Rafa Will Always Have Paris x-13.

10/12/2020

Notre Dame gargoyle and Rafa Nadal, Photo by Art Seitz with photo-shop help from his pal Zair Mansour,

Four superstars, overlapping.
I am referring to Rafa Nadal, one of the nicest people I have met in sports, who won his 13th French Open on Sunday. I am also referring to Chris Clarey and Karen Crouse of the NYT, who wrote about Nadal in the Monday paper. And I am also referring to Art Seitz, master tennis photographer, who has been snapping away, well, forever.

I loved reading about Nadal and seeing Art’s photos, having become a Nadal fan in 2011, the only time I met him. I had heard he was a good guy, a sportsman, and he lived up to his reputation on a miserable day, with the remnants of Hurricane Irene lashing New York much as the tail end of Hurricane Delta was drenching New York on Monday.

He had done his obligatory media conference and was eager to get back to Manhattan, but he was promoting his book and had promised me a few minutes for an interview. We got into a conversation, and I mentioned that I had covered eight World Cups by then, including my first, in his country, Spain.

I think it's fair to say that reporters do not expect their subjects to show much, or any, interest in them. But Nadal seemed intrigued that an American knew and loved soccer, even my modest dose of knowledge. I knew that his uncle, Miguel Angel Nadal, had been a mainstay for Johan Cruyff at Barcelona in La Liga in the 90s, and I had covered Spain’s World Cup championship in 2010. So we talked soccer…as well as tennis….as well as his penchant for cooking for himself and entourage on the road.

He could have ducked out at any time, but he stayed and talked, and my impressions of him since have been confirmed – a centered person who has willed himself to the top of tennis, and can speak with compassion about the pandemic, knowing it is more important than tennis.

My pals Chris Clarey and Karen Crouse caught him perfectly in Monday’s paper – Chris concentrating on the match and the career, Karen focusing on his values and his acquired trilingual abilities. When I first saw Nadal nearly two decades ago, he could not speak any English in public. Now he is eloquent, from the heart.
Felicidades, Rafa.

Chris Clarey:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/sports/tennis/nadal-french-open.html
Karen Crouse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/sports/tennis/french-open-rafael-nadal.html
My article in 2011:
https://straightsets.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/off-the-court-nadal-wears-chefs-whites/
For a sample of Art Seitz tennis photos, check out his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/100001883302306/posts/4593499944056070/?extid=0&d=n

Tom Schwarz

10/12/2020 01:10:06 pm

Oh man yet another GREAT one. Thanks GV!

Marty Appel

10/12/2020 03:42:55 pm

He seems like a well grounded guy, and it must have been a delight to spend that 1-on-1 time with him. We will look back on this era of "the big three" as we do on golf when Palmer-Nicklaus-Player ruled. What a time!

bruce

10/12/2020 03:49:33 pm

george,

well done.

i wonder what odds were available for him throwing a bagel at joko in the first set or any set for that matter.

rafa always comes across as affable and with his head screwed on right.

just trying to think if i've seen him take a wrong step and i can't think of any.

joko on the other hand....heard say some things that seemed rather too nationalistic about serbia which, i thought, was the worst of a bad bunch during the 'troubles' in their part of the world.

some serious bonehead shite and more than once.

as for rafa's english. he was hard to understand at times when he started out.

however, i hadn't heard him talk at all since--probably--his last major tournament and the improvement was incredible.

bruce

George Vecsey

10/12/2020 05:08:02 pm

Tom, thanks,
Marty, good point. To be at a sports event (or concert, let's say) and think these are the good old days. Take a look around. Did we appreciate Seaver, Brock, Gibson, Morgan in their prime. I think I did -- but is that the same as capturing that one mental photo for always?
Bruce, bagel jobs hard to come by. As for language, our colleague Chris Clarey moved his family from Paris to Segovia to for the experience -- now he is trilingual, like Rafa.

Curt Block

10/12/2020 10:18:21 pm

Do you know everyone who ever owned a
pair of laces?
Keep up the exceptional work.

George

10/13/2020 09:13:28 am

Captain Curt: Thanks for the nice words. You know from your own work how we meet people once....form our impressions....and move on. I've had some great one-time interviews with sports and non-sports people -- John McCain, great guy, Colleen Dewhurst between sessions on a matinee Saturday earth mother, Larry Flynt, obscenity monger -- but charismatic and smart, before he got shot, etc. etc. Plus athletes and coaches. You never knew. You've got your stories, too -- miss them at our lunches. Be well, GV

bruce

10/15/2020 02:39:51 pm

george,

as you know, it's my job to point out canuckistanis since there are so many who 'merikcans think are 'merikans.....dewhurst was one of us.

dewhurst was one of us. from montreal as were shatner, cohen and peterson and the rocket.

bruce

bruce

Alan Rubin link

10/15/2020 09:45:27 am

Another great humanist story. You are the master of putting people at ease and capturing their humanity. There is so much more to people than how then are perceived by the public.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Rafa Will Always Have Paris x-13.

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