The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal

These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.

I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-five years, raised three children, and buried both of my parents. The intellectual, moral and life-experience chasm separating my students and me seems to widen every year.

And not just because I am getting older. 

Few of them read books or watch films. Fewer pay any attention to the news. Religion is a non-existent variable in most of their lives. Most of them come from families that can’t afford to travel. They spend most of their lives on screens where fame is often wrapped in the necrotic sheen of celebrity. The names my students know are often more notorious than meritorious. Lately, all I hear about is Diddy this and Diddy that.

Sports are perhaps the last significant tendril of connective tissue between us. I love that we can commiserate about football games in the fall and talk about our favorite baseball and basketball players each spring. We tease one another about the foibles of the various teams we love and root for.

Which is why it was heartbreaking when the great Rafael Nadal recently announced his retirement from tennis, almost none of my sports devotee students knew anything about him. I get it. Tennis in America is a second or third tier sport, at best—a pebble on the beach filled with boulders like football and baseball.

But if there is one athlete in all world who deserves exaltation as a genuine role model, who is worthy of both personal emulation and global celebration, it is Rafael Nadal. Modern American students would do well to learn a few things about his extraordinary life and career.  

Learning the Wrong Lessons 

Ferocity can sometimes bleed into indecency. Too often, transcendent athletes like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady are celebrated for their almost pugilistic drive to win at all costs, no matter the harm it might inflict on their families or the alienation it sows with teammates. We Americans delight in these stories through Netflix programs and Instagram reels. We romanticize the win-at-all-costs ethic of athletes and blindly accept the false notion that human decency is antithetical to human excellence. 

Rafael Nadal is the antidote to this shambolic falsehood, a falsehood too many young Americans are all-too eager to accept. He is the living embodiment of Samuel Johnson’s dictum that, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." 

Here is a man who didn’t mind flashing his ID to security at tournaments he had won multiple times. Here is a man who was known to be gracious to the support staff of every tournament, walking around to personally thank locker room and kitchen attendants before exiting the premises for the final time. The drivers who transported him, the fans who interacted with him, the media who peppered him with questions, were all met with genuine human decency for over two decades. 

I met someone who had once taken a picture with Nadal. I asked him what he remembered of the encounter. “I know it sounds weird,” he recounted, “but what sticks out in my memory is what his back felt like when I put my arm around him to pose for the picture. It was steel. Pure muscle. I mean, truly, pure muscle.”   

Oddly, when I associate the word “muscle” with Rafael Nadal, it is more than a facile synonym for “strength,” more than a banal mental image of brute, chiseled, human tissue. For Nadal, muscle was always wedded to morality. His strength exuded character more than sheer brawn. He was the same person no matter who he interacted with—a fan on the street or the King of Spain. “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch” might be the words of Kipling, but they capture Rafael Nadal’s manner of existing in the world. 

When I think of so many of my students who come from broken homes and severed families, who often struggle to imagine a future life that includes marriage and children, I think of a man whose highest priority was always his friends and family, whose most significant tennis influence was his own Uncle Toni, whose only loss at the French Open from 2005-2014 occurred in the midst of—or perhaps, because of—the greatest tragedy that could befall him, the divorce of two parents he loved beyond measure.     

As he wrote in his book Rafa: My Story: 

My parents were the pillar of my life and that pillar had crumbled . . . On the surface I remained a tennis-playing automaton, but the man inside had lost all love of life . . . Maybe I should not have competed at Roland Garros, but I had won the championship the previous four years and I felt a duty to defend my crown, however unlikely the prospect of victory felt.     

Tennis journalist Jon Wertheim tells the amusing story of interviewing a young Nadal at the US Open following a practice session. Nadal abruptly cut off the interview to rush back to the court because he realized he had failed to pick his trash off the ground.  

The same athlete who many label “the most intense competitor of all time, in any sport”—literally never conceding one point in a match over twenty years of competitive tennis—didn’t break a single racquet in two decades. He never uttered profanities. He didn’t scream at his coaches in his player box. Not once.  

Even the grace of Roger Federer had the occasional crack—cursing at an umpire during the 2009 US Open or destroying his racquet during a final round match in Miami against Novak Djokovic earlier that same year. 

Flourishing By Way of Suffering   

What truly separates Rafael Nadal from every other sportsman of our time, what makes him sui generis and worthy of my students’ attention and approbation, is the utter humility with which he approached every opponent, every injury, and every challenge. He possessed an inordinate amount of what hermitic novelist Thomas Pynchon labels “personal density.” 

Unlike other renowned athletes, world-wide fame neither inflated his ego nor seduced his soul. His titanic achievements never hollowed the constancy of his humility. The fortune he amassed through prize money and A-list endorsements—Nike, Kia, Tommy Hilfiger, among others—were byproducts of his zest for sport, a happy corollary to the process of excellence itself. It is revealing that he has devoted a significant portion of his fortune to building a world-renowned tennis academy, the Rafa Nadal Academy on his home island of Mallorca.   

Consider that Nadal’s achievements in the world of tennis are so vast, so colossal, that there are simply not enough superlatives to describe them. He is the most dominant player on a single surface in the history of the sport. He won an other-worldly sixty three titles on clay, including fourteen championships at the French Open alone, the only grand slam tournament staged on his preferred surface. He won eight additional grand slams on grass and hard courts. To put that in perspective, eight is the total number of grand slams won by the likes of Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl and Andre Agassi. Eight is more than the total won by legends like John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, and Boris Becker. He has spent more weeks in the top ten than any player in history.

Surely such exalted excellence carried with it the occasional weight of vanity or a significant anvil of ego. Right?

Not Nadal. For the past decade he was constantly injured, endlessly nursing this strain or that tear. His knees. His abdomen. His hip. Listening to a compilation of Nadal’s injuries is akin to an auctioneer rapidly enumerating the competing offers for a world renowned painting. One would understand if he occasionally lashed out in frustration or flexed the privilege of being a tennis god.  

But he never saw himself as a victim of the Fates. Never bemoaned setbacks or bespoke anything utter than profound gratitude for the career he was enjoying. He was often felled by injuries but never entirely defeated by them. He admitted long ago to never expecting to be “pain free.” Waiting for perfect health, he explained, was just not a real prospect if he was going to achieve anything of significance. None of this was ever supposed to be comfortable or easy.  

Many of the young people I teach have absorbed the modern notion that life should be as painless as possible. Like many Americans, they love a good hack. They are unabashed in their quest for shortcuts and their aversion to any form of suffering. Why take time to write a paper when ChatGPT will do it instead? Why lose weight the old fashioned way when there are now drugs that can expedite the process? Why read a book when a YouTube video can quickly summarize it?   

Consider how Nadal won the French Open for the final time in 2022. He prevailed with “no feeling in the foot,” after receiving countless injections directly into a nerve. The man Nadal defeated to win the title, Casper Ruud, saw Nadal the next day at the airport, where he couldn’t even walk, hobbling around on crutches a day after triumphantly hoisting the Coupe des Mousquetaires trophy.     

Many tennis enthusiasts rank Nadal’s 2008 Wimbledon victory over Roger Federer as the greatest tennis match of all time. At the time, it had all the ornamentation necessary for a match of historical significance with Nadal trying to vanquish a five-time defending champion. 

But a powerful case could be made that the highest quality of tennis ever played in a single match was a five hour and fifty-three-minute Australian Open final played against Novak Djokovic in 2012. The quality of the shot making was the stuff of CGI or a video game. Humans playing in a three-dimensional space have never attained such heights, before or after. At the time, the superhuman capacity of both men transcended adequate description. For over five hours they seemed to bend or suspend the laws of Newtonian physics, employing a graceful potpourri of spins, lunges and brute strength.  

At the awards ceremony, both men nearly collapsed with cramps before someone thankfully ushered in chairs for them to sit in. And yet, the essence of Nadal was revealed not with forehands and serves, but in the post-match news conference. Listen to what Nadal had to say about the value of suffering: 

So, when you are fit, when you are, you know, with passion for the game, when you are ready to compete, you are able to suffer and enjoy suffering, no? 

The most laudable fact undergirding this quote is that Rafael Nadal actually lost this match. He didn’t triumph or hoist a trophy. He came up short in his quest for the title.  

But his manner was oddly buoyant because he reached a different type of summit, one that rose higher than merely winning a tennis title—he suffered in service of something greater than himself. He danced with perfection on that day, participated in showing the world what human beings are capable of achieving in the arena of sport and competition. He and Djokovic came closer to touching the cheek of Perfection than any tennis players in human history.  

And for that, Rafael Nadal was filled with gratitude for the opportunity to suffer. 

What the career and moral muscle of Rafael Nadal ultimately teaches us is that human achievement—big and small, local and historic, profound and pedantic—is never pain free. And even more, excellence and personal decency are never the byproducts of an unencumbered life. Maybe the dentist filling your teeth is having to convince his elderly mother that it is time to transition into a nursing home. Maybe the kindergarten teacher just discovered her husband is having an affair. Maybe the police officer who pulled you over for speeding just received a stage three cancer diagnosis. 

Maybe the tennis champion can’t feel his left foot.

We all hurt. All the time. In one way or another. None of us can escape the pain of our own existence. And yet, we can still practice kindness to one another. We can still strive for our dreams. We can still feel the electrification of inspiration in our loves. We can continually aspire to be the people we always wanted to be.  

Rafael Nadal exemplified this ethic in front of the entire world, for two decades, more gracefully and consistently than any athlete in our time. And that, this schoolteacher would submit, is greater than anything he ever achieved with a tennis racquet. 

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of the recently-released book published by HarperCollins Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.