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 didn’t wait for it to come to him,” Toni tells BBC Sport.
” Normally, when he would throw a ball to a child small, he stayed still until it came to 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.
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No player in history won more Grand Slam men’s singles titles than Nadal.
The Spaniard equaled the Roger Federer’s all-time record of 14 victories by winning the Roland Garros final in 2020, a record to which Serbian Novak Djokovic joined by winning Wimbledon.
On Sunday, perhaps in the most unlikely major victory of his career, Nadal took your according do Australian Open title, beating Federer and Djokovic
But nevertheless, as Nadal often acknowledges, he doubtfully could have achieved 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, harsh 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 fulfill 61 years old in February, I was just over 30 years when Nadal first joined once to a small group of children he was teaching.
In the early days of his 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 calm and calm at that age, used to get annoyed by what I considered too harsh a treatment.
“I demanded a lot from Rafael because I cared a lot about him. ”, says Toni.
Nadal’s mother, Ana María, remembers how her young son used to come home crying after training, but he didn’t reveal 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 “feeling of vertigo in the stomach” when letting him know that they would train alone.
Yes the young man’s mind would wander while they were on the court, Toni used to throw balls at him to get his attention.
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 you forgot your bottle of water, he had to train without rehydrating under the hot Mallorcan sun.
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“Toni was inflexible with me from the beginning, more than with the other guys. He demanded a lot from me, he put pressure on me”, recalled Rafael Nadal in his autobiography published in 2022.
“I knew he could”
Toni admits that everything is true.
“I believe in work and I believe in players who are strong enough as 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 is why I was like this with Rafael . I knew he could stand up to it”
When Nadal, at 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 the spirits of those present by naming the last 25 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: had only one chance in five of get that same
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 traveled until 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 she 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
“I wanted him to know that everything he achieved at that age wasn’t very important in terms of the big picture,” says Toni.
“I wanted to cushion him the expectations
“I was tough for a greater good”
Rafael Nadal’s father Sebastian, Toni’s brother, sometimes wondered if his younger brother was putting too much pressure on his son. His wife also had her reservations.
Beyond his inner circle, there will be someone today —considering how much they have changed in 25 years attitudes regarding to well-being in sport—question Toni’s methods.
In one 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 context sport, 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 on the track my arm is tense and I play below my possibilities, and he’s right. Of course he has it”, he recounted.
Toni says that he only wanted “the best” for his nephew.
There were not “too many” family disagreements, he says, and Sebastián and Ana María without a doubt they appreciated how important Toni was to their son’s hopes of becoming a professional tennis player.
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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 14 years.
Nadal himself , even being so young, knew that the association with Toni was esp ecial and was also reluctant to go.
“Deep down, I didn’t want to leave home either, and today, looking back, I’m glad (I didn’t)”, he told the British-Spanish journalist John Carlin, who included it in his book “Rafa. My story”, by 1333 .
“(Although) Toni got on my nerves, I knew I had something good with him”.
“Because Toni was right. It was infuriating often but, in the long run, he was right“.
During the Madrid Open last year, drone images of the historic square were used for television promotion of bulls of Las Ventas in the Spanish capital as a dramatic anticipation of Nadal’s matches.
The Majorcan’s personal logo, which adorns his track 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 35—and who prefers to sleep with the light or the TV on, and about what he hides under the pillows every time there is a storm.
Nadal as a “furious bull”
“I was a coach who cared more about forging and strengthening Rafael’s character than training him technically”, he says.
The basic skills that have allowed Nadal to win 21 Gra and Slams, 30 Masters and pretty much every other honor in his sport is still evident in his 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 the Nadal’s mantra and developed it, both physically and mentally, during the long and uncompromising sessions with Toni.
His indomitable spirit was encouraged by the parties to 21 points where the guy let his protégé score 19 before leveling up and taking him to win.
And play a sub tournament 14 with the little finger broken 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.” He didn’t want to show any signs of weakness against Toni.
The ability to play clearly under pressure and solve problems on the pitch 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 that gave him his first Wimbledon title in 2008, or how he outlasted Daniil Medvedev to win the US Open in 2019 first and from Australia this Sunday.
“Play every 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 14 years of competition makes it clear that it makes no sense to suggest that you rely solely on the will of your body and mind.
Clearly, his technical capacity —a difficult serve to answer, the ability to viciously finish off forehands such as backhands, his intelligence and well-executed game at the net— is one of the best.
“I think I conveyed my commitment to sports, 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” .
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 2011, Toni decided that now he had traveled enough around the world and retired from his role as Rafael’s head trainer.
Although according to the stories that are told about him easy to presume that Toni was a tyrannical figure, demanding and irascible in equal measure, that is not a fair description
Nadal speaks of 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.
Remoteness
Toni retired from Nadal’s team in 2017, but then returned to the tour part-time, working with Canadian player Felix Auger-Aliassime at the Grand Slams and other major events.
Today, Toni is in charge of Nadal’s academy in Mallorca, a short walk down a tree-lined avenue from the Manacor Tennis Club, where it all began, trying to forge the tennis stars of the future through training. and education based on family values.
They continue to have a close relationship, as does the entire Nadal clan, who lives in Manacor. It’s a “normal” uncle and nephew relationship, as Toni describes it.
However, they never talk about Nadal’s game. Although Toni still watches some of his matches – he was recently seen in the stands at the Madrid Open – he doesn’t get involved.
When he won his 10th French Open title in 2017, Toni’s last Roland Garros as his coach, the beaming uncle came to the Philippe Chatrier court to present the trophy. The uncle’s face shone with pride and the love between the two became evident when they shared a big hug
“If we could go back to when I started playing tennis with Rafael and you told me I would win 21 Grand Slams, I would have said it was impossible”, says Toni.
“But now, because of the path he has taken, winning Grand Slams almost every year and improving his records, it even seems normal”, he adds.
“We have shown that a normal kid from Manacor, with effort, with sacrifice, has managed to meet many of the goals he set for himself as a young man”.
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