When Rafael Nadal retires from professional tennis next month, the sport will lose some things.
It will lose a powerful athlete whose on-court explosions were always about sending tennis ball-shaped torpedoes flying over the net – not about breaking the racket. Absent in the future will be an obsessive player whose in-match rituals were obvious even to casual fans, as was the effort he put into every point of every match. Tennis will say goodbye to a man whose humility remained steadfast even as he won two Olympic gold medals and a whopping 22 Grand Slam titles, including an extraordinary – and probably unrepeatable – 14 on the red clay of Paris.
And it will say goodbye to a tennis player whose childish love for the game never faded, even as he changed the sport itself.
After more than two decades in the professional circuit, countless injuries – and just as many comebacks – Nadal announced on Thursday that his final tournament this year would be the Davis Cup, where he will play for his home country Spain next month.
Over the past twenty years, 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim has seen it all; he has covered Nadal for Sports Illustrated and Tennis Channel since the tennis phenom was 18.
In 2019 for 60 minutes, Wertheim met Nadal in his birthplace on Mallorca, the Spanish island where he was born and still lives. The two had a long conversation that was unusual on the tennis circuit: It was in Nadal’s hometown, not during a tournament, not when he had a match the next day, not when he was thinking about cutting backhands.
In that conversation it became clear how much love Nadal had for his sport.
“I never felt that what I did was a sacrifice,” Nadal told Wertheim through a Spanish interpreter. “I trained, yes. I worked very hard, at the maximum, yes. But I enjoyed everything. For me, sacrifice means doing the things you don’t like. But I did all the things that I like to do.”
60 Minutes visited in December, the weeks that amount to tennis’s off-season. But instead of using the time to rest before the start of a new season, Nadal worked intensely, honing his left-handed forehand and double-fisted backhand.
Wertheim watched as Nadal played through his morning training with his trademark power, firing the balls off his racket with an urgency normally reserved for matches. His ruthlessness served him well on the field. It also took a toll on his body.
“I am very happy that after all the physical problems I have faced during my career, and there are many, I am happy to be where I am today, at 33,” he told Wertheim in 2019. something I appreciate and that gives me a lot of personal satisfaction.”
Over the years, Nadal has dealt with a range of physical injuries, occasionally taking extended periods of time off to rehabilitate. Each time he seemed to persevere and return to the top of his game.
In a way, wrestling with adversity is what Nadal told Wertheim he enjoyed most about tennis itself.
In his 2019 interview, Nadal said he enjoyed the “mental effort” of the game, of looking for solutions when he was in a set, of the analysis required to change the dynamics of a match. When he lost, he wanted to understand what went wrong, to analyze how his opponent played better that day.
When he came from behind to win, he said he found the win even more satisfying than, say, beating a competitor in straight sets.
“Because you put in extra effort,” he said. “It means that the next day you have a chance to compete again. And the next day you will play better. Sometimes when I’m in the first or second round, and I’m not playing well, I say, okay, just accept it .Don’t get frustrated.
Focus has been a key element in Nadal’s game. To block out distractions – from the crowd, from his opponent, from his own head – he created rituals that he performs every match. He told Wertheim that he talks to his coach about an hour before a game starts. Then he thinks to himself as he prepares the handles of his rackets and his physiotherapy bandages. Just before he walks onto the track, he steps into an ice-cold shower.
On the field, there is also a routine that precedes each serve. Nadal steps forward and leans his weight on his right foot as he adjusts his shorts at the back. Then, as he methodically dribbles the ball with the racket in his left hand, his right hand grabs the sleeve of his left shoulder and then his right hand. He takes a quick swipe at his nose before tucking the hair behind his left ear, then repeats on the right: nose flick, hair fold. With a final wipe over each cheek with his wrist sweatbands, he is ready to serve.
Then, once back in his seat on the sidelines, there are the water bottles. He always places two bottles in front of his chair, one behind the other, so that they face diagonally towards the field. He turns their labels outwards. Before the match and during substitutions, he alternately takes a sip of each drink before putting them back in place with precision.
It may seem like superstition, but Nadal explained that it’s all part of the way he ignores distractions.
“If I don’t do that with the bottles, I sit down and I can think about something else,” he told 60 Minutes in 2019. “If I always do the same things, it means that I am focused and that I am alert to think purely about tennis.”
Wertheim witnessed many of Nadal’s rituals in the twenty years he covered the tennis star. When Wertheim first profiled Nadal for Sports Illustrated in May 2005, the Spanish teenager had not yet won a major. But Wertheim saw the potential in Nadal’s passionate play, writing: “[T]here is everything that points to Nadal… beginning a long run at the top of the sport.”
And he did. Nadal entered the top 10 of the Association of Tennis Professionals that same year, spending 912 consecutive weeks in the Top 10, only dropping out in March 2023 after an injury sidelined him for most of the season.
One of Nadal’s most lasting legacies will be his rivalry with Roger Federer. They met through the net forty times, facing each other on European clay, hard courts far away and the London grass. That’s where the pair battled it out in one of the greatest matches ever played: the 2008 Wimbledon final, a battle that raged on the court for nearly five hours, not counting two rain delays. Ultimately, Nadal defeated Federer, who had claimed the Wimbledon title for the previous five years, and ended Federer’s 40-match winning streak at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
But this duo is perhaps most memorable for their genuine friendship.
“We know this is a game,” Nadal said in 2019. “And there are many other things in life that are more important than a game, than a match. And of course there have been moments of more tension. But as with everything in life, both [Roger] and I had it very clearly in mind that human relationships are more important than tennis rivalry.”
When Wertheim spoke to Nadal on 60 Minutes five years ago, Federer had 20 majors. Nadal had 19. When he retires next month he will leave the field with 22 players – two more than his old friend, and two fewer than the remaining member of the ‘Big Three’, Novak Djokovic. Of the three, his place in history may be the least important to Nadal.
And in 2019, he told 60 Minutes that he would be at peace if he returned his last serve.
“I’m not worried about retirement at the end of my career,” he said. “I just want to be happy and enjoy playing as much as possible. And fortunately when I retire, I think there are a lot of things in my life that will make me happy.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Scott Rosann and Sarah Shafer Prediger.
