During the EPS interview with Rafa Nadal at the end of last year, the tennis player said that when he retired, the first thing he would do would be travel. In the mouth of a professional tennis player, the phrase would be interpreted as a joke. In the mouth of a legend who has been traveling around the world for twenty years, the phrase perhaps needed a careful explanation. For someone who wins 14 Roland Garros, you can believe that he circles the world twenty times without having traveled. He said in that interview that he had been to Rome 18 times (he has won the Open 10 times) and that, however, he did not know the Vatican. He had had his visit thwarted on two occasions because of the people who recognized him and did not let him advance; Two others had been invited by two different popes, but just on match days. Rafa Nadal conquered Rome enough times without visiting God.
There is a perfect symbology in Rome and it was Rome, which one day took over the world, that fired Nadal from his Masters. You know: this is how it will all end, not with a bang but with a whimper. And above that, defeat, which is the most symptomatic of goodbye: the reason for leaving. Nadal is not tired but injured, and his last year is complete with unexpected but necessary defeats to leave. Tennis is not football, from which one can retire at the top because there are ten teammates who escort him and those he leads. The most significant thing about tennis is solitude; The most symbolic thing about tennis is that, as in our lives, we have many people around us without whom we would be nothing, but when push comes to shove we are usually alone. As Felipe González said in a fortunate phrase, “in the end your phone is the last one that rings.”
Nadal’s phone is ringing for the last time with opponents whose names it would have been difficult to know in the past. The time has not come when it becomes necessary to look back and murmur Wordsworth’s poem (“Though my eyes can no longer see that pure flash / Which in my youth dazzled me. / Though nothing can do / Return the hour of splendor in the grass, / of the glory in the flowers, / we must not grieve, / because beauty always subsists in memory. But the time has come to start enjoying your presence on the court beyond the result, the moment when the blows mean nothing more than an exchange doomed to defeat. Once the hope of winning has been lost, the time has come to learn that luck is seeing the way, like those last Zidane games at the Bernabéu knowing that the League was not going to be won: you had to see that regardless of the result, you had to be present in the controlled, perfectly aesthetic demolition of the last white god who met his tragic end in the World Cup final in Germany.
Rome said goodbye to Nadal like an emperor who made the tournament his own in such an overwhelming way that it is difficult to imagine those courts without him. How then do you say goodbye to someone who almost renamed Roland Garros for winning it for 14 years? And what discomfort would it be for the public, we assume for him too, to say goodbye winning? Defeat is necessary, it explains life to us, it tells us that what we were (all victory) was an accident (sometimes even a misunderstanding, according to Brassens), and that after the accident comes the harvest, the explosion and the silence. Which deep down is a moan.
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