So what exactly was a "nadal"?
Part 1: To start, we might need to understand long-range weapons.
June, 2024.
Pen this as Rafael Nadal’s last month on the ATP circuit.
In 2005, he grabbed our attention with tennis that seemed weird to say the least.
A mode of sweaty brinksmanship that a mumbly British tennis committee, we hoped, would soon outlaw.
If not, his shtick won’t last, we agreed.
His hips and rotator cuffs seemed like they would bring about the heat death of the universe a decade earlier.
Then, he swung through two, earning almost a century of trophies.
Federer was passed. Djokovic only just caught up, and has the annual distribution of hardcourt to thank.
Hmm.
We weren’t actually studying his weird tennis, were we?
June 3, 2023.
It’s Nadal’s 37th birthday today.
A point in time when we still don’t have one great post mythologizing his tennis.
One!
22 years and 22 majors have passed since he turned pro. Kids have long-adopted his looping, grenadier forehands and deep return positions.
Writers are bloody slow to his talents, though.
Ol’ Federer had at least a hundred great articles propping up his version of ball: elf in a whack-a-mole rush, leaning into baselines, converting milliseconds into points, cynics into devotees, scorn tightening his lips.1 Djokovic’s tennis had at least one good half of a blog post: a clever meta-essay that exaggerated the Serb’s in-rally camouflage over his core skill: stroke discipline that a hoplite would envy.2
But I’ve never wolfed down any Nadal article and burped gratefully as its last fullstop drained into my brain.
Never.
There were always at least two ingredients in those articles that seemed either undercooked or borrowed from a commentator’s done-to-death cheat sheet. And no writer meditated over the Spaniard’s many, many technical choices—that could easily fertilize an ancient river basin’s worth of sporting myth.
They could have done so much more.
Instead, when they wrote about Nadal’s tennis, they autopiloted through an old shortcut.
A tennis writer’s shortcut to fans
“Learn the metaphors, not the tennis so much.”
It’s maddening.
I’m a Nadal fan.
It’s borderline disrespectful to the millions of us out here.
It’s shocking how dumb they think we are. That we somehow can’t recognize that they’re not even trying to sort through the video fragments that have been floating inside the tennis hivemind for the last 15 years.
Like, we can’t see their metaphor-building pathology cheapening Nadal’s tennis.
The descriptive lethargy, tsk.
It’s almost as if 90% of the tennis analysts out there were Federer fans who didn’t really care about Nadal’s tennis, who were slowly phasing out their tennis-watching habits through the late 2010s, as their man faded to third in that slam race.
One of our suspected Federer fans was long-time tennis journalist Christopher Clarey.
Recently retiring from his post at the New York Times to become a full-time book author, he said the financial success of The Master, his biography on Federer, allowed him the decision. Now he would use the time to tie up his biography on Nadal.
The title of this Nadal biography?
The Warrior.
Yes. That shortcut to a dead end. That whorey paintjob of a metaphor. Warrior. Gladiator. Fighter. Poor, dead bull beaten to an archetypal pulp, dripping down your screens in self-conscious journalese.
He snorts. He stamps. He charges.
He never gives up.
Shut the fuck up, you entire army of gasbags.
For years, their stories on Nadal went through these childish preliminaries, to sound like they knew something we didn’t. [Add obligatory quips about his two bottles, his losing paranoia, his fist pumps.]
Then, when they actually had to get to the part where they describe his tennis, their confidence quickly faded into “his topspin forehand ball bounces too high for Federer’s backhand” and something something “relentless spirit.” Within a minute’s reading, they ended the article, pretending they’d imparted rocket science to the planet.
You know what was happening, right?
They didn’t want to work the metaphor.
“Warrior” isn’t a negative metaphor, but it gets stale when writers don’t season it with facts, tidbits, and the differences of Nadal’s tennis.
Did they want to learn new tennis things about Nadal? Did they want to browse through the shots, swings, and tactical choices in his career, and use all of that to create an exciting story?
No, not most of the time.
I’m almost the same.3
Most of us just watch tennis for the result—those short dopamine peaks after gambling our emotions on a tennis match, or player's career.
We don’t care about a tennis magician's secrets.
We'd rather allow the same, old trick, that same, old metaphor of his talents, to work our brains. But, in doing that, we also allow it to puppet us into a blank, cow-eyed gaze.
A metaphor, even a weak one, can be cunning.
“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
— George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
We learn the metaphors. We forget the tennis.
Thinking of Nadal as a “warrior” or “fighter” or whatever tends to erase his skills in your mind. And then your mind is obsessed with these vague connotations forever—or at least until you buy a set of fresh eyes.
My rant, or this prelude, about the difficulty of capturing a sporting star’s “special powers,” isn’t aimed at the Clareys of the world.
I imagine Clarey’s category of writing will reveal the people within the Nadal world: family, rivals, team members, videogame partners, paella sharers, umpires, a few fans, and Rafa himself. A book with that “behind-the-scenes” tone to it, without going too behind the scenes—certainly not documenting the yearly fluctuations of his lead tape placements, forehand takebacks, and weird slidey shots.
Journalists aren’t allowed much runway to work with, so I imagine even when they can claim more pages, they revert to old habits. Which is its own genre of light reading: a meandering stream of anecdotes, conversations, perhaps life philosophies.
I expect caricatures of Nadal’s three personalities between stage, backstage, and domestic life. His boring, rote press interviews. Those infuriating euphemisms. Those obvious exhortations (“I gonna fight foh da biggest troffies”). A whole chapter dedicated to the soundbites of Uncle Toni’s tyrant humour. The ebbs and flows of the Big 3 Era.
And only 50 words on Nadal’s actual tennis.
Out of 30,000 odd words.
I won’t read it. No, okay, I might. For the interpersonal stuff. And for Nadal being a sassmouth to Moya and Maymo. But I won’t read it to see his tennis being demystified into the image it deserves. It will fall short of anything I have in mind.
And, to be fair, it's not Clarey's job.
It's yours. It's mine.
I blame us.
The fans.
A tennis writer’s scenic route with the fans
“Learn the tennis, then repackage it in newer metaphors.”
So, I’m starting a 4-chapter series on Nadal’s tennis.
We can learn and talk about Nadal’s tennis—not Nadal, leaving that to our trusty journalists.
I know we have a reluctance to use the acres of space we are given here. But we can easily create a ripe system of meaning for his tennis. Platforms like Substack allow for the stuff that journalists can’t do. Fans can write about their favourite players in the way they want. They can write for other fans, ask for their help, and think up a safe space to make the sport more than just those solitary streaming hours on Amazon Prime and Sony Liv.
Please share your opinions, comments, whatever.
The thing I’ve learned over the years of watching and discussing sports is that when we write about anything we’re saturated with, we need to cheat.
We need to act like we’ve forgotten tennis as we know it. Like, put our old concepts away, and go back to the start. That’s kinda the whole point of the literary genres in historical fiction and high fantasy—and those Victorian comedies-of-manners on Netflix. We’re saturated with the staleness of modern life. So we cheat. We go back to an old time to get a new glimpse.4
In the same way, we can start a refresher course on Nadal’s tennis by just asking ourselves…
If you were watching Nadal for the first time today, what would he mean?
With a little more effort, we could get over our unhealthy knack for metaphorical reductionism.
So that the message doesn’t get lost.
You, me, or any hypothetical writer, can go the extra mile to improve the message’s medium. With GIFs and descriptions of pivotal moments in a match or career, we can remake an old answer to the question of what a player's tennis is. This has kinda been going on at Deadspin, Substack, and Twitter over the past five years.
Using this new-age tech palette, we can make a player’s otherwise-dry-sounding technical choices (racquet, grip, swing, positions) easier for our understanding.
For example, “Wawrinka doesn’t mind thwacking forehands from 3-4 metres behind the baseline. The combination of his heavy racquet, his thick tree-stump body, and his compact high-to-mid-to-high technique, made his ball feel like a full-speed truck even when it had to go through almost 30 metres of aerodynamic drag.”5
The last step is to breathe life into the content…
Dress up all the new info in something more engageable.
No, not “warrior.”
Something a little more specific.
Something not too complicated.
Perhaps a type of warrior — a pikeman, a slinger, a longbowman.
Our boy Wawrinka has a long range. He might be a longbowman. He might be a sniper. Anything can work if you think it through.
We could use a movie character, too.
Federer, whose racquet swarmed the baseline with utter disrespect to his opponent's shot-speeds, in a deft, fast-tempo’d, close-quarters style of tennis, can be compared to Neo when he literally becomes god of the machine, and enters that higher dimension of cognition.
Lightspeed hands.
If we’re sports buffs, we could try the inter-sport comparison based on technology—Djokovic’s heavy racquets and error-free stroke production could pair well with Tendulkar’s heavy cricket bats and error-free stroke production.6 Or we could base it on player archetypes: long-range, deep backcourt players like Zverev can compare with long-range out-boxers like Tyson Fury.
I’m going with an allegory of long-range weaponry, as you might have surmised with the strange AI-generated images that introduced this post.7
I’d wanted to write just one piece on Nadal’s tennis, but then quickly realized that I’d need more space to work with, given the man's complex playing style.
I thought the best way to do it was through the concept of range, and then discuss range through the 4 dimensions of tennis:
Part 1: Length
Part 2: Width
Part 3: Height
Part 4: Time
Height, width, and time ain't even alluded to in any regular match stats sheet!
You won't find even the faintest clues of the time Nadal's forehand ball took to reach the other guy's racquet or baseline. You won't find anything referring to the height of his ball at the apex of its post-racquet trajectory, or post-bounce trajectory. You won't find the wide spots the ball bounces to, in proximity to the sidelines.
This is why tennis analysis is still in the Dark Ages. Fans will go through entire articles without mentioning these real factors of tennis.
But most of us do discuss length—also called “depth.”
And depth is already a stat at Tennis Abstract, the unofficial capital of free tennis stats.
If width is the proximity of a ball’s bounce to the sidelines, depth is the proximity of a ball’s bounce to the baseline.
Given that it’s something we’re more accustomed to, we’ll explore the depth of Nadal’s range in this first post.
First, what’s range?
Basically, the place before precision and power dies.
The first thing we need to grab onto is that Nadal expanded the playing area like no other player before him.8
Look at the GIFs below and you’ll know.
His deep-stance audacity is why the concept of range works best with him, and that’s why I wanted to use it. It explains half of everything, and then makes the other half easier to explain.
If you had a preliminary understanding of tennis, and suddenly were faced with Nadal’s tennis for the first time, what would seem different about him?
His ability to hit the ball with power and precision from soooo far back, obviously.
For the rally vs. Wawrinka, the guy is…
A couple of metres behind the baseline.
Moving in reverse, i.e. his weight is directed at the back wall—suboptimal.
His opponent is in the centre i.e. best placed to run down his next shot.
He deadass dips the ball onto Wawrinka’s forehand corner, at close to 75 mph.
And it’s even spinning outward, away from Wawrinka.
Feel free to disagree in the comments, but I believe he’s the best at pulling off this type of moving-backward forehand. It’s peculiar to him—helped by his special technique, small grip, and, uh, muscles.
We can use this memorable bit of kinetic badassery to define “range” as the distance that a player can hit to with a fair degree of precision and power.
And, in that sense, Nadal had the best range in the last twenty years.
Since we’re supposed to use fresh metaphors, Nadal’s tennis is little like that scene with the Witch King’s spiked flail.
Peter Jackson shamelessly beefed it up for our visual thrill—to a weight that his actor could barely lift.
But it worked for him. And it works for us, given that the Witch King is…
Lefty.
Nadal is lefty on a tennis court.
Practically cross-dominant—his right hand able to wield a deadly sword as a secondary weapon.
Nadal, like old Australian great Ken Rosewall, is cross-dominant and wields a powerful secondary weapon in his backhand.
Using a primary weapon (flail) that could do more damage to the wielder than the opponent!
Many of us less educated fans thought Nadal’s forehand was so obscenely powerful, it would injure him.9
Using a primary weapon (flail) that is offensively strong but defensively weaker.
Nadal’s forehand is not as defensively strong as, say, Djokovic’s or Federer’s. Like the flail, which has most of its weight in the head, his racquet is head heavier than his peers, which leads to complications.10
Is strong enough to control a massive area of offence—basically, his flail is a long-range melee weapon.
Nadal has the longest range among modern tennis players, like the Witch King in this duel.
Eowyn, quite brave otherwise, has no desire to enter the Witch King’s circle of destruction. In other words, he can hit her, she can’t hit him. She can’t hit him without the fear of turning into a meat puppet crumpled around those spikes. She leans out of the radius of his swing.
Translate it into tennis, and Nadal’s opponents are doing the same thing.
The power and precision he can generate from so far back, puts them on the back foot.
Like other long-range melee weapons—from longswords to spears to halberds—Nadal’s superior range allowed him a comfortable distance from the opponent.
His shots could hurt them from way back there.
And their shots, by the time they reached him, were too slow to hurt him.
It’s a simple phenomenon. But it’s not discussed in detail because its results may not be obvious to the untrained eye. In this post, we’re going to explore how this plays out longitudinally—how his range uses the depth of the opponent’s court.
How Nadal Uses Depth
Destruction, based on where he stood.
The conventional wisdom is hit your ball as deep as you can into the opponent’s court. Your opponent has less time to react, and the ball has a little more velocity to disrupt their shots.
This is mostly true, given opponents are usually standing on the baseline.
If your opponent is near the net, however, a dipping ball that bounces within the service box itself (not deep) would be more sensible than a shot that would otherwise land deep near the opponent’s baseline, which he would easily volley.11
Or not…
But, for purposes of convenience, we will assume a deeper shot is optimal, given that an opponent’s regular position isn’t at net.
And we will categorize the way Nadal uses it based on where Nadal is hitting from.
As is obvious, we’re also assuming the ball should be hit at considerable pace—above 70 mph. If a player gently lobs a ball at a deep spot near the baseline at 20 mph, it’s not exactly telling us his range.12
1. From a deep backcourt position
When Nadal is 2+ metres behind the baseline
Generating depth from the backcourt is what I’ve already shown you in most of the GIFs above.
So I’ll go off on a tangent based on how Nadal used his range to overpower what is claimed to be his biggest obstacle on clay.
The biggest obstacle to Nadal was the Djokovic backhand, most people would agree. What they seem to assume is that it was more than an obstacle. That it won the exchange.
Hah. No. It being an “obstacle” entails it just took a little more time for the inevitable: Nadal’s forehand dominating.
It's a wrecking ball.
It's basically exploding off that deep swath of court near Djokovic's baseline, and the ball's unpredictability is exacerbated by how the clay particles push it higher after impact, and the spins generated by Nadal's racquet.
The weight of this ball forced Djokovic to half-volley, take it on the rise, or parry it at shoulder height—types of shots that can’t push Nadal back on the next shot.
So, Nadal earned increasingly weaker replies from Djokovic’s backhand—allowing him increasingly stronger forehands, until he had the position for the coup de grace.
Djokovic, the man with the safest backhand otherwise, ended with 470 unforced errors off his backhand groundstroke through the clay rivalry with Nadal.
In my opinion, someone more equipped to deal with this bombardment would be a tall Zverev-type creature, who has Nadal-like range to stay further back so that Nadal’s ball loses its explosive bounce. Then, this giant can crush the ball back at a sharper angle from his high contact points.
In the last three years on clay, Zverev posed the greatest threat to Nadal on the backhand side, on account of his lanky power angles.
The problem with the real Zverev is that he doesn’t have the creative range on the forehand to move Nadal around, at least not like Djokovic (and the younger Thiem, Federer). Djokovic has had the speed and defensive capabilities to delay the inevitable on clay, but, to win, he needs to use his forehand above his usual level, redlining.
Because the Nadal forehand’s range is practically unbeatable when at its best.
Let’s get back to the main narrative.
2. From a baseline hitting position
When Nadal is within 2 metres on either side of the baseline
The closer Nadal gets to the baseline, the more his ability reverts to the mean.
Like that gargantuan spiked flail, his primary weapons aren’t as scary from up close.
They’re defensively a little weaker.
Why?
He plays with a small Size 2 grip (small grips tend to redirect fast balls weakly), a more unforgiving racquet than his peers (more recoil), and a slightly head heavier setup than his peers (needs more time to swing).13
He wasn’t ever going to do that impression of Neo that his two main rivals do so effectively up near the baseline.
But it’s not like he was totally a fish out of water there, either.
When he needs to put a little more pressure on an especially dangerous opponent, he will risk moving in and cutting off the angles.
The last 4 GIFs were taken from the 2014 Roland Garros final, which included an hour of this baseline-pressing type of tennis in the 2nd and 3rd sets. In the 1st set, Djokovic seemed to be winning the lateral tussle, moving him around the court at will. So he stepped in, and cut out Djokovic’s angles—check it out on YouTube.
He knew he had to improvise to keep a marauding opponent on the backfoot, and that’s exactly what he did: taking fast balls on the half volley, in his best impression of Federer—choking Djokovic’s reaction times.14
For our metaphor, it’s a little like that semi-effective “Chain Choke” move Gogo used on Beatrik Kiddo, when the fight came closer.15
Trigger warning: Blood depiction
And once Nadal gained the front foot off this adjustment, he stepped into the baseline, and let it rip.
It was unrelenting. His usually patient tempo was sacrificed, and he hit deep spot after deep spot in both the opponent’s corners.
A forehand frenzy.
Basically unplayable.
3. From inside the baseline
When Nadal is between 2-6 metres north of the baseline
As Nadal gets closer to the net, his weapons again turn extraordinary.
You'd see something that doesn't usually happen on a tennis court.
This is where we must part with the flail metaphor. The flail is practically useless up close, but Nadal’s primary weapon, his forehand, wasn’t.
In real life, when combatants got close enough, method died—chaos ensued. What was useful then were the smaller weapons that could slip between armor joints, visor slits, and, uh, eye sockets.16
Trigger warning: Blood and gore depiction
You needed a finishing move.
Daggers could work.
But there were better options: fist-load weapons.
The Roman caestus, basically a spiked or studded glove, smashed through ribs and teeth. Brass knuckles and knuckle knives were used through medieval times to the World Wars. In India, vajra-mushti knuckledusters were used in gory wrestling matches.
In complicated and uglier plate mail combat, after the combatants were disarmed, a death wrestle followed… where metal gauntlets were the last possible move—groping and scratching around for the opponent’s armour gaps to maim and kill.
Since we have the Witch King, we have his diabolical gauntlets too…
Nadal owned these “gauntlets” for a super-close finishing move.
Volleys are a version of super-close finishing move, but those are generalized shots and won’t explain Nadal’s unique range.
So, this isn’t about that.
This is, as it usually is, about Nadal’s forehand.17
It pretty much mopped up all those tricky balls that dripped low over the net.
This might seem easy, but it’s a skill many top players lack when the stakes are high.
It contributed to so many cheap points for Nadal.
As you know, the basic principle is to hit the ball as hard and deep as you can so the opponent can’t reach it. But, but… the ball being closer to the net means that you can’t hit it too hard, or it will overshoot the baseline.
The worst afflicted by this dilemma is, of course, Daniil Medvedev—his technique on the shot doesn’t allow for high topspin rates that would allow the ball to dip down before the baseline.
Yet, even players with otherwise-excellent forehands, such as Djokovic and Sinner, show a bit of hesitancy on this ball.18
Along with Federer, Nadal’s service-box finishing forehand was the best in the sport.
The racquet-head-speed he could impart on a ball created some of the fastest topspin rates, and the steepest Magnus Effects. So, he could hit it with enough power that it didn’t overshoot the baseline, spinning down at the last moment.
He had it covered.
What’s next week?
Part 2: Width, or how Nadal flirted with the sidelines
Nadal’s style changed subtly over the years.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at that patient and assured tendency to build wide angles upon wide angles—a younger iteration of his tennis.
In the last decade, losing his mobility with those many injury issues turned him into a more urgent player, who felt he had to bulldoze with depth to avoid being run off the court—at the cost of many errors.
But in those halcyon years, you might remember how it used to go…
I have a feeling the next chapter will be more fun, because it was Nadal’s most unique dimension of tennis.
Cheers!
At a rate of ~3.5%.
Take said 100. Then, divide by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of copy-pasted, ham-handed tributes Federer’s tennis generated in the 2010s. Then, multiply by 100. Voila! You get 3.5%. The irony is that all the “beauty” talk glossed over his best talent: that fast-paced, early-striking tennis.
That blog post was trying to say Djokovic is hard to read—unpredictable, like a Joker card. He is, but I wouldn’t say that’s his core trait. When trying to finish points, Djokovic does create more attacking unpredictability off the backhand side than Nadal at least, but his forehand did not ace the difficult corridors (inside-out, down-the-line) like his two rivals could. So, he wasn’t as unpredictable off that wing. It’s a matter of his defensive racquet setup (heavier swingweights, twistweights, bigger grip) and the concomitant slower racquet head speed. Basically, off both wings, he’s the greatest player at dealing with a ball coming to him at 80mph—because the mass in his racquet is distributed in such a way as to redirect a fast, coming ball at good depth, even off off-centre hits. But this skill trades off that easy, swishy racquet-head-speed you see in Federer and Nadal. This is often why you’ll see him struggle to hit through slower balls and surfaces, and them not so much. And he’ll then have to resort to a painful, back-and-forth until he earns an easier ball to attack. For unpredictability, I’d still put Federer at the top, whether he is trying to finish points, or trying to just mess with his opponent’s head. When hitting forehands down the line, crosscourt, down the middle, inside out, or inside in, (Graph: FHDTL, FHCC, FHDM, FHIO, FHII) or backhands (Graph: BHDTL, BHCC, BHDM, BHIO), he disrupts his opponent’s plan a little more than his two juniors can. They, on the other hand, are Masters of Fewer Arts to his Jack of All Trades. They’re a lot more disciplined at picking apart an opponent’s weakness with repetition. Check out his bars in yellow.
Okay, not almost. It’s always annoyed me how Nadal’s tennis isn’t given much thought. It’s annoyed me enough that I’ve dug a little deeper than regular sports fans.
The first Inkling, Owen Barfield, spent his life figuring out how old minds perceived the world, and how we could use that to re-enchant our own modern one. The gist of what I understood was that once you make idols out of modern words and their perceived logic, you tend to lose the wonder of the experience they originally referred to. So, you need to go back to the source.
On May 7, 2015, this special skill set allowed Wawrinka to hold a deep position. Djokovic’s conservative shots bounced harmlessly into the Swiss’s racquet. Wawrinka enjoyed an afternoon of what was essentially batting practice.
I know that a few cricket fans here would be aghast at anything less than a Federer comparison for the Little Maestro, but it’s the truth. Tendulkar’s strokeplay wasn’t ever as flashy as the greats who used lighter bats—Lara, De Villiers, Bradman. With his heavy 1.5 kg bat, he played few hooks, late cuts, and lofted shots, especially later in his career. And his arms fatigued as the hours passed, which is partly a reason for a lack of a triple hundred. But all that was gratefully traded for straight-bat shots that used the pace of the fastest bowlers with expert timing. Djokovic’s safe, slower-swing, counterpunching tennis is similar. With his heavier racquet, he’s the best defuser of power tennis, rebounding “bullets” back at attackers.
The header image, with the gigantic, armour-plated tardigrade-elephant thing in the background, was supposed to be AI-generated art for a halberdier. Substack’s AI created Edward Longswordhands in the foreground instead. Yeah, I don’t understand either.
Sure, we had Monfils and Murray as roughly contemporaneous to his deep-seated empire, and now we have Thiem, Zverev, and Medvedev. But Nadal is more ambidextrous than all these players, and can put balls fairly deep into his opponent’s court in the biggest matches—off both wings. Anyone who tends to practise a playing style more, and uses it more successfully, is the pioneer.
Nadal has had a Dead Sea scroll’s worth of acute and chronic injuries, but few (or none) were suffered on his obliques, shoulders, arms, and wrists!
Relatively, Nadal’s racquet has more weight distributed in its head. The balance point of Nadal’s racquet comes in at 334 mm up the racquet. Djokovic’s is at 327 and Federer’s at 315. In other words, Nadal's racquet is the lightest to hold, but feels heavier to swing. A head heavier racquet is relatively difficult to start moving but quite destructive once it does start moving—like a flail. So, on offence, off slower balls, when he has time to start the racquet moving, he puts a truckload of energy into the ball, overwhelming most opponents. Inversely, when rushed in defence, off faster balls that cut his time, his forehand reply tends to fall short because, with only one arm on this flail of a racquet, all the mass in the head resists his arm’s movement. This isn’t a problem on his backhand side, though, when his two arms help him with the stability. Nadal’s peculiar forehand mechanics are why he prefers staying back and creating power from there, when he has more time. Interestingly, Nadal’s coach, Carlos Moya had one of the weirdest setups in terms of head heaviness, an actually head heavy setup with its balance point at 375mm up the racquet!
We will further explore the benefit of the “shallowness” of a shot. It will come in handy in the ‘Width’ chapter.
A lob or even a moonball isn’t useless, but it’s not useful to telling us about the range of a player’s best shots.
A stroke using a small grip size and a lighter racquet tends to be less stable during contact with a fast ball. There tends to be more racquet recoil and twisting. Nadal’s recoil weight is an average 168.9. In tandem with Footnote 9, it’s another reason he prefers standing back and creating his own power. The best counterpunchers, who use their opponent’s power from up close (Djokovic and Murray) have a higher recoil weight in the 180s. The matter is obviously a little more complex: length of arm, strength of the player, swing path, measure of head heaviness, string tension, and grip orientation also matter: Davydenko has low recoil weight numbers but was amazing from close quarters. Adrian Mannarino has a very headlight racquet, but counterpunched better than expected due to his absurdly low string tension (11 kg, when the norm is more than double). A better explanation of the Big 3’s racquet setups can be found on this YouTube video, from 7:37.
How Nadal transitioned his core style from one of width to one of depth (as he got older), I’ll explore in the next part of this series to understanding his tennis.
Please don’t take movie fight scenes as indicative of real-life combat. These are just metaphors. Metaphors that are, perhaps, unavoidably facile, but, at the same time, memorable for the purpose of Nadal’s tennis, and a little less facile than the metaphors we’re used to.
Another fake television scene. This wouldn’t work in real life. The combatant in full plate mail is pretty much impregnable. The Viper’s improved mobility due to lighter armour does not trade off well; the combatant with the lighter armour usually loses because no amount of thrusts and stabs can penetrate plate mail. I choose the scene because it makes my point of super-close combat. Metal gauntlets and other fist-loaded modifications (and huge Gregor-Clegane-sized hands) are useful for crushing the softer, squishier parts once you’re practically wrestling with your opponent.
Two-handed backhand strokes generally don’t attack these low balls in the mid-court because the shorter radius of the two-handed stroke doesn’t quite get down to the ground.
See Footnote 2: Djokovic’s technical setup does not optimize for that swishy racquet head speed.
Although I'm a lifelong Federer fan, I really enjoyed this extensive writing on Nadal. It covers so many aspects from his game, while being backed by the stats and sources.
It makes me appreciate him and his accomplishments even more.
Another wonderful Dragon cook session, waiting for the next part(s)!