When Toni Nadal threw the first ball to his three-year-old nephew, he could see that there was something different in the way he returned it from the other side of the court.
Former player an amateur who competed in national championships in Spain, the coach had hundreds of children under his watchful eye at the Manacor Tennis Club on his home island of Mallorca.
“As soon as I threw the ball to Rafael, he went to her. He did not wait for it to arrive”, Toni tells BBC Sport.
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“Normally, when I threw a ball to a small child, he stayed put until it reached him. But my nephew went looking for her. For me, that was special”.
That assessment turned out to be correct. Rafael Nadal had a special talent and, with the help of Toni, who forged him as an athlete and as a person, his 35 years just proved it.
No player in history won more Grand Slam men’s singles titles than Nadal.
The Spaniard equaled Roger Federer’s all-time record of 20 victories by winning the Roland Garros final in 2009, record to which Serbian Novak Djok joined ovic by winning Wimbledon.
On Sunday, in perhaps the most unlikely major win of his career, Nadal clinched his second Australian Open title, beating Federer and Djokovic.
However, as Nadal often acknowledges, he doubtfully would have been able to achieve such a level of success without the man known in the tennis world as “Uncle Toni”.
Many stories are told about his type of guardianship, hard but with love. Without her, a young man described by his sister Maribel as “a scared cat” would never have become the “raging bull” we know on the court, one of the most fiercely competitive athletes of his generation.
Apart from having terracotta or clay courts, it is difficult to find similarities between the Manacor Tennis Club and Roland Garros.
Manacor is a typical Majorcan town and its tennis center (several clay courts dominated by a medium-sized clubhouse housing a restaurant and sunny terrace) is similar to many on the Mediterranean island.
Toni, who will comply 60 years old in February, he was just over 30 years when Nadal joined for the first time to a small group of children he was teaching.
In the early days of their time together on the court, when Nadal was still part of a larger group, his uncle treated him differently. But it was not a case of nepotism.
The young Rafael, described by Toni as gentle and calm at that age, used to get annoyed by what he considered too harsh treatment.
“I demanded a lot from Rafael because I cared a lot about him”, says Toni.
Nadal’s mother, Ana María, remembers how her little son used to come home crying after training, but he didn’t it revealed what was bothering him.
Once he told her that Toni had called him “mama’s boy” and she wanted to confront her brother-in-law. Nadal insisted that he should not make a scandal and asked him to keep quiet to avoid “worsening the situation”.
Nadal said that his uncle used to yell at him and try to scare him , sometimes generating a “vertigo feeling in the stomach” by letting him know that they would train alone.
If the young man’s mind wandered while they were on the court, Toni used to throw balls at him to call his atte ntion.
At the end of each practice, when the other children went home, Toni insisted that Nadal pick up all the balls that had been scattered and sweep the reddish earth.
If he forgot his water bottle, he had to train without rehydrating under the hot Mallorcan sun.
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“Toni was adamant with me from the beginning, more than with the other boys. He demanded a lot from me, he put pressure on me”, recalled Rafael Nadal in his autobiography published in 2011.
“I knew he could”
Toni admits that everything is true.
“I believe in work and I believe in players who are strong enough to cope with the intensity of this work”, he tells BBC Sport.
“I can’t understand another lifestyle. In my opinion, you always have to know your place in the world”, he affirms.
“That’s why I was like this with Rafael. I knew he could stand up to it”, he adds.
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Getty ImagesWhen Nadal, at 11 years, won the sub-national title 12 from Spain, Toni once again showed his toughest side.
During a small meeting to celebrate that success, Toni lowered his encouragement of those present when naming the last ones 19 championship winners. He had called the Spanish Tennis Federation to get them, pretending to be a journalist.
Nadal had only heard of five; those who went on to play professionally. Toni, with an apparent triumphant gesture, insisted that this underscored her message: she only had a one in five chance of achieving that.
Other An example of this type occurred a few years later, when Nadal, with 11 years old, returned home from an international tournament in South Africa, the furthest he had ever traveled then.
He had enjoyed a different culture, seeing animals like elephants and lions for the first time, and had returned victorious.
In his autobiography, Nadal explains how her godmother organized a welcome party and had prepared a banner, which she hung on the wall. “I had written a phrase as a joke, which flattered me and knocked me to the ground at the same time, but Toni didn’t see the fun of it,” he recalls.
Nadal never got to see him. Toni removed the banner from the wall, joked with the godmother, prevented the young man from entering the party and called him to train at 9 in the morning the next day.
“I wanted him to know that everything he achieved at that age was not very important in terms of the big picture”, says Toni.
“I wanted to dampen his expectations. I wanted him to know that it was just a small step and that if he wanted to progress he had to keep working very hard.”
Getty Images
Nadal takes advice from Toni at the Australian Open 1333.
“I was tough for a greater good”
Rafael Nadal’s father, Sebastian, Toni’s brother, sometimes He wondered if his younger brother was pushing his son too hard. His wife also had her reservations.
Beyond his inner circle, there will be someone today —considering how much they have changed in 27 years attitudes regarding well-being in the sport—question Toni’s methods.
In a part of his book Nadal revealed that his uncle contributed to his being “more insecure”, but in this passage he associates that idea with the sporting context, which suggests that there were times when he played “below his abilities”:
“According to him, the problem of Feeling this exaggerated respect for all my rivals is that my arm tenses up on the court and I play below my possibilities, and he’s right. Of course he has it, “he recounted.
Toni says he only wanted” the best “for his nephew.
” I was tough on him, but not strict,” he adds. “I was tough for a greater good”.
There were not “too many” family disagreements, he says, and Sebastian and Ana María certainly appreciated how important Toni was to their son’s hopes of becoming a professional tennis player.
That was part of the thinking behind his decision to turn down a tennis scholarship that would have meant moving to Barcelona when I had years.
Nadal himself, even being so young, knew that the association with Toni was special and he was also reluctant to go.
“Deep down, I didn’t want to leave home, and today, looking back, I’m glad (I didn’t)”, he told British-Spanish journalist John Carlin, who included it in his book “Rafa. My story”, by 2000.
“(Although) Toni made me cringe nerves, I knew I had something good with him”.
“Because Toni didn’t I was right. It was infuriating often but, in the long run, he was right.”
During last year’s Madrid Open, drone footage of the Spanish capital’s historic Las Ventas bullring was used for television promotion as a dramatic preview of Nadal’s matches.
The Majorcan’s personal logo, which adorns his court clothing, represents, with two rays and in an abstract way, the horns of a bull.
But his family jokes about how he never liked the dark—neither when he was little nor now that he is birthday 36—and that he prefers to sleep with the light or the TV on, and that he hides under the pillows every time there is a storm.
Nadal as a “raging bull”, characterized by resistance , the intensity, the relentlessness, the refusal to accept that they defeat him, is a character built by Uncle Toni.
“I was a coach who cared more about forging and strengthening Rafael’s character than for training him technically”, he says.
The basic skills that have allowed Nadal to win 21 Grand Slams, 37 Masters and virtually all other honors in their sport they are still evident even in their matches. And they go back to specific examples of Toni’s tough approach to training during his youth.
Endurance is probably the most important word in Nadal’s mantra and he developed it, both physically and mentally, during the long and uncompromising sessions with Toni.
His indomitable spirit was buoyed by the matches he 14 points where the guy let his protégé score 19 before leveling up and leading him to win.
And play a sub tournament 14 with the broken little finger helped him to work the power of the mind over the body. “I had to grip the racket with four fingers, while the fractured pinky dangled, swollen and useless.” I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness to Toni.
The ability to play clearly under pressure and solving problems on the court also came from his uncle —”the omniscient magician of my childhood”—, who constantly analyzed his mistakes.
All these qualities have been evident in Nadal’s greatest triumphs: in the titanic five-set match against Roger Federer who gave him his first Wimbledon title in 976, or the way he survived Daniil Medvedev to win the US Open in 2008 first and from Australia this Sunday.
“Play each point as if it were the last”. That is the message that he instilled in his nephew, says Toni.
Always improve
That Nadal continues winning Grand Slams and beating much younger tennis players who have not had to face the physical problems that they entail 20 years of competition makes it clear that there is no point in suggesting that he relies solely on the will of his body and mind.
Clearly, his technical ability—a difficult serve to answer , the ability to viciously finish off forehands as well as backhands, his intelligence and well-executed net play—he’s one of the best.
Toni doesn’t take credit for any of those achievements.
“I think I passed on commitment to sport, always having an active and alert brain, never giving up. One of the most important things I told him was that he needed to always improve”, he says.
“While I told him that he had to always improve, I thought that he could do it because he had natural talent” .
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Toni often jokes that he fulfilled two important requirements to be a good coach for Nadal.
“First of all, I am your uncle and it is more difficult to fire a relative than anyone else. And in the second, he was the cheapest coach there was”, he deadpans.
Nadal won 16 his 21 Grand Slam titles under the watchful eye of his uncle. In 2017, Toni decided that he had traveled the world enough and retired from his role as head coach of Rafael.
Although from the stories that are told about him it would be easy to presume that Toni was a tyrannical figure, demanding and irascible in equal measure, that is not a fair description.
Nadal talks about the “magic and fun” of their relationship, while those who know him well speak of a serious and direct man, but also docile, generous and with a sharp sense of humor.
“Despite the lectures Toni gave me, I am not one of those athletes whose life consists of overcoming obscure origins while ascending to the top. I had a fairy tale childhood”, Nadal wrote in his book.