The book, Rafa, written by John Carlin in 2011 takes a look at the mental toughness that has made Rafael Nadal the most dominant clay court player in the history of the sport. Specifically, it talks compares Nadal’s mindset in the finals of the 2007 and 2008 Wimbledon.
The following quotes from the book provide a sampling of Nadal’s mental state on the court.
- Because what I battle hardest to do in a tennis match is to quiet the voices in my head, to shut everything out of my mind but the contest itself and concentrate every atom of my being on the point I am playing. If I made a mistake on a previous point, forget it; should’ve thought of victory suggest itself, crush it.
- I always dreamt of playing here at Wimbledon. My uncle Toni, who has been my coach all of my life, had drummed into me from an early age that this was the biggest tournament of them all. By the time I was 14, I was sharing with my friends the fantasy that I would play here one day and win.
- But my defeat in 2007 (in the Wimbledon finals), which went to five sets, left me utterly destroyed. I knew I could have done better, that it was not my ability or the quality of my game that had failed me, but my head. And I wept after that loss, I cried incessantly for half an hour in the dressing room.
- Losing always hurts, but it hurts much more when you had your chance and threw it away. I have beaten myself as much as Federer had beaten me; I had let myself down and hated that. I had flagged mentally. I had allowed myself to get distracted; I had veered from my game plan. So stupid, so unnecessary.
- Tennis against a rival with whom you are evenly matched, or whom you have a chance of beating, this all about raising your game when it’s needed. A champion plays at his best not in the opening rounds of the tournament but in the semi-finals and the finals against the best opponents; the greatest champion plays at his best in a Grand Slam final.
- I also know that, most probably, the balance of poorly chosen or poorly struck shots would stand at close to fifty-fifty between us by the time it was all over. That is in the nature of tennis, especially with two players so familiar with each other’s game as Federer and I are. You might think that after the millions and millions of balls I’ve hit, I’d have the basic shots of tennis sown up, that reliability hitting a true, smooth, clean shot every time would be a piece of cake. But it isn’t. Not just because every day you wake up feeling differently, but because every shot is different; every single one. From the moment the ball is in motion, it comes at you at an infinitesimal number of angles and speeds; with more topspin, or backspin, or flatter, or higher.
- The differences might be minute, microscopic, but so are the variations your body makes – shoulders, elbow, wrists, hips, ankles, knees – in every shot. And there are so many other factors-the weather, the surface, the rival. No ball arrives the same way as another; no shot is identical. So every time you line up to hit a shot, you have to make a split-second judgment as to the trajectory and speed of the ball and then make a split second decision as to how, how hard, and where you must try and hit the shot back. And you have to do that over and over, often 50 times and a game, fifteen times in twenty seconds, in continual bursts more than two, three, four hours and all the time you’re running hard and your nerves are taut; it’s when your coordination is right and the tempo is smooth that the good sensations come, that you were better able to manage the biological and mental feat of striking the ball clearly in the middle of the racquet and aiming it true, at speed and under immense mental pressure, time after time. And one thing I have no doubt; the more you train, the better you’re feeling. Tennis is, more than most sports, a sport of the mind; it is the player who has those good sensations on the most days, who manages to isolate himself best from his fears and from the ups and downs in morale a match inevitably brings, who ends up being world number one.
The book has much more and is a must read for any athlete wanting to improve his or her mental toughness.