Sports fans have been blessed by the example of RafaelNadal
In his combination of championship excellence with sportsmanship, Nadal ranks with golf’s Jack Nicklaus and baseball’s Willie Mays as the three athletic paragons of my lifetime.
The last time he played the U.S. Open, in 2019, Nadal won it. The last time he played the Australian Open, earlier this year, he recovered from two sets down in the finals to win it. The last time he played the French Open, also this year, he dominated throughout to win his 14th Roland Garros title. And this year at Wimbledon, he won all five matches he played, including a semifinal as he battled through his painful abdominal injury to win in a fifth set tiebreaker.
Nadal would retire at age 36 as the current male holder for the record of most major championships won, at 22, plus an Olympic gold medal . Apart from the majors, he has won more “Big Titles” than anyone in history, more individual outdoor matches and titles and a higher overall match-winning percentage than any tennis player in history, and he stands alone with 876 consecutive weeks ranked in the world’s top 10 and 579 total weeks in the top 2.
With Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, Nadal has formed the longest-lasting, most accomplished stretch of three-person dominance any modern sport has ever known — and done so while returning tennis to the status as a gentleman’s game it had enjoyed before Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe made it for a while a redoubt for expletives and churlishness.
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