The era of the so-called Big Three in men’s tennis is finally ending. Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slam titles, retired aged 41 in 2022. Rafael Nadal, the subject of this new book and winner of 22 Grand Slam titles, was forced through injury to retire at the age of 38 last autumn. But Novak Djokovic, aged 37 and winner of an unsurpassed 24 Grand Slams, grinds on even as a new generation of players, led pre-eminently by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, has emerged to challenge and now supplant him at the apex of the game.
There’s something especially poignant about the last days of a tennis champion. The technical brilliance, discipline and will to win remain but the body is much less accommodating. In the end, no matter what you have achieved, as Geoff Dyer writes in The Last Days of Roger Federer, “you run out of options”.
The question, then, is how and when to depart. Do you stay on, as Andy Murray did after multiple surgeries and a hip replacement operation, to continue playing but as an imperfect facsimile of what you once were? The last days of Murray’s career were defined by physical and psychological pain as he lost to players he would once have beaten routinely, and yet he felt compelled to go on. I was at Queen’s in London last summer to see Murray’s final game as a singles player. He carried yet another injury into the match and could scarcely move – the crowd collectively gasped as he hobbled towards the ball at the start – but tried to compete all the same before succumbing to the inevitable: it ended with Murray 4-1 down in the first set. Note that, somehow, he won a game.
The Big Three – plus Murray, who won three Grand Slams and two Olympic gold medals – were intensely self-motivated but their rivalry powered their ambition and sustained them through the long years of gruelling competition and travel. “Why are you even asking me this question about why I want to keep it up?” Federer once said. “This is what we all love doing, and you want to prove to yourself you can do it over and over again. You can just never get enough until you hit the wall.”
The tennis tour is truly global and the appeal of the four Grand Slams – the US Open, the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon – is that they are played on different surfaces in different countries. But no player has dominated one Grand Slam as Nadal did Roland Garros on the red clay in Paris.
He won 14 titles there and Christopher Clarey, who began work on The Warrior in 2022, must have hoped he would be playing at this year’s tournament in Paris as the book came out. It was not to be. Nadal’s last competitive match was to represent Spain in a Davis Cup tie against the Netherlands in November 2024. By which point, even the great Spaniard, the only male tennis player to rank No 1 in three different decades, had run out of options. He had hit Federer’s wall.
As tennis correspondent for the New York Times, Clarey followed the tour for more than three decades and what elevates the book above mere hagiography, or a fan’s memoir, are the author’s contacts in the game, the conversations he has had with players and coaches over the years and his technical analysis. The book has 20 chapters. Each has a two-word title, the first word being the definite article: The Monument, The Code, The Weapon, The Canvas, and so on. It’s a formulaic approach but it enables Clarey to organise his material, and move fluidly back and forth in time without too much repetition as he charts the rise of Nadal, with each of his 14 triumphs at Roland Garros being the rope that tugs the narrative on. The courtside summaries of forgotten or nearly-forgotten matches are much less engaging than the digressions into tennis history and biography. I didn’t know that the Roland Garros Stadium was used as an internment camp for “foreign undesirables” at the start of the Second World War; the writer Arthur Koestler was among the detained.
There is a good section on Björn Borg and Chris Evert, the premier players at Roland Garros in the 1970s, and a fascinatingly nerdish chapter on the origins of clay court tennis. The French for clay courts is terre battue, which literally means “beaten earth”. Clarey, who married a French woman and lived in Paris, likes this detail and repeats it on numerous occasions. To excel on clay a player must learn to slide; Stan Smith, a former Wimbledon champion, equated playing on clay to “running on marbles”.
Nadal, with his “deeply ingrained patterns and choreography”, learned the game on clay courts at his local club in Manacor, on the island of Mallorca, where he still lives and in 2016 opened his own academy. Coached from a young age and for much of his career by his uncle Toni Nadal, Rafael was a teenage prodigy. Toni, a failed player, was relentlessly demanding of him: he knew his nephew had the potential to be a player for the ages and sought every competitive advantage. Rafael was naturally right-handed but ended up playing with his non-dominant hand. His power and athleticism were remarkable. “I saw very quickly that he was an extraterrestrial,” Richard Gasquet, one of his talented teenage rivals, said of Nadal after losing to him. “When I came off court, I told my father, ‘It’s over, that’s the new champion of Roland Garros.’”
The young Nadal, who first won Roland Garros aged 19, was piratical in appearance, with flowing hair, bulging biceps and sleeveless shirts. He sweated profusely and would lose four litres of fluid every match; Nike developed fabrics that could better absorb his sweat. His forehand, hit with extraordinary speed and topspin, was his signature shot, and the more he played the faster it became.
Clarey mentions that Nadal, because of his achievements, stamina and physique, was subject to much speculation, notably in France, about whether he took performance-enhancing drugs (he never failed a doping test). His obsessive and eccentric on-court rituals – meticulously lining up his water bottles, tugging at his shorts and shirt and touching his nose before each serve – only increased people’s fascination in a player who seemed as shy and reserved off-court as he was compelling and flamboyant on it.
Christopher Clarey doubts that another player will ever surpass Nadal’s achievements at Roland Garros. But in sports, one can never predict who might come next or what the human athlete can achieve. Clarey was from the beginning watching with “a growing sense of wonder” as Rafael Nadal set about conquering his kingdom of clay in Paris, and The Warrior is an absorbing tribute to the tournament’s greatest champion.
The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay
Christopher Clarey
John Murray, 320pp, £22
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: Faith is a half-formed thing]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion