Rafael Nadal Left His Mark
On the big farewell to the biggest player in Roland Garros history.
PARIS, France — I take pride in my eagerness to zag here at Bounces, swerving away from the pack to find something unexpected like yesterday’s story on Elmer Møller and his wicked backhand. I was very happy to see how that story resonated—a hearty velkomst to all the new Danish subscribers here!—and enjoyed watching that backhand sizzle as Møller took the first set over Tommy Paul today before running out of steam and falling in four.
Doing the unexpected is especially appealing in the opening days of a major when there are so many little-known characters to explore, and I will have more for you on several of these people and their stories soon here in due course.
But after some hemming and hawing, I ultimately decided it would be pretty ridiculous—and just contrarian for contrarian’s sake—to pretend today at the French Open was about anything other than Rafael Nadal.
With a standalone ceremony in his honor on Sunday afternoon like nothing I’d ever seen before in tennis, Nadal was yet again the star and the story of Roland Garros, somehow simultaneously both for the last time and forevermore.
A reminder of how we got here with Nadal: he played his last French Open a year ago—getting the brutally unwinnable first round draw of Alexander Zverev—and left his future somewhat undecided in an on-court interview after the loss. He then returned to Roland Garros a couple months later for the 2024 Paris Olympics, falling to Djokovic in the second round of the singles and falling just short of the medal rounds in doubles with Carlos Alcaraz. He still hadn’t revealed his retirement plans yet, but he didn’t enter the U.S. Open, either.
Nadal ultimately made it official last October, announcing that he’d finish with Davis Cup a month later. Clearly diminished, he lost his opening Davis Cup match to Botic van de Zandschulp and then watched from the bench as Spain was eliminated in a doubles match. A short ceremony that followed on court in Malaga left few satisfied. The guy who had done everything in the sport countless times—and also clearly had nothing left in the tank—seemed to somehow have been left with unresolved business.
To put a huge bow on his enormous career here, Roland Garros went big for the occasion, dressing up not only their stadium but also the crowd: they gave out 15,000 terre battue-colored t-shirts with “Merci Rafa” and today’s date on them.
After spending quite a while hyping up the waiting public—including by blasting The Bee Gees, unexpectedly—the tournament kicked off the ceremony with announcer Marc Maury introducing Nadal as he so often had: by naming each successive year in which Nadal had won the Roland Garros title, letting the absurdity of the achievement grow evident with the sheer length of time it takes to read off 14 four-digit numbers.
Even with all that enumeration of time passing by, I was still struck by just how much older Nadal looked in his business casual attire; it was hard to believe he had been competing in the sport less than a year ago.
But Nadal was greeted like someone returning home from a far longer absence. The crowd in Paris, which had been famously slow to embrace Nadal during his most dominant stretches, gave him a raucous ovation that lasted several minutes, and then again during and after a rousing montage video.
Once Nadal began his speech, all alone on the court, it felt strangely static. He had been the embodiment of frenetic dynamism and constant restlessness in this arena; watching him stand still and read a pre-written speech verbatim—starting off in his fourth and third languages, no less—felt flat. It was a perfectly fine, hall-of-fame induction-type text that checked all the expected boxes, I’m sure, but Nadal, like most tennis players, is most adept at reacting, not reciting. The best bit of the speech, therefore, was when Nadal had to improvise briefly when he’d misplaced the page of his speech thanking his wife.
After the speech, and after an inexplicable interpretive dance sequence, there was a nice moment in which Nadal greeted several of Roland Garros’ behind the scenes staff. But the best bit—and the part everyone will remember, surely—is when the other three members of the legendary Big Four came out to meet him. As a longtime defender of mortal Andy Murray’s worthiness of standing alongside those three immortals, I was especially glad he was included.
For how much they’ve been talked about as a group, I was struck when seeing them together just how few occasions there had ever actually been like this, assembling this Mount Olympus of 21st Century men’s tennis in full array, or even with more than two of them on a court together at the same time. When Nadal addressed the trio who had joined him—this time thankfully without pre-scripted remarks, he was much looser and freer than he’d been before.
The rare summit meeting felt like a valedictory end of their glorious era, even if one of them is still in contention for this tournament. While Roger Federer and Andy Murray are now retired, Novak Djokovic had won his long-awaited 100th title in grueling fashion in Geneva a day earlier. Still, this felt like a bookend: even after Djokovic somehow single-handedly kept their stranglehold as tight as ever all the way through 2023, he’s finally loosened his grip on the top rung of the ladder.
But the top rung will forever be indented from the holds all of these men had on it, and particularly Nadal in this place. To make that permanence more literal, the tournament surprised Nadal with a plaque embedded in the court itself, next to the net post, inscribed with his name and his shoeprint. It was an especially nice bit of stagecraft when they swept away a layer of red clay to reveal the plaque, which makes his mark on this place permanent. The unexpected gesture brought the biggest of Nadal’s waves of tears during the ceremony and they felt entirely appropriate for this staggering, unprecedented honor.
Not unlike how Kelly and Michelle ducked out before the end of Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show, the other three members of the group bowed out to make the final curtain call all Nadal’s. After initially walking right toward the exit once the pageantry was over, Nadal thought better of it and did one last victory lap around Chatrier. He picked his dangling young son, Rafa Jr., out of the stands on his way out.
While obviously I prefer sport to ceremony in nearly all circumstances, I have to say I might have enjoyed this as much if not more than any other moment I’ve had watching Nadal on that court. I can admit that often in my years coming here, Nadal’s predominance made the men’s competition Roland Garros feel perfunctory at best or tedious at worst. He was just so damn good, so damn reliable, and so damn inevitable. His performances were always tours de force, but 14 times is probably too many times to watch nearly anything. What is sport without suspense? But once it was all over today, and the scale of it all was so vivid, I was more appreciative than ever before that I’d gotten to see it at all.
Below the paywall for subscribers, a preview of the matches to watch on Day 2 at Roland Garros. If you haven’t subscribed to Bounces yet, here’s another nifty chance! And thanks to all of you who subscribed today, shooting Bounces all the way up to #2 on the 24-hour rankings across all of Substack’s Sports category!
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