“Playing sports is a good thing for ordinary people; sports played at the professional level is not good for your health,” Rafael Nadal observes in the first pages of his autobiography, “Rafa,” which was written with the British journalist John Carlin. “It pushes your body to limits that human beings are not naturally equipped to handle.” The book was published in 2011, and, by then, Nadal, with the unflagging physicality of his tennis, had already been testing those limits for some time. He had tendinitis in both knees, plus Mueller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative and chronically painful disease that cuts off blood flow to the navicular bone, and which caused him to require injections before matches to numb his left foot. These are conditions commonly associated with aging. Nadal, when he wrote “Rafa,” had yet to turn twenty-five.
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