Rafael Nadal just really loved playing tennis

What's your motivation these days? Why is tennis important to you right now? You still like tennis? I'm happy playing tennis. I like the competition. I'm happy after all my physical problems that I've had throughout my career, which have not been few, to be in the situation I'm in at the age of 33 and a half. I think this has great value for me and it gives me great personal satisfaction. Rafael Nadal is more than a tennis star. He's one of the all-time towering athletes in any sport. All explosiveness and passion on the court, and then unwavering humility off of it. It's earned him two Olympic gold medals and 22 Grand Slam singles titles. An extraordinary, and likely unrepeatable, 14 of them on Paris' red clay. For perspective, he has as many majors on one surface, the French Open of Paris, as, say, Pete Sampras has for his total career. Nadal has, in short, changed his sport forever. Now, after more than two decades on the pro circuit, countless injuries and countless comebacks, Rafael Nadal has announced that he's set to retire at age 38. I've been covering Nadal since he was 18 years old, from the beginning. In 2005, he had yet to win a major, and I went to Rome to do a story on him for Sports Illustrated. This is not because I am so prescient. This is because he had already made it so clear that he was, as the title of the story read, the real deal. In 2019, I got a long sit-down interview with him for 60 Minutes, and I'd never really spoken with him quite like that before. I was in his hometown, not at a tournament, not when he had a match the next day, not when he was thinking about slicing backhands. In that conversation, it became clear just how much love he had for his sport. You don't feel you're making sacrifices? For me, the sacrifice is when you do things that you don't like doing. I've done things that I've liked doing. Tennis players practice in different ways. Some go through the motions and say, yeah, I'm going to save my intensity for the match. That's not Rafael Nadal. We watched him practice in what amounts to tennis' off-season, as though it were like the fifth set of Wimbledon. We got a real sense of his power, his precision, his athleticism up close. It's something that doesn't fully come through on TV. One thing that is apparent on TV, his rituals. Before serving, he adjusts his shorts and touches his shoulders, his hair, his nose. At his chair, when he sits down between games, he aligns his water bottles so they're at just the precise angle. We asked him about it in 2019. He told us it's all meant to keep his head in the match. One of the Doll's legacies will likely be his rivalry with Roger Federer. They met 40 times, facing off on European clay, in hard courts oceans away, London's grass. That's where they duked it out in, for my money, the best match of the season. But this duo might be most memorable because of their genuine friendship. When I spoke with Nadal for this story five years ago, Roger Federer had 20 majors. He had 19. When he retires next month, he'll walk off the court with 22. Two more than his friend, two fewer than the remaining member of the Big Three, Novak Djokovic. Of these three, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, I think history means the least in Nadal. And in 2019, he told us he'd be at peace when he returns his last serve. He'll be ready for the end.