Every tennis fan felt compelled to make a choice in the middle of a recent golden era for the sport. Who was the best: Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal?
By 2012, the three horsemen of men’s tennis won everything, couldn’t be beaten by anyone but each other, and dragged the sport into the future with whirling top-spin forehands and impossibly precise backhands. They expanded what tennis perfection could be, and I felt I needed to choose a side in the arms race.
I ultimately chose Federer, the oldest but most successful to that point. He never seemed to get too upset or too excited, the aspirational opposite of my game, which sometimes included broken rackets and screams of indignation. He wore cool headbands instead of hats, and his one-handed backhand was smooth. When he would play Djokovic, I nicknamed him “Roger Better-er” against “Novak Choke-ovic.”
Djokovic spent the last 12 years convincing me I picked the wrong side, declaring himself the Greatest of All Time with the most Grand Slams, most weeks at No. 1 in the rankings, and Olympic God, reminiscent of Napoleon crowning himself emperor to show where he believed his power came from. Federer retired as perhaps the most dominant over any 10-year stretch, but Djokovic stood the test of time.
The odd man out was Nadal, who retired Thursday morning after a 23-year professional career in which he won 22 Grand Slams, second only to Djokovic. He is either the second or third-greatest of all time and dominated any clay court he stepped foot on. He had explosive reactions, vibrant and likable aura, and is perhaps the most physically talented men’s tennis player in history.
He was almost perfect, and he will go down as the icon he was. The next generation of tennis terminators all owe Nadal for the blueprint he wrote, and for the stature he maintained. But I’ll also remember the almosts, and I wonder if he could have, or even should have, been better
At his peak, Nadal was a beast even Djokovic and Federer couldn’t handle. His picturesque left-handed forehand spun faster than anyone else’s, allowing him to tee off on slow-bouncing balls on springy clay courts with the force of a thousand suns without committing too many errors. He grew up playing on clay in Spain, and it is unfair to the rest of the world — where hard and grass courts are more common — that the Nadal’s talent was loosed on this surface.
Of his 22 Grand Slams, 14 of them came at the French Open, the lone clay major tournament. Between 2005 and 2022 Nadal won it four times in a row three different times, and picking anyone to beat him there was as clumsy as it was stupid. He didn’t just feel inevitable, he actually was. His 81 match clay win streak stands alone as the longest of anyone on any surface, yet it felt three-times longer. It was absurd, unbeatable and even boring at times. Nobody else had a chance. Ever.
His body was built on a lab bench to play tennis on clay. His legs were long and flexible but still built like tree trunks, allowing him to slide to balls he had no business reaching. Yet his shoulders and torso are compact, allowing his upper arms free-range of motion to hit a variety of angled-shots while maintaining power. While Federer and Djokovic beat everyone by playing perfectly for longer and more often, Nadal just pulled out a shotgun and destroyed you.
He could always hit the ball harder than his opponents, and so he figured out how to maximize that advantage. Nadal proved that running around your backhand to get to your forehand was a viable move, all but inventing a tactic that has come to dominate modern men’s tennis. Why hit a weak, difficult-to-control backhand when you can contort your upper-third to grip, rip and ship a 100 mile-per-hour forehand right where you want it to go?
Nadal could hold his physical advantage above his two contemporaries until his body began to give up on him, when the cold, plodding style of Djokovic was too efficient to resist. But he kept winning the French Open, over and over and over again.
His single-surface dominance is a double-edged sword; both an unprecedented achievement and an argument against his greatness. Nadal won a Grand Slam on every surface at least twice among his 22, but it did sometimes feel cheap that he had the French Open in his pocket every year. Nadal knew this — towards the end, he would skip other majors to make sure he was healthy enough for July. While Djokovic and Federer were locked in a war for every tournament they entered, Nadal would grab a spare hard court title here and there while calmly accumulating French Opens and increasing his slam count.
Should that detract from his greatness, making him 2B to Federer’s 2A, a man he has two more Grand Slams than? Perhaps, though it’s fairer to say the two men achieved their stature through different calculations. It may be accurate to call Nadal “one of the greatest” grass and hard court players and “by far the greatest” clay court player in the history of men’s tennis, arriving at “second-greatest” from a different formula than the Swiss maestro’s all-around portfolio.
And because of his physical prowess, his game shone through the long march to perfection that Federer and Djokovic were having. No image of Nadal is complete without his powerful roars and full-body fist-pumps after spectacular winners, nor without his infectious smile, showing his tennis-body extended to communicating the proper-level of happiness after a win.
Nadal’s retirement may have reminded me of all the things he almost was, but he was truly, truly great in the end, no matter the degree. He was the bringer of his own destiny; completely inevitable as he marched to more French Opens, international fame and eventually to the end. He showed that tennis was cool, explosive and passionate. Nadal was unique, yet also the forerunner to today’s generation of physical players with forehands-of-mass-destruction. Federer and Djokovic captured my imagination, but Nadal may have done more to make the game the beautiful battlefield it is today than either of them. For that, I’ll remember him fondly.
