How much do you have to suffer to be a great athlete? Do you have to suffer like Johnny Unitas, the great quarterback of the 1960s, who was unable to lift a fork with his right arm after he retired? Do you have to suffer like Tiger Woods, whose otherworldly drives destroyed his body, resulting in seven back surgeries, five knee surgeries, and two ankle surgeries? Do you have to suffer like Larry Bird, who played basketball with such chronic back and leg pain that when he was taken out of a game to rest, he had to lie on the floor because it hurt too much to sit in a chair?
Or do you have to suffer like the Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal, for whom pain was a constant companion throughout a professional career that began when he was 15 and ended a year and a half ago, at the age of 37?
During the course of that career Nadal won 22 Grand Slams, the second most of any player in history, and was ranked in the top 10 for 912 consecutive weeks—that’s 18 years straight, an astonishing feat. Along with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, Nadal was one of the “Big Three” who dominated tennis for most of this century. He played in a handful of the greatest matches ever played. He won the French Open 14 times, a record that is unlikely to ever be broken.
He had, in other words, a career like few others.
Nadal was relentless on the court and a gentleman off it, and we fans loved him for both those qualities. What we didn’t see—because he tried to hide it from us—was how much suffering he endured to play at that level, and for that many years. And in Rafa, the new four-part Netflix documentary, it is his threshold for pain—his belief that suffering was required for him to achieve greatness—that writer and director Zach Heinzerling was most interested in exploring. To Heinzerling, the question wasn’t only why Nadal was willing to endure it but also: Was it worth it in the end?
