A Curious Career (11 page)

As far as I can see, Nadal has made only one (mildly) controversial remark in his life and that was in 2009 when he criticised Andre Agassi for saying in his autobiography,
Open
, that he had taken crystal meth while he was still on the circuit. Nadal said that tennis was a clean sport, and it was very bad of Agassi to suggest otherwise. Was it really news to him that anyone in tennis took drugs? This requires some heavy conferring with his PR but he eventually comes back: ‘Well that’s something that’s all in the past. But I was shocked. I know Agassi did a lot of good things for tennis but that book wasn’t one of those things. You didn’t feel bad when you were playing and then you feel bad five years after you retire – it’s not a moral thing. Anyway, that is something that is impossible today. We have twenty-five drugs tests a year.’ Random ones? ‘Sure. A lot of times.’

Agassi also said in his book that he grew to hate tennis, having played it so relentlessly for so long. Nadal says that could never happen to him – he loves tennis – but he wishes the tour could be shorter. All the ATP players have to commit to playing sixteen obligatory tournaments, most of which last two weeks, but Nadal in addition always plays Barcelona, for the sake of his family and Majorcan friends; he also plays Qatar as preparation for the Australian open, and Queen’s as preparation for Wimbledon, which means that he plays eleven months a year. And of course, because he is rarely knocked out in the early rounds, he never gets time off. ‘For sure,’ he sighs, ‘the tour is not perfect. In my opinion, three months is the minimum time that you should be off. Because if not, we have a shorter career. Everybody has a shorter career and it’s not good for the sport, not good for the players, not good for the fans.’ I asked Nadal if his history of knee injuries meant that he would be more crippled at age fifty than someone who had never played tennis, and he said, ‘For sure. When you play eleven months of the year, mostly on hard courts, that’s what happens, yes.’

So, it’s a hard life, and a very very unnatural one. The players live inside a bubble surrounded by these great phalanxes of middle-aged men, big-bellied habitués of the hospitality tent, who don’t seem to have anything much to do except talk on their mobiles. If required to do so by a journalist like me, they will effuse about their ‘boy’ and what a lovely lad he is and how he loves his football and his fishing and is so close to his family, etc etc, wheeling out their tired old stereotype of what a lovely lad consists of, and you think: Hang on, your ‘boy’ could eat ten of you for breakfast – why do you talk so patronisingly about him? And why do you find it so remarkable that he is still close to his family and that he still sees his old friends? Presumably because you are some multi-divorced adulterous sleazeball who dropped your old friends the minute you moved up in the world. One journalist found it remarkable that Rafa had still not upgraded his mobile phone a year after winning Wimbledon. Rafa (good man) said that it was a perfectly good phone, it worked, why change it? But the journalist seemed to take this as evidence of an almost saintly degree of unworldliness, right up there with the Dalai Lama.

The degree of publicity control in sport is comparable to the heyday of Hollywood, when they had these great studio publicity machines that took young actors as soon as they were signed, and proceeded to invent their life stories for them. Poor Merle Oberon was told she grew up in Tasmania, Australia, when she actually grew up in Bombay, but woe betide any actor who ever deviated from the script. The game was exposed in Oscar Levant’s remark, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin,’ i.e. before the studio got their mitts on her. And poor old Rock Hudson had to die of Aids before anyone could reveal that he was gay. Incidentally, David Law told me that there are no gays on the tennis tour, which made me boggle a bit.

Anyway it means that sports stars, like Hollywood stars of old, are forced to live within the boring and meagre straitjackets their publicity machines have crafted for them. But once in a while the machine breaks down – most memorably in the case of Tiger Woods. Here was a young man exceptionally good at golf whose minders and sponsors dictated that he was also Mr Wholesome, a clean-living guy devoted to his wife and kids, a role model for would-be golfers – ‘lads’ – around the world. And lo! he turns out to have a long and sleazy history with hookers. And the world – or at any rate his sponsors – throw up their hands and shout this is APPALLING! We are amazed, we are shocked to the core, we wash our hands of him. Whereas in fact if they were doing their jobs and knew anything at all about him, they would have known, the way studio publicists knew that Rock Hudson was gay, that it was all a charade.

Anyway, I wanted to ask Rafa about Tiger Woods and spent a long time before the interview plotting how I could best raise his name without looking too obvious, but then Rafa saved me the trouble by raising it himself. Almost out of the blue, having talked about Seve Ballesteros (usual paeans), he said, ‘But if I have an idol, I love Tiger Woods.’ Crikey. I almost fainted with excitement. Er . . . and did his opinion of him change when he found out . . . ‘No, it didn’t change my opinion of him because I don’t care about his personal life. Nobody must care about his personal life – Tiger Woods is a very important person in the world because he plays golf.’ But when he’s been marketed as this great clean-living role model for the young and then it turns out . . .? ‘Well I don’t want to discuss about these things but in my opinion’ – which unfortunately requires a great deal of translation and discussion with his PR who eventually comes back with: ‘He says that Tiger never hurt anybody in the outside world, he only hurt himself. He is a role model for him on the golf course and also in public because he always behaved properly. But what he does in private is his personal life, nobody else’s, and Rafa says his problems with his wife are HIS problems with HIS wife, not anybody else’s.’ Yes, but there’s a certain hypocrisy when he’s been marketed as Mr Clean? This question doesn’t seem to need translation because Rafa responds sharply, ‘Well. Anyway. Next question.’

Right. Which brings me to the subject of The Girlfriend. Her existence was first unveiled to the world by Uncle Toni in 2008 (though unveiled is perhaps not the word) when he said that Rafa had a childhood sweetheart back home in Majorca called Maria Francisca Perello, or Xisca for short. Rafa was quoted as saying, ‘She is perfect for me, because she is very relaxed and easy-going and I’ve known her for a long, long time. Our families have been friends for many years.’ Hardly the language of passion you’ll agree but at least from then on he had an official Girlfriend, which made up for the fact that his sleeveless tops and bulging biceps reminded one inexorably of Freddie Mercury.

But The Girlfriend remains a distant presence, never actually around. She sometimes make an appearance at his finals, among his family, but even long-time tennis insiders like David Law have never met her. Rafa says that he sees her whenever he goes back to Majorca but that is only maybe thirty days a year. For a young man in peak physical condition, it doesn’t suggest the height of sexual fulfilment.

Anyway I asked if he was going to marry The Girlfriend and he said flatly, ‘No.’

Me: No??!!??!!

‘Not now, no. I don’t have any plans in that way.’

‘Do you mean you’ve split up?’

‘No. I don’t talk about the girlfriend in public, but I have the same girlfriend since many years.’

‘When do you meet?’

‘Her house is very close to my house so when I am in Majorca I see her, and when she has holidays sometimes she comes to the tournaments, but she cannot follow the tour around because she has to do her work. [She works for a big insurance company.] She has her life and I have my life.’

‘Do you think she’ll wait for you? To get married when you finish tennis?’

‘I didn’t ask her to.’

‘But if you only see her – what? – thirty days a year, it can’t be a very fulfilling relationship?’

Rafa for the first time in our interview seems to turn his full attention on me, a laser stare, and for a second I can imagine what it must be like to stand on the baseline waiting to receive his serve. ‘But do you care about my relationship?’ Well no, I have to admit, as the ace whizzes past me, of course I don’t really care about his relationship, I’m just doing my job. Somehow this breaks the tension, and we both laugh.

Rafa: I understand your point, but I never talk about my girlfriend. I have a fantastic relationship with her, we understand each other. It is not a problem for her if I travel every week and for me not a problem if when I am in Majorca she has to work all day.

Me: Do you talk on the phone though?

Rafa: No. When I am in a tournament I have to concentrate. Sure, I talk every day with her.

Me: I’m confused now.

Rafa: Forget about my girlfriend.

Me: Do you phone your mother every day?

Rafa: Yes. My mother, my sister, my father, everybody.

I AM confused. I can only record that there was a big difference in the enthusiasm with which he said he phoned his mother and sister every day, and whatever he was saying, or not saying, about his girlfriend. According to the Majorcan press, they split up last year, but then got together again. Before that there were rumours that he was ‘close’ to the Danish player Caroline Wozniacki. There was also a curious episode a year and a half ago when he made a ‘steamy’ video with the Colombian singer Shakira for her single ‘Gypsy’ and was photographed having what seemed like a romantic dinner with her. It looked like an attempt to rebrand him as a stud. But his PR later revealed that he was present, along with Rafa’s manager, Shakira’s manager and other members of their respective teams, so it was hardly a tête-à-tête. And Rafa says he has ‘no plans’ to do more videos with Shakira, or with any other pop singers.

Listen: I dare say Rafael Nadal really is a lovely man (though I refuse to say ‘lad’). But the point I’m trying to make is that whether he is or isn’t I wouldn’t know, and you wouldn’t either. He lives within this tight stockade of team Rafa, and sticks to the script his minders have written for him. It must require great discipline to be so controlled, but then it must require great discipline to be a world champion anyway. Oh for a McEnroe, a Connors, an Agassi! There was a time, O best beloved, when tennis players had temperaments, when they threw racquets and shouted at umpires and had sex in broom cupboards and often behaved quite badly. Nadal has never thrown a racquet in his life – his Uncle Toni trained him not to. And the tennis player HE most admires is Björn Borg, whom he admires precisely because he had ‘ice in his veins’ – which was what always made him so deadly dull to watch. But Borg, we might note, retired at twenty-six, not from injury but because he was burned out. All that discipline must take its toll on a young man. Even more than the injuries, the psychological attrition of having to be on your best behaviour every day, to play match after match, to give press conference after press conference, to meet and greet sponsors, the sheer boredom of living on this treadmill, must wear anyone down. And for Nadal already the best may be over. He was number one when I started this article, but will probably be number two by the time you read it. I asked if he might retire at twenty-six, as Borg did. ‘If I have injury I could. You never know. But it’s something I prefer to believe is not going to happen.’ How will he know when to retire? ‘When I don’t have enough motivation to go on court and play every day and love the competition. But that is not the case at the moment.’

Do you think physical or psychological wear and tear will make you stop eventually? ‘I really don’t know. Nobody knows the future. I don’t know if I will be injured before mentally, or physically. It is something you cannot plan.’

*

I’d only recently joined Twitter when I published this piece, and it gave me my first experience of being trolled. Every Nadal fan in the world, it seemed, wanted to tell me they hoped I got cancer. It was upsetting of course – on the other hand, it left me with twice as many Twitter followers as I’d had before. Some of them stopped following me after the frenzy died down, but most of them stayed. Since then, I’ve learned that you can always boost your Twitter following by writing something rude – it seems that the people who follow you in order to abuse you are just as loyal as the ones who like you. And among the torrents of abuse, I did have one or two sober messages of support, as well as the priceless photographs of ‘Capybaras who look like Rafael Nadal’ which you can still find online.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In Extremis

I said that writing up my interview with Rafa Nadal felt like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This one with Christopher Hitchens shortly before he died was the complete opposite: I was given a silk purse and my only problem was not ruining it. The responsibility was all the greater because we both knew that he was dying.

I had interviewed him once before in 2002, for the
Observer
, over a typically boozy five-hour lunch. (I could barely walk when we left, but he was still going strong, in fact went straight on to speak in an Orange Word debate.) I avoided asking much about his politics but instead asked about his mother’s death – it was not a subject he had talked about before, though he did later in his autobiography – and he seemed to welcome this unusual foray into personal reminiscence. He was pleased with the article and was always friendly when we ran into each other subsequently at
Private Eye
lunches or at the Hay Festival.

Then came the news that he had inoperable cancer, which he wrote about in
Vanity Fair
. It sounded as though he was pretty near the end. But in January 2011, Sarah Baxter, the editor of the
Sunday Times Magazine
, said, ‘Christopher Hitchens wants you to interview him – but he’s in Washington. What do you feel?’ What did I feel? I didn’t hesitate: I felt that a summons from Hitchens was one I could not refuse.