Rafa Nadal
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#43611977 · 30 Jan 2015, 21:58 · · პროფილი · პირადი მიმოწერა · ჩატი
Is it so entirely stupid and cliché to be inspired by sportspeople? Probably.
You probably noticed, but Roger Federer lost the other day. In four sets. He hasn’t lost that early in the Australian Open for eleven years. It got me thinking.
I never really hide my love for things, and Roger is one of those things. My crush on him bloomed very early, when I was a gangly thirteen year old who thought Ripcurl tshirts paired with ¾ pants and Nike runners were the height of fashion. To be fair, Roger wasn’t much better, overgrown hair in a kind of surfer’s ponytail alongside his glowing white Wimbledon ensemble.
On the inside of my teenage bedroom door, there’s his Australian Open Championship posters, collected dutifully from the Herald Sun and The Age, taped together and yellowing. ’04, ’06, ’07. I love Roger in the best and easiest way you can love a complete stranger, which is of course from afar, from the sidelines, when they are on-stage, on the field, and can’t make out the faces in the crowd for the lights.
Roger Federer lost the Australian Open in January 2009. That year’s final was particularly brutal, a punishing five setter against Rafa Nadal, who pushed just that bit harder and edged him out. It went late. When they went to present the runner’s up trophy, Roger stepped up to the microphone and he started crying. He was going through the motions graciously, thanking Rafa for a great match, and then he paused and he couldn’t talk for ages. The words caught in his throat. He put a hand to his face. I remember forever what he said.
‘God, it’s killing me.’
Watching at home, I started to cry too. I was thin and threadbare and every day was like that. It was killing me, too. My mental illness was destroying me and I didn’t know what else to do. I’d hit a wall. I couldn’t sleep. I was getting confused by daily tasks.
It’s killing me. Roger voicing his own struggles felt way too raw, too close to home. It isn’t often you hear an elite athlete be so brutally honest like that. That it had really, truly hurt so much to still lose when you’d given everything. He was trying so hard. I was trying so hard. I didn’t have a very good grip on things, but it felt like for a minute like he understood. And then the next day, people said the words ‘sook’ and ‘sore loser.’
In March I went hospital for almost a month. The second week I spent there, I was looking at the Herald Sun sports section. I say ‘looking’ because I could barely read something without getting confused, and so had to be content to look at the pictures. There was a picture of Roger on the back page, training somewhere. There was that steely look of determination in his eye, midway through a forehand, ball a little green blur. I looked at it for ages, because I was having trouble processing things. But it seemed to me like he had his eyes on the prize. Back to prove what’s what.
I carefully tore that picture out of the paper. Later in the week, my psychiatrist challenged me to try and read a few pages of a book. I used the picture of Roger to mark where I was up to while reading The Great Gatsby, lining up the torn corners with each line and sounding out the words in my head, deliberate and remedial. Eventually, I didn’t need the picture any more. I finished the whole book.
Roger won the French Open that June.
Roger had never won a French Open before. Clay was his weak point, everyone always said. Rafa always bested him, and they’d faced each other three times previously and Rafa, who’d grown up with his socks covered in red dirt, was the King of Clay. But that year there was a shock upset – Rafa got knocked out by Söderling, his record winning streak ended. Roger faced Söderling in the final, and won. He finally had his Career Grand Slam. All four. Bang.
I remember thinking really hard about that, as sick as I was. If Roger could achieve things he had never achieved before so could I, right? Wasn’t that how things should go in life? If he could get back to number one so could this hopelessly sick 20 year old girl. I know we were in completely different situations, he was playing professional tennis and I was just trying to get through a day without wanting to die. But don’t they both require some significant mental strength?
The next year, Roger won the Australian Open again, after two years of loss. He held the trophy aloft, went down by the Yarra to get his photo taken. I cut that picture out of the paper too and stuck it on the inside of my wardrobe.
At my 21st birthday, a friend who’d never visited the family home before saw the door wide open in my room while putting his coat down. ‘What’s that, an inspiration wall?’ He chuckled.
‘You’re not wrong.’ I replied.
Later that year, I passed my first semester of university. Roger never, ever, ever retired during a match. I graduated in 2013, six years after I enrolled. A set down? It’ll be all right. Two sets down? Fine. Come back and get it in five. Don’t be dissuaded, you can do it.
In January 2011 I went to the Australian Open, as I usually always do, and for the first time I saw Roger in the flesh. There was barely twenty metres between us as he practised on the showcourt. Well, twenty metres and about 150 other people who also wanted to see him. I remember watching him frowning down at his racquet, plucking the strings absent-mindedly, and I thought it so completely crazy, as I always do, that one way street of admiration. I was standing there and he could never have known what a beacon he was for me in a shitty time where I thought I might not make it. And now I have written it all down, it sounds so completely fucking batshit. He doesn’t know me and he never will. I’m just a tiny insignificant speck in the glittering constellation of millions of fans he has worldwide. So I can’t say thank you. There’s no way to say thank you for the years of inspiration and encouragement that I found in a stranger.
So instead, I’m just content to sit here and have that privilege of watching his beautiful game while he’s still playing. Getting upset when he loses. Being defensive and taking it personally when people call him smug or arrogant or a wuss. And of course, trolling him mercilessly online, in the vain hope that he’ll one day see a tweet of mine and genuinely think, ‘what the fuck?’
But yes, is admitting a sportsperson is an inspiration to you lame? Probably. But I don’t really care. It’s all absolutely true.
თქვენი მეფეეეეეეეეე!!!!!!
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ROGER FEDERER-ის ქომაგთა კლუბი(Part 9), THE GREATEST TENNIS PLAYER OF ALL TIME
