The parish shouted:
-Happy Birthday!
And Sasha Zverev understood: he did not play at home.
He could feel the atmospheric pressure against him, and would only get his applause at the end of a game as disconcerting as it was presumably long (3h10m had been played, and the second set had not even finished) that ended abruptly: Zverev was running for a ball of Nadal, he twisted his ankle, projected himself on the red earth and no longer got up.
By then, things had gotten complicated (the match was 7-6 (8) and 6-6 for the man from Manacorí), but not that much.
There was party.
(...)
If Philippe Chatrier sang "happy birthday", she did it for Rafael Nadal. This June 3 turns 36.
(At 36 years nailed, he is already the second oldest tennis player in the Paris final, after Bill Tillden, who was 37 in 1930)
What happens is that the congratulations had occurred in the run-up to the semi-final between the man from Manacorí and the German giant, during the heads and tails to see who would serve first and who should occupy each side of the track.
And that weighs.
Zverev (25) already felt the weight of Paris, the weight of Nadal, in the eighth game of the first set, when he served to consolidate his break and lost everything. Suddenly the shaft would fly away on a volley and send the ball far and the racket, to the clay. And then he committed another nonsense in another volley, with Nadal in the background, almost delivered, and everything got tangled up there.
Hadn't he controlled the manacorí until that moment?
It was cool again in Paris, the anticyclonic truce had ended, and it was raining and the drops echoed against the sliding roof and, supposedly, the circumstances favored Zverev. Nadal's demonic effect was not going to weigh so much, right?
And that?
The chronicler could not help it: Nadal is like Michael Jordan. The worse they put it, the more he grows.
The capacity was on his side, too.
Nadal plays thirty meters from his steel sculpture and his personality fills every corner of Roland Garros. Fifteen thousand throats exploded when the man from Manaco scored the first set, in the tie break, after an exchange of pennants that included four set points for the German and six for Nadal.
That partial had lasted 1h31m, a bundle of nerves for those who suffer watching tennis.
-Happy Birthday!
Damn Big Three, Zverev was already telling himself, who doesn't want to be a sandwich between generations. His tenacity had been enough to suffocate Alcaraz's teenage rebellion on Tuesday, but Nadal is another story.
Nadal weighs more than any other rival.
Overcoming him in Paris is one of the greatest sporting challenges, in any discipline.
That's what Djokovic said, his victim in the quarterfinals, and that's what Zverev felt this Friday: the German didn't hit like Tuesday against Alcaraz, he even rushed and got stuck. When he lost the first set he had committed four double faults and 26 unforced errors (to Nadal's ten), where was the hammer that had tortured Alcaraz?
Nadal sniffed out his prey, but he was not the great Nadal of other years either. He is now worried about his foot problems, a syndrome that he will clear up in due time. He plays tennis but he does it conditioned. He doesn't know when things will get complicated, when the pain will reappear, when he will have to say enough is enough.
There is a lot of talk about these things, and less about tennis. Nadal's tennis has seen better days, now the epic rules. The epic and, perhaps, statistics.
Although Nadal questions all that.
"I don't look at the numbers, I don't think about the 22 Grand Slams," he insistently repeats every time he appears before the press.
Let's talk about the epic, then. 21 days ago, in Rome, Nadal left the stage limping and sending worrying messages:
"I don't know how much longer I will bear this pain," he said, after falling to Shapovalov.
And now...
Now he was fighting and surviving a 44-shot rally and overcoming the identity crisis they both experienced in the second set. Four times he lost the serve each one of them, an absurdity that led to a trap for Zverev: after all, he is a server. And if I take it from him he doesn't shoot (he commits three double faults when he served to take the sleeve), what does the German have left?
He has nothing left, least of all his health, for in the twelfth game he stumbled and twisted his ankle and rolled on the clay and cried as he rested his head on the doctor's shoulder. And they took him away in a wheelchair, an unprecedented scene that the chronicler had never seen.
And Nadal?
Nadal awaits the epic. If he wins the final, he will be the longest-serving champion in history in Paris, longer than Andrés Gimeno, champion in 1972, when he was 34 years old. May he rest in peace.
