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Mornin', everyone. I just wanted to drop a quick post and ask you to indulge me for the next few days: we're doing some long-term magazine planning this week (meetings, meetings, meetings), and I'm on deadline for a U.S. Open issue Andy Roddick profile. So blogging will be light over the next few days.
Asad Raza was up at the farm with me and Cowboy Luke this weekend. We had a great time, and the unseasonable heat and humidity dictated serious pond time. We swam in the afternoons, and caught a few bass in the evening. We did some shooting, and watched the Queens final together - at last until early in the second set, when I had to take Luke for his riding lesson.
Watching that high quality match made me recall the nearly evangelical fervor with which John McEnroe, near the tail-end of his career, exclaimed that what tennis really needed, what tennis would soon have, if it continued to evolve, was a higher caliber athlete - someone built on the platform of Michael Jordan, who at the time was the gold standard for athleticism. The not-so-thinly veiled secondary message was that tennis also needed a broader base in all ethnic and racial communities, in order to wean the athletes therein away from basketball, soccer, baseball, et al.
I think McEnroe's hopes have been fulfilled, but not in the way he might have expected. That's partly because in McEnroe's era, the U.S. was still the dominant tennis power, and the imperial assumption that the higher breed of tennis player would emerge from North America - perhaps, if you wanted to stretch it, east Europe - was an underlying, reflexive assumption. Who would have guessed that the uber-athlete of McEnroe's dreams would barrel onto the tennis stage from Mallorca?
Nadal's play over the past few months has been extraordinary. As he took pains to note after the French Open final, it isn't like he's a "typical" clay-courter, either. That Nadal himself would have thought through this issue and elected to make and broadcast the distinction was very telling. He sees himself as a tennis player, not a clay-court this, or baseline that. He sees himself as a tennis player in roughly the same way that Lawrence Taylor saw himself as a football player; sure LT was a linebacker, like Nadal is a player schooled in the art of tennis on clay. But you got the feeling that LT would have been just as happy throwing 85-yard touchdown passes, flattening offensive tackles, or carrying the ball and mowing down linebackers as the other way around, except his skill set and history in the game dictated the linebacker's role. It's the same position Nadal would play if he had a taste for futbol imperialismo. In fact, it's the position he plays in tennis, to Federer's sleek, high-strung wide receiver.
As we saw at Queens, Nadal has become a tennis meta-stylist - perhaps anti-stylist is a better way to put it. His unique gift is that he's found a game, and a way of playing, that doesn't allow technique or strategy to get in his way. It's a strange idea, but worth exploring. Sure, he's bent on sneaking that serve in to Roger Federer's backhand. And yes, he likes to open up the court and inflict punishment with his inside-out forehand. You can't not do a certain amount of that kind of thing. But his tennis isn't about technique or strategy. Not at all.
The games of most players are built on the platform of technique; there isn't a better example of that than Roger Federer. It helps explain why it took The Mighty Fed quite a few years to marry that superb technique with a strategic grasp of the game and the urge - and will - to win. Nadal is different.
Technically speaking, Nadal's game is a nightmare - at one time, it seemed to doom him to "clay-court expert" status. But he's transcended that, because his game was not really designed to succeed on clay; it was designed (although "evolved" would be the better verb) to succeed, period. That Uncle Toni and the other architects of Nadal's game managed to steer clear of all that great advice out there on forehand grips and two-handed volleying technique is an achievement akin to having produced a concert violinist of unsurpassed ability who never attended music school.
I've seen many people playing tennis roughly the way Nadal plays it - almost all of them crazy kids dashing around the courts of some high school, in cut-off blue jeans and tank tops, taking huge cuts that launch the ball over the fence, or send it carooming off the courtside water cooler, having not the faintest idea of what "deuce" or "forty-love" means. Tennis is about whacking the ball as hard as you possibly can while still keeping it inside the lines, and it's especially fun to do that on a dead run. What, did you really think someone whose game was technique-based could take the measure of TMF?
This brings us back around to the original point. In Nadal, we have an astonishingly gifted athlete. Just look at that build. Stand in awe of the kinetic explosion that waits to be tapped in every step. I've written before that Jet Boy is like a cartoon character. Since then, he's evolved into a Super Hero cartoon character. Note to Benito and Carlos - where the hail is the Rafa action-figure toy, swathed in piratas and a bandana?
At the same time, Nadal is blessed with a humility and clarity that suggests that he would succeed at almost anything he tried. The kid just has a knack for knowing what he wants and how to get it, unencumbered by silly prejudices, whims, delusions or vanities. In order to achieve success - in order to, simply, win - he had to deal with using that racket thingy, and his development is a tale of bending that racket into an instrument expressing his will, instead of capitulating to the dictums of technique in the conventional belief that it will enable him to win. It's an abstract difference, but a powerful one that seems the key to his game.
Nadal has paid a price for this approach, for sure. He could conceivably be a more effective player if, among other things, he had developed a smoother, less cramped service motion. But the shortcomings in his game from a technical point of view increasingly seem like the cost of doing business in the way he chose. That he's been able to succeed on such an enormous and broad scale is just a tribute to the athlete within.
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