers himself actively injured. But injury is one thing. The dying of the light is quite another.
Something else John McEnroe mentioned during Nadal’s match against Dustin Brown is that he believes the Spaniard will win more majors.
He may be right, just as Hewitt was about Sampras. Sport is full of astonishing stories, and in tennis these past years Nadal has written many of them. It seems unthinkable that he may be weary of the fight. But how long can he keep drawing from the well before the water simply runs dry?
