“Rafa”: the Destruction of a Man, and the Making of a Legend
About midway through Zach Heinzerling’s new Netflix docuseries, “Rafa,” we see its subject, the legendary Mallorca-born tennis champion Rafael Nadal, receiving physical therapy before he competes in the Barcelona Open. It’s April, 2024, and Nadal, who is nearly thirty-eight—by no means old in regular-human years but positively ancient by tennis-pro standards—is about to return to the court for the first time since 2022, when a bad hip injury forced him to stop competing. As he lies on the treatment table, the Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper duet, “Shallow,” from the 2018 movie “A Star Is Born,” begins to play softly in the background, the song’s notes blending with the faint electric buzz of the physiotherapist’s massaging device. “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in / I’ll never meet the ground,” Gaga sings. “Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us / We’re far from the shallow now.” Nadal hums along, his disrobed and inert figure pushed and prodded in preparation to go out and perform, as he has done so many times before.
Watching this scene, I found my thoughts turning to the gap between these familiar lyrics and Nadal’s life, as it emerges in “Rafa.” Gaga, in the role of Ally, the titular emerging star of “A Star Is Born,” sings of her desire to free herself from the pain that others might try to inflict upon her; Nadal sees pain not as something to try to run from but, rather, as something to endure and even embrace in order to achieve success. This pain is, first and foremost, physical: almost from the beginning of his record-shattering career, Nadal has weathered a series of intense bodily ailments, from a rare and chronic foot syndrome to knee, back, and hip problems, which made his everyday life and, needless to say, his tennis playing, an exercise in near-constant anguish. But this pain, especially as the years went on, became almost a belief system. “It was a philosophy. To learn how to suffer through sport,” his mother, Ana María Parera, tells the camera at one point, a sentiment that his longtime physical therapist, Rafael Maymó, echoes: “Rafa likes to suffer, to have the feeling that he’s pushed himself to the maximum.” For Nadal, in other words, pain has always felt like weakness leaving the body, and “Rafa” shows the boons of this ideology, as well as its undeniable costs.
Heinzerling’s docuseries alternates between two parallel time lines, each proceeding chronologically. In one, told through a wealth of archival materials, we follow Nadal from 2004, when, at only eighteen, he won the prestigious Davis Cup for Spain, becoming a tennis sensation—and a national hero—overnight. This early triumph led to a long run as a world-famous icon of the sport, mastering, first, the clay court of Roland-Garros, and then, within less than half a decade, the hard courts of the U.S. and Australian Opens and the grass court of Wimbledon. (In sum, Nadal has won twenty-two Grand Slam titles during his two-decade-long career, second only to Novak Djokovic’s all-time record of twenty-four.) The second, tighter time line focusses on more recent events. After winning the French Open in 2022 at the unprecedentedly advanced age of thirty-six, Nadal had to step away from the sport because of his hip injury, and Heinzerling’s film crew joined him to document his return two years later, following him through several tournaments in the lead-up to that summer’s Roland-Garros. The journey is haunted by the spectre of a retirement that everyone on Nadal’s team—everyone, perhaps, except Nadal himself—realizes must not be far off.
The decision to have the series go back and forth between early- and late-period Nadal is a revealing one. In some ways, he is, of course, the same person whether he is eighteen or thirty-eight, with the same innate talents. (We are reminded of this when a clip of a younger Nadal delivering, say, a devastating forehand, is intercut with one in which the much older player serves a near-identical shot.) And yet, the passage of time that continuously confronts us, as we travel from early- to late-career and back again, reminds us, starkly, of the heavy toll that Nadal’s dazzling achievements have taken on him.
The young Nadal—baby-faced and long-haired and, by turns, in the clips we see from his early days, shy and joyful and ferocious—has transformed in his later years into a harried and careworn man who looks rather older than his age. He still plays spectacular tennis: seeing the economy, force, and focus of his winning game against Casper Ruud at the 2022 French Open is a thrill, and it calls to mind the man who David Foster Wallace likened, in a 2006 essay, to a passionate warrior, “mesomorphic and totally martial.” But, as we learn from “Rafa,” Nadal was able to go through with the match only by having his doctor anesthetize his foot, to dull the debilitating pain caused by his chronic condition. This dead foot, dragged around the court, is both a literal expression of and a metaphor for Nadal’s larger trouble. He has become heavily weighed down by the burden of his tennis-related injuries, and by the psychological mechanisms required to bear this pain—and, what’s more, to keep going, full throttle, despite it.
In his on-camera interview with Heinzerling, Nadal comes across as reticent and a bit bland. But if he doesn’t exactly have the most riveting personality, his fervent commitment to the game of tennis, seemingly to the exclusion of almost all else, makes him fascinating as a case study for ambition and monomania. His seething endurance has clearly been honed during the course of his storied rivalry with his two main competitors: Djokovic and Roger Federer, both of whom are interviewed at relative length in the series. Federer, especially—unperturbed, smug, highly punchable—seems to have brought an almost martyr-like tenacity out of Nadal. In the 2008 Wimbledon men’s singles final—a six-and-a-half-hour match that stretched past sundown—Nadal finally bested Federer and won the Wimbledon title simply because, he says, “I was willing to suffer more than him.” As his uncle and former coach, Toni Nadal, tells Heinzerling of the match, “The temptation to give up is always there. But when you get used to enduring a little more . . . This is what great champions do.”
It’s Uncle Toni who is, perhaps, the most fascinating and, honestly, bloodcurdling character we encounter in “Rafa.” A sixtyish man with a thatch of gray hair, a stone-cold stare, and the gruff but measured manner of a Mafia don, Toni began training Nadal when he was four, and from the very start, by his own admission, was a “demanding coach.” (“It was a lot less pressure to play against any opponent than training with Toni,” Nadal says. “I was scared to make the next mistake.”) When Nadal breaks his finger mid-match as a child, Toni commands him to keep playing. When he wants to drink water during the first hour of practice, Toni forbids it. (“To learn to suffer a bit,” Toni tells the camera, recalling the memory with a slight smile.) It’s no coincidence, I think, that when Nadal finds himself in the grip of intense anxiety, it manifests not only in a series of complicated O.C.D.-like routines on the court—tugging at the back of his shorts as if to avoid a wedgie, lifting his shirt’s fabric over one shoulder and then the other, sweeping the bridge of his nose and tucking his hair behind each ear—but also, at least during a particularly fraught period in the mid-twenty-tens, in his need to always have a bottle of water wherever he went. (Without it, he’d begin to choke on his own saliva.)
Even after Toni abruptly quits his role, in 2017, following the addition of the gentler and more encouraging coach Carlos Moya to the team, his punishing spirit still lives on within Nadal. At one point in the series, when Moya suggests to Nadal before a tournament leading up to the 2024 French Open that he should “just go out there, enjoy yourself, relax, and that’s it,” I almost laughed, since it’s so clear that Nadal’s pleasure center lies elsewhere. “I’m the most perforated player in the history of our sport,” he tells his team dejectedly, likely referring to the literal perforations he’s developed in his intestines from taking too many painkillers and anti-inflammatory meds over the years, or, perhaps, to the hole in his knee tendon that, among other injuries, has brought him to an overreliance on these medications. And yet, though Nadal is obviously miserable about his situation, there’s also a hint of bitter pride in his voice. After all, if he hadn’t kept pushing his body to the detriment of his health, he “probably would have ten fewer Grand Slams.” His decision to retire, in July of 2024, following his failure first at the French Open, and, soon after that, at the Swedish Open, is owing to the inability to “find the energy to overcome my limits.” As he writes his team in a text, he is finally—finally—“obliterated.” Who else can say that he has beaten himself up more completely, more brutally, for the sake of tennis posterity? ♦