Staring into the Nadal void

Early this week, Rafael Nadal announced that the wrist injury he suffered during a late-July practice session would keep him out of the U.S. Open, meaning there won’t be a men’s title defense at Flushing Meadows this year. 

This is nothing new. It’s the second time Nadal will sit out a tournament the year after winning it (Wimbledon 2009), and the fourth time he'll do so the year after making the final. It’s the second U.S. Open in three years that he’ll miss. As part of a disconcertingly familiar trend, tennis will again be robbed of its most electrifying player for two of its most exciting weeks of the year.

The Interminable Climb

Remarkable as his resume is, Nadal’s career has been a confounding scatter, a series of fits and starts, peppered with interrupted bursts of dominance. One stretch, from April 2008 to April 2009, saw him win the French Open, Wimbledon, the Australian Open, Olympic gold, and six Masters 1000 tournaments. Another, from April 2010 to September 2010, saw him go 43-3, mount a 24-match win streak, win three Masters titles, and claim successive Grand Slams in Paris, London, and New York.

But every time he builds up a locomotive surge of momentum, some impediment seems to pop up and wedge itself in his tracks. First it was his foot. Then his knees. Then his hamstring. Then his back. His longest layoff came in 2012, when, shortly after winning his eighth French Open, the tendinitis that had curtailed his first great run in 2009 flared up again in both knees, and he wasn’t heard from for seven months.

When he finally resurfaced in February 2013, he embarked on possibly his most dominant run of all, one of the most dominant by anybody, ever. From then until September, he played in 13 tournaments, made the finals in 12 of them, and won 10, including the French and U.S. Opens and five Masters 1000s.

When the back injury railroaded him in the 2014 Aussie Open final, he saw the match through anyway. But after Stan Wawrinka put him out of his misery, Nadal looked plain worn out. He didn’t go on to dominate the clay season the way he usually does. He talked about being hurt, about age catching up to him. Just when he looked to have bounced back again with a resounding showing at Roland Garros, he suffered an early Wimbledon loss, and then his latest setback.

It feels like Rafa has done far too much winning to be considered a "what if?" case, but it’s certainly tempting to wonder how high he might’ve climbed by now if circumstance hadn’t kept knocking him back a few rungs practically every time he scaled the ladder.

But maybe the flipside to that is what’s important; that Nadal keeps climbing, that he somehow remains determined and able to get back to where he was, even after being yanked down time and again. As much as anything, it's this resilience that defines him. His greatness is inextricably bound by it. 

That's true also of the way he plays: that hard-charging, balls-out style that has probably contributed in some way to the frequency of his injuries. Just about every athlete has to make adjustments as he or she succumbs to the ravages of time, but with Nadal, it seems particularly difficult to separate the man from his craft.

An Assault on the Senses

There's a sports notion that falls somewhere between universal truth and narrative convenience, which is that all champions possess some great ineffable quality, an overarching associative trait. (Federer’s game is swaddled in reverential buzzwords like "poise" and "grace" and swaths of corresponding imagery.) For Nadal, that association has always been a feral and animalistic one. His game is described as rugged, relentless, scrappy, and violent. He is, in other words, the most visceral tennis player on the planet.

Nadal's is the game you feel as much as you see. You feel him digging for balls and galloping after tailing drop shots; you feel the exhaustion of a punishing baseline exchange; you feel the ridiculous torque, the exaggerated whirl of his forehand follow-through, the schizoid movements of multiple limbs as he lunges and recovers, sprints and stops, pivots and slides, punches and whips. His game doesn't just enter through the eyes; you feel it in your gut and in your bones.

And so it is with his absence. It isn’t a void you simply know about, or keep somewhere in the back of your mind. It’s one you feel, as profoundly as you feel his presence. 

The hard thing is knowing that one of these days Rafa’s going to try the ladder and find he can’t make it back up. Each time you hear about another setback, you wonder if it’ll be the one that grounds him for good. You can only hope that it isn't. Just not this one, not yet. These tournaments feel too hollow and incomplete without him.