Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players to ever grace the game, played his final singles match today, against Botic Van Der Zandschulp, in Spain’s Davis Cup competition against the Netherlands. (Nadal, who had said a month ago that this Davis Cup would be his last outing as a player, lost the match 4-6, 4-6, and—with Spain’s loss in the later doubles match—was eliminated from the competition.) Seemingly the entire Spanish tennis community, along with a large international audience, watched the match in Malaga, Spain, utterly rapt, sometimes in tears.
As with pretty much everything in his storied career, Nadal, 38, handled his leavetaking from the sport with grace and modesty. “I’m more than grateful with everything that has happened to me in all these years,” he said in advance of the Davis Cup rounds, going on to add that this week would “close a very beautiful and very long cycle of my life… accepting that everything has a beginning and an end.”
In recent years, Nadal—who holds 14 French Open titles—has been hampered by injuries, and while he tried valiantly to make a go of it, he’s been quite frank about the fact that his body is no longer able to compete at level befitting his ambition and talent. “Movie-script endings are for American films,” he said, “and I realized a long time ago that I wouldn’t have one of those.”
As for the hype—real or manufactured—that sometimes accompanies an athlete of his stature walking away from the game, Nadal’s intentions have been elsewhere. “I’m handling it with the same normality with which I’ve tried to approach everything during good and bad times—without any kind of excess,” he said. As for the notion of pushing himself for one more year of competition—a kind of farewell tour—he was similarly clear-sighted. “Why? To say goodbye in every single tournament? I don’t have the ego to need that.”
“I am in peace that I give all what I had,” Nadal said on Sunday, looking back on his life and work in tennis, “and I played and practiced since I was seven… with passion, with love, and with the determination to be as good as possible… I am going to leave this professional tour with the calm and with the personal satisfaction that I give my best almost in every single moment.”
