When Rafael Nadal retires from professional tennis next month, the sport will lose a few things.
It will lose a powerful athlete whose explosions on the court were always about sending tennis ball-shaped torpedoes flying over the net — not about breaking the racquet. Absent going forward will be something of an obsessive player whose mid-game rituals were obvious to even casual fans, as was the effort he put into every point of every match. Tennis will bid farewell to a man whose humility stayed unwavering, even as he earned two Olympic gold medals and a staggering 22 Grand Slam singles titles, an extraordinary — and likely unrepeatable — 14 of them on Paris’s red clay.
And it will say goodbye to a tennis player whose childlike love for the game never dampened, even as he changed the very sport itself.
After more than two decades on the pro circuit, countless injuries — and just as many comebacks — Nadal announced on Thursday that his final tournament would be this year’s Davis Cup, where next month he will play for his home country of Spain.
During those last two decades, 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim has seen it all; he has covered Nadal for Sports Illustrated and the Tennis Channel since the tennis phenom was 18.
In 2019 for 60 Minutes, Wertheim met Nadal in his hometown on Mallorca, the Spanish island where he was born and still lives. The two shared a long sit-down conversation that was unusual on the tennis circuit: It was in Nadal’s hometown, not at a tournament, not when he had a match the next day, not when he was thinking about slicing backhands.
In that conversation, it became clear just how much love Nadal had for his sport.
“I never felt that what I was doing was a sacrifice,” Nadal told Wertheim through a Spanish interpreter. “I trained, yes. I have worked very hard, at the maximum, yes. But I have enjoyed every single thing. For me, a sacrifice means that you are doing the things that you don’t like doing. But I have done all of the things I enjoy doing.”
60 Minutes visited in December, the weeks that amount to the off-season in tennis. But rather than use the time to rest before the start of a new season, Nadal was working intensely, honing his southpaw forehand and double-fisted backhand.
Wertheim watched as Nadal played through his morning practice with his characteristic vigor, sending balls catapulting off his racket with an urgency typically reserved for matches. His relentlessness served him well on the court. It also took a toll on his body.
“I’m very happy that after all of the physical issues that I had to suffer through my career, which are a lot, I’m delighted to be where I am, being 33,” he told Wertheim in 2019. “This is something I value and that gives me great personal satisfaction.”
Over the years, Nadal experienced the gamut of physical injuries, occasionally taking extended time off to rehab. Each time, he seemed to push through and return to the top of his game.
In a way, struggling through adversity is what Nadal told Wertheim he liked most about tennis itself.
In his 2019 interview, Nadal said he enjoyed the “mental effort” of the game, the search for solutions when he was down in a set, the analysis needed to change a match’s dynamics. When he was losing, he wanted to understand what was going wrong, to analyze how his opponent was playing better that day.
If he came from behind to win, he said he found the victory even more satisfying than, say, trouncing a competitor in straight sets.
“Because you make the extra effort,” he said. “It means that you have the chance to compete again the next day. And the next day, you’re going to be playing better. Sometimes when I’m in the first round or second round, and I’m not playing well, I say, okay, just accept it. Don’t get frustrated. Just accept and focus.”
Focus has been a key element of 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 about an hour before a match began, he talks with his coach. Then, he thinks to himself as he prepares the grips on his rackets and his physiotherapy bandages. Just before walking out on the court, he steps into an ice-cold shower.
On the court, a routine also precedes each serve. Nadal steps forward and leans his weight into his right foot while adjusting his shorts in the back. Then, while methodically dribbling the ball with the racquet in his left hand, his right hand picks at the shirt sleeve on his left shoulder, then his right. He gives a quick swipe to his nose before tucking the hair behind his left ear, then repeats it on the right side—nose swipe, hair tuck. With a final wipe of each cheek with his wrist sweatbands, he’s 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, setting one behind the other so they face the court diagonally. He turns their labels outward. Prior to the match and during changeovers, he takes alternating sips from each before putting them back in their places with precision.
It may seem like superstition, but Nadal explained it is all part of the way he disregards distraction.
“If I don’t do that with the bottles, then I sit down, I could be thinking of something else,” he told 60 Minutes in 2019. “If I do always the same things, it means that I am focused and I’m alert to think purely about tennis.”
Wertheim witnessed plenty of Nadal’s rituals in the two decades he has covered the tennis star. When Wertheim first profiled Nadal for Sports Illustrated in May 2005, the Spanish teen hadn’t yet won a major. But Wertheim saw the potential in Nadal’s passionate playing, writing, “[T]here’s every indication that Nadal … has begun a long residence at the top of the sport.”
And he did. Nadal entered the Association of Tennis Professionals’ top 10 that same year and spent 912 consecutive weeks inside the Top 10. He only dropped from it in March 2023 after injury sidelined him for most of the season.
One of Nadal’s most enduring legacies will be his rivalry with Roger Federer. They met across the net 40 times, facing off on European clay, hard courts oceans away, and London’s grass. That’s where the pair duked it out in one of the best matches ever played: the 2008 Wimbledon final, a battle that raged on the court for almost five hours, not counting the two rain delays. In the end, Nadal defeated Federer, who had claimed the title at Wimbledon the previous five years, and ended Federer’s 40-match winning streak at All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
But this duo might be most memorable because of their genuine friendship.
“We … know that 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 some moments with more tension. But like everything else in life, both [Roger] and myself, we had very clearly in our minds that the human relations are more important than the tennis rivalry.”
When Wertheim spoke with Nadal for 60 Minutes five years ago, Federer had 20 majors. Nadal had 19. When he retires next month, he’ll walk off the court with 22 — two more than his old friend, and two fewer than the remaining member of the “Big Three,” Novak Djokovic. Of these three, it may be that his place in history matters the least to Nadal.
And in 2019, he told 60 Minutes he would be at peace, whenever he returns his last serve.
“I’m not worried about retiring at the end of my career,” he said. “I just want to be happy and enjoy playing as much as possible. And when I retire, I think fortunately there are many 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.
