One afternoon towards the end of 2010, I was surprised by a call from Carlos Costa, Rafa Nadal's manager. He suggested that I write Rafa's autobiography. It would be a joint project: the tennis player and me. I was so flustered that I didn't say yes right away.
I thought about it for a few days, which seems strange to me now, because I was a big fan of Rafa, without knowing him, and because, after accepting the proposal, I really enjoyed the hours I spent spend with him, with his team and with his family.
I will never forget my paternal grandfather, another Rafael, a musician who led the choir in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Palma Cathedral in the late 1940s. When I talked to him, I remember thinking that maybe I had the wrong Christmas, that Rafa senior, the wise patriarch, would have been a better subject for a book. I'm thinking about it again today.
I feel cheated and I feel stupid. A useful fool. With the exception of my dear friend Benito Pérez Barbadillo, his head of communications, there must be few who have done more propaganda in favor of Rafa Nadal than I have over the last fourteen years. Not only with the book, translated into I don't know how many languages, but through the hundred or more interviews I have been given about him on all continents.
The most frequent question was always: "Is Nadal as good a person as he seems?". I never doubted the answer. "Yes, even better than people think." I told them that in one sense (only one) he reminded me of another person about whom I had written a book: Nelson Mandela. Rafa is a man of integrity, he said, consistent with the image he exhibits in public and his behavior away from the cameras; just as nice and respectful to the waiters or hostesses as to the tycoons or dukes (or sheikhs) who present him with the prizes.
He also mentioned that, once he received his millionaire checks, he did not move to any tax haven, like so many of his rivals, but stayed at home, in Mallorca, and paid taxes in Spain. An example for children, they say of him. Yes, and for adults too.
I will never be able to say that again. Last week, Rafa Nadal announced that he had accepted the appointment as "ambassador" of the Saudi Tennis Federation. In other words, following in the illustrious footsteps of Leo Messi, he would dedicate himself to doing public relations around the world in favor of a dynastic and dictatorial regime that dismembers its opponents, that sentences teenagers to death, that cuts off the heads of dissidents public, who imprison gays for being gay and (for 34 years, in the recent case of a young mother) people who write tweets that are not to the liking of Muhammad bin Salman, from whose coffers the Christmas money will come for diplomatic work.
Look, you have to try to understand people, not judge them. I know. But in the case of Christmas, today, I don't see how. It makes me extremely sad – I feel it as a personal loss – but I can't avoid the conclusion that all these years I didn't understand him and I misjudged him, that from now on the decision to sell to the Saudis will prevent any possibility for me to admire and praise him again, as he had done before, always.
What does my opinion do? It doesn't matter if it's just me. But I think it's not just me. There are many of us, I suspect, who feel that it has tarnished his reputation, the immortal part of his being, beyond repair. There will be others, perhaps more adapted to our times, who will shrug their shoulders. "Bah, we all have our price", they will say. Or: "It's his life, isn't it?".
Yes, it's his life. But Nadal's life is not just any life. He is a public figure, one of the most famous in the world, someone who has always boasted, unlike Messi, of being an example not only of sports but of morals. What Nadal does has an impact on millions of people. What message does this last play send? That even the most decent people on Earth are willing to sell their souls for a few more petrodollars.
Call me old-fashioned, or old-fashioned, or superb, if you want, but if Carlos Costa called me again today to propose doing volume two of Rafa, I would answer him the same as I did to Bin Salman when he asked me six years ago to write your autobiography. No. Thank you very much, but no.
