moving past it
Professional tennis mirrors life in more ways than you might think. Life is a really lengthy learning process — early on, none of us have much of an idea what we’re doing. You can watch a marriage fail, for instance, and even make observations about why it failed, but that experience alone isn’t going to be enough to stop you from potentially ending up in the same place one day. If you yourself end up in a contentious marriage, it’s not going to be as easy as implementing logic from what you observed years prior to keep it together. In tennis, players face a similar challenge: they have to go through hellish losses to learn how to avoid more of them down the road.
Every tennis player falls victim to a huge choke at some point, simply because the first time the opportunity to fail spectacularly presents itself, a player doesn’t know how to avoid it. Rafael Nadal is one of the greatest players of all time, but in his very first professional match at the tender age of 14, he somehow lost after having match point 13 times. This means that thirteen separate times, he was one point away from winning the match. And he lost. His teenage mind was probably shattered with grief at the time, but an experience like that is instructive. Tennis players rarely choke the same way twice.
Pick whatever comparison you want in life — relationships, finding a job, figuring out who you are — this phenomenon is present everywhere we go. We often have to fail before we can succeed; we have to not be good enough before we are good enough. It’s a process, and that process has to start somewhere.
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The danger in this procedure is not having enough pain tolerance. The first fail — or the most important fail — stings. It stings a lot. It stings in a way that makes you never want to feel that way again. For some people, it stings so much that it takes away their ability to bounce back.
Back in 2004, there was a promising 22-year-old tennis player named Guillermo Coria. He had a particular affinity to playing on clay courts, and looked primed to win the biggest clay-court tournament in the world: Roland-Garros, one of tennis’s four majors. He made the final. He was the favorite to win the final. He even won the first two sets of the final (it’s played in a best-of-five format, so winning three sets wins you the match*), then took a lead in the third. Coria got nervous, losing the third set and then the fourth. He had match point twice in the fifth. To his credit, he went for aggressive shots both times, trying to win on his own terms rather than hoping for his opponent to miss, but Coria missed both shots. He went on to lose the match. People called it the biggest choke ever.
The loss was devastating, but at 22, Coria still looked to have a long career ahead of him. If he could just get over this, people probably said, he will win Roland-Garros one day. Sadly, Coria didn’t have it in him. His confidence fell off a cliff, and his game fell with it. His heart was broken and refused to heal. He retired at 27, an age when tennis players are still considered to be in their prime.
Tennis and life punish a lack of pain tolerance because they will go on without you. While you wallow, others are out there networking or winning a tennis match or making love or learning things or going places. It’s cruel, but it’s the way things are. The world doesn’t stop spinning when we’re sad. Some can never shake themselves out of the funk and end up getting spun right out of their dreams.
*A quick word on tennis scoring: you need four points to win a game, then six games to win a set, then either two or three sets to win a match, depending on if the format is best-of-three sets or best-of-five sets.
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Nadal, as bad as that first loss as a professional was, has become perhaps the best tennis player ever at enduring disappointment and coming back stronger. Over the years, his body has been ravaged by injuries. Hell, he was born with an extraordinarily rare congenital disease in his foot. It almost ended his career in 2006, and his foot has flared up time after time throughout his career, most recently ending his 2021 season prematurely after barely half the calendar.
Nadal now has 21 major titles, more than any man to ever play the game, but it’s been a struggle, particularly at the first major of the year: the Australian Open. Nadal did win the Australian Open way back in 2009, and he won it in a remarkable way. His semifinal and final went to five sets (the max in the men’s best-of-five format). The semifinal in particular required a mammoth physical effort to get through. It lasted five hours and 14 minutes. Nadal’s opponent, Fernando Verdasco, was hitting fast, risky shots to the corners of the court, leaving Nadal, who was struggling with his own offense that day, no choice but to try to win by running down everything. His speed back in those days was ridiculous — if you search “Nadal Australian Open 2009” on YouTube, you’ll see some athletic feats that are difficult to put into words.
Since 2009, though, that tournament has been a house of horrors for the guy. He was injured in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, he made the final, rebounded from a massive deficit against Novak Djokovic, then choked with the finish line in sight. In 2014, he made the final again, this time as the overwhelming favorite, only he hurt his back in the warm-up. Confronted with severely compromised mobility, Nadal cried into his towel midway through the match and could barely play out the points. His woes continued: he lost in the final two more times, in 2017 and 2019. After that, Nadal lost to significantly younger players in the quarterfinals in 2020 and 2021. His window for a second Australian Open title had clearly closed.
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The Australian Open happens to be my favorite tennis tournament. It took place from January 17th to January 30th this year. The 16-hour time change meant that most of it happened when I would have ordinarily been sleeping. I watched most of the tournament, pulling three all-nighters over the course of the two weeks. I slept during the day, working around my classes and the headaches that chased me, without fail, after I took naps. I loved every minute of it, intense sleep-deprivation notwithstanding.
I also had a problem. For the two or three months prior, I had been unhappy except in patches. It wasn’t a debilitating sadness, not by any means — I felt close to tears a lot of the time, but I never cried. It was, however, enough to coax me into days spent alone in my room, hours spent watching TV instead of being productive. (Socially or academically.) The reason why doesn’t feel that important. I was dealing with something everyone deals with sooner or later, but it was my first time going through it, and I was taking it badly. There were lessons to be learned from what I was experiencing, but by refusing to take on the next chapter of my life, I wasn’t letting those lessons take root. I had gone over a hurdle, but instead of running to the next one, I was still shaking from the jump over and missing the steps leading up to it. In short, I was knowingly prolonging emotional pain, but for whatever reason, couldn’t get myself to stop.
So I didn’t. I wouldn’t constantly dwell on stuff, at least not literally. But if I found a funny clip on YouTube, instead of laughing and moving on, I would watch it again and again until the humor no longer registered. I felt worse for myself than I had any reason to. I hated what was happening but didn’t seem to have the strength or will to stop it.
The Australian Open, then, became a necessary sanctuary as well as something to look forward to. Watching tennis for hours on end was a way for me to stay in the present in a manageable way. I wouldn’t be watching a TV show that had been recorded years ago. This was something that was happening, and I had taken part in far too few moments like that of late. For two weeks, I could continue to live in my sealed-off bubble, and this time I wouldn’t feel bad about myself, because even at my happiest, I would be watching as much as I could.
And for two weeks, that was what I did. This year, the Australian Open had a fairly obvious protagonist: the same Rafael Nadal I mentioned earlier. The thing to know about Nadal is that he never quits. It goes beyond a cliché, though — he yells in celebration after practically every point he wins, even if he’s way behind and has no realistic shot of winning, but it’s more than that — if his initial tactic doesn’t work, he changes things up. He has the confidence to win matches, but also the humility to admit it if his normal tennis isn’t getting the job done. This is harder than it sounds; many players play the same way, all the time, because it’s good enough to win matches seven or eight out of ten times. Those players wind up being very good, but not great. Nadal is great.
Nadal knows the danger of licking wounds for too long. In 2005, the year after Guillermo Coria had that huge choke at the Roland-Garros tournament, Nadal entered the tournament as an 18-year-old and won it despite never having played it before. Then he won Roland-Garros the next three years in succession. When Robin Söderling finally ended his streak in 2009, Nadal had won his first 31 matches at the tournament. Today, Nadal has 13 Roland-Garros trophies. His overall record at that tournament is 105-3. When he won in 2020, he was nearly twice as old as he was when he won it in 2005. It’s comical dominance.
He wouldn’t have been able to do it, though, if he were made of the same stuff as Coria. When Nadal lost at Roland-Garros in 2009, he could have gone into a tailspin. Losing there was a new experience for him, after all. Instead, he took the title back in 2010 and didn’t relinquish it until 2015. In the rare cases when his best tennis is not good enough — he once lost seven matches in a row to Novak Djokovic — he acknowledges the need to improve, then goes and does it.
Before the 2022 Australian Open, though, Nadal didn’t even seem like a contender. There were a bunch of reasons why. He had been injured for most of the previous six months. He had a difficult bout with COVID a mere month earlier. Most of all, though, the Australian Open had become cursed ground for him, what with all the injuries and losses in the final since his 2009 triumph.
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One of the reasons I was so entrenched in my pattern of doing nothing was that I had been quite happy before my emotional crash. Deliriously happy, actually. When that ended, I didn’t see a quick route back to that peak. I knew it was going to take a lot of work — talking to lots of people (once I start a conversation, I tend to do okay, but I’ve always found that first step extremely difficult) and taking chances — and reminiscing about paradise lost was a quicker way to euphoria, even if nostalgia is to euphoria as drying off with a wet towel is to sipping hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire.
I was taking no risks whatsoever, only doing what was comfortable, and risk is an obstacle in front of a lot of good things in life. You usually have to tell someone you’re in love with them to know if they reciprocate your feelings. Sour Patch Kids are bad for you but deeply delicious. One of the more difficult ways this phenomenon manifests itself is that the more one invests themselves in something, the more potential there is for pain. It hurts more if your favorite show ends badly, no matter how good the rising action was.
So when Nadal stressed in press conferences that his concern at the 2022 Australian Open was health rather than results, it made sense to me on a couple of levels. Not only did he have reason to believe that he could lose due to his propensity for injuries, he was taking away the shock factor in the case of an eventual loss. As he progressed through the tournament, though, his philosophy became less and less plausible. He won his first two matches easily (the Australian Open is seven rounds), then his third, this time playing so well many started to consider him a contender to win the whole thing. He made it to the semifinals, then won even that match pretty comfortably. When he said “the goal now is to win [the tournament],” after the semifinal — what else would the goal be in a final? — it was actually jarring, such had been his loyalty to the I-don’t-expect-myself-to-win mantra.
The problem was that it looked like Nadal would lose the final. No matter their coping mechanism, a tennis player cannot shield themself from the pain of losing in the final of a tournament, especially a big one. That’s like finding a relationship, watching it progress happily for a while, then proposing and getting rejected. (Though at least after a rejection, you can walk away. In tennis, the losing finalist has to give a speech and then watch as their rival lifts the bigger trophy and waves to the crowd. Also, the highlights will be on YouTube until the end of time.) It’s like getting told point-blank that your best is not good enough, which, for my money, is one of the worst feelings in the world. Merely being at our best is a struggle in itself; we make mistakes all the time. After a mistake, we can go back to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong. There is no such luxury with trying your best and not getting what you’re after. Someone else is better than you are.
Nadal’s opponent in the final was Daniil Medvedev. Ten years younger than Nadal, Medvedev had been crushing the competition on hard courts, the surface on which the Australian Open is played, for the past year. He had beaten Nadal the last time they played. He had won the most recent major tournament, the 2021 U.S. Open. Medvedev looked much fitter than Nadal, who was openly admitting he was getting tired during his matches — which hadn’t been especially draining ones, either.
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Nadal lost the first set of the final. It wasn’t close. In the first few minutes, Nadal had to hit a series of spectacular shots just to keep pace with Medvedev. As soon as that well dried up, Medvedev ran away with the set. A player ranked 100 spots below Nadal could have gone out there and done only marginally worse.
Nadal lost the second set, too — he had several leads and probably should have won it, but Medvedev swept the last four points to steal it. This set was twice as long as the first, clocking in at 84 minutes. I was on Twitter during the match, exchanging tactical thoughts with fellow tennis fans, and consensus was that Nadal needed to win the set just to stay competitive. At two sets to zero down? No chance. He wouldn’t possibly have the legs to win three sets in a row after already playing two difficult ones.
If I had been Nadal, I would have given up at this point. I would have cursed my luck that this match was happening now and not in 2005, when I was running on legs that could go forever. I’d have spent the third set lost in nostalgia for my younger years while Medvedev remained in the present, destroying me. A win predictor would flash on my screen intermittently during the match, and there was a moment in the third set when it gave Nadal a 4% chance of winning. Nadal being Nadal, he didn’t quit. In the middle of the third set, he was teetering on the edge of a surely fatal deficit, but climbed to safety, then came back to win the set.
The match still looked over — my favorite tennis writer, a guy whose tennis opinions I tend to take as gospel, tweeted after the third set that he was going to bed because Medvedev was still going to win, the only difference was that we now had to wait an extra hour to see it happen. Nadal took a lead early in the fourth set, though, and at this point I actually started to care a little bit less who won, finding myself totally absorbed by the latest epic Nadal match. There’s a moment in Friends when Joey confesses his love to Rachel. You know before she opens her mouth that she doesn’t love him back. But before rejecting him, she says, “Joey, I love you so much.” It’s clear she means as a friend; she isn’t leading him on. But the moment is so sweet that for a second, the fact that Joey is about to have his heart broken doesn’t feel important. You’re thinking about how nice it is to be reminded that she loves him, because they’re best friends, and that might not be romance, but it’s pretty cool. Even after Rachel delivers the necessary blow, they kind of just hold each other for a while, giving a shitty situation a lovely glow. And sure, you can argue that the kind buildup makes the eventual letdown even more devastating in the end, but I think there’s a lot to be said for watching someone put on a brave face when up against a massive challenge. That was how I felt watching Nadal in the fourth set. He still wasn’t going to win, but he’d given the fans a flashback to his prime years, and that was enough.
The thing was, Nadal kept going. He won the fourth set — not without complications, but he won it — to tie the match. They had been playing for four hours by now, and Nadal’s endurance was holding up shockingly well. All the experts predicted that if Nadal was going to win, he’d have to win quickly. Yet Medvedev, the younger, fitter player, was looking more tired.
When Nadal took a lead in the fifth set, the impossible looked possible. At the same time, he was struggling to hang on to his advantage, and I couldn’t help but think he had set himself up to get his heart broken by the Australian Open again. At the start of the match, he could maybe still have fooled himself into not hurting too much from a loss by sticking with his underdog theory. I didn’t have much of a chance, so how much can a loss really hurt? But in the middle of the fifth set, there was nowhere to hide anymore. He was fighting like hell, as aware as anyone that this was his last best chance to win the Australian Open for a second time. Serving at 3-2, Nadal was down a break point, meaning Medvedev had an opportunity to tie the set. Nadal scythed a serve to Medvedev’s backhand. “Va-MOS!” he yelled hoarsely, watching Medvedev’s return drift wide of its target. Here we are again, I thought. Back in a brutal match at the Australian Open.
Somehow, Nadal held the lead. He served for the match at 5-4. If you don’t follow tennis, this means that he was a step away from winning. It’s like throwing a game-winning pass to a wide open receiver in the end zone, or nailing a free throw in basketball to put your team ahead. Nerves can absolutely still kill you, but this is the position a professional athlete wants to be in — they have control. They have the chance to win by doing the exact thing they’ve practiced a billion and a half times in anticipation for this very moment. If things don’t go right, it’s on them. It’s what we call a choke.
Nadal choked.
For a fleeting moment, it looked like everything was going to be fine, but Nadal’s game crumbled within touching distance of the finish line. It was such an obvious loss of nerve that the man himself flashed a smirk.
One of the more brutal aspects of tennis is the lack of a clock. An opponent can gift you a match, but it has to be gifted all the way; in theory, a rival could half-ass a match for 90 minutes, then snap back into it and reel you all the way back in. If you can’t close the deal, it doesn’t really matter how good at tennis you are. You have to be able to win the last point.
Somehow, Nadal fought back to win the next game, meaning he was serving for the match again at 6-5. It felt like the biggest gift the Australian Open had ever given him: a second chance, right after he had given up a golden one.
When Nadal finally took the lead late in the match after trailing for hours on end, I was cautiously optimistic for him, but also aware that he could well blow the advantage and wind up looking at his most devastating loss yet. In retrospect, though, I think I also wanted the tournament to go on for as long as possible, the men’s final being the last match of the event. When it ended, I would no longer have a viable distraction from the pleasure and pain that comes from actually taking part in society. I knew that once the final was over and I had processed the result, written a piece, it was time to start actually living again. I wasn’t actively thinking about it at the time, but I think I was scared of what would happen when the tournament ended.
Nadal stepped up to the line to serve for the final once again. The tension had finally built up to its boiling point. I didn’t think I could take it if he choked again. I just didn’t want that for him; after all that suffering at the Australian Open, I needed him to drag himself over the line. It was well past eight o’clock on Sunday morning, the match having started at three. My blinds were down, my laptop a glowing block of light in the lessening darkness of the room. The first point of the game was long, with Nadal firing shots into the corners and Medvedev stretching to get them back. Finally Medvedev missed. The camera cut to the bandana tied behind Nadal’s head; he was walking towards the towel at the back of the court to wipe down his eternally sweaty face and arms.
The line between my own emotional state and my investment in Nadal winning started to blur. I had been watching the match build to this climax for five hours and 20 minutes, and I desperately wanted the match to end and last forever. What Nadal had been doing – defying the odds, his opponents, and the limits of his own body to make it as far as he had – was obviously the spirit I needed to implement in my own life. Quite simply, if I didn’t try, I was not going to get anywhere. I just didn’t trust myself to put everything on the line.
Nadal played as if the choke from ten minutes earlier had utterly vanished from his mind. He smashed a serve that Medvedev couldn’t touch, setting up match point — championship point. He pumped his fist, which he’d done a million times in the match already, but this one was different. His face, perpetually scrunched into a mask of competitive rage, looked exhausted. His features suddenly had a gentleness to them, like his will was finally burning out, and he was grateful that he would be able to rest momentarily.
As Nadal won the match point to seal his second Australian Open title and covered his face with his hands in utter euphoric disbelief, my emotions had finally boiled over and I could do nothing but sob as I watched the historic scene unfold in real time.