The Warrior: Rafael Nadal And His Kingdom Of Clay

Rafael Nadal Roland Garros
Rafael Nadal (photo: Jürgen Hasenkopf)

WASHINGTON, May 16, 2025 (by Michael Dickens)

Award-winning writer Christopher Clarey, the longtime tennis columnist and global sports correspondent for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune – covering more than one hundred Grand Slam tournaments, 15 Olympic Games, and six World Cups – has reported from more than 70 countries. He has covered Rafael Nadal on six continents – rituals and all.

So, it should come as no surprise that from the New York Times best-selling author of The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer comes an original – and intimate – biography of Rafael Nadal, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay (368 pages, published Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hatchette Book Group, Inc.), one of tennis’s most enduring champions and anointed the King of Clay for winning the French Open men’s singles title a record 14 times that won’t soon be matched.

The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay

(Book jacket photo: Antoine Couvercelle, used by permission of Grand Central Publishing.)

However, as we learn, The Warrior is not just a book about tennis and one of its enduring legends, known once for his sleeveless shirts and pirate pants. It also ties together life lessons that connect Nadal with the unique place that Roland-Garros became during his noteworthy career.

We also learn why Roland-Garros was symbolic for Clarey, too. As one of the world’s most preeminent tennis writers, who left his post at The New York Times in 2023 to channel his energies as a book author and to begin a Substack blog, “Tennis & Beyond,” Clarey, who is also fluent in both Spanish and French, brings to his book about Nadal the experience and expertise of having covered the “indomitable and inspiring force of nature from Spain” from the start to the end of his Hall of Fame-worthy career – spanning the years from 2001 to 2024 – in which Nadal won a total of 22 major titles.

There were, of course, the mind-boggling 14 he won on clay at Roland-Garros, as well as two Australian Open and four US Open crowns on hard courts, and two Wimbledon Championships trophies on grass.

By the end of his remarkable career, Nadal had re-written tennis history.

Clarey, who first covered Nadal as a 17-year-old teenager in Mallorca, Spain, takes measure of the man and his career. He drew upon more than 20 years of interviews with him on the ATP Tour, as well as with his team – including his two longtime coaches, Uncle Toni Nadal and Carlos Moya – even friends like Federico Lopez, admirers such as Iga Swiatek, and his chief rivals, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, whom together with Nadal formed “The Big Three” of men’s tennis.

It’s on the red-brick clay courts, like at Roland-Garros, which Clarey describes as the “grittiest of the game’s playgrounds” where everything came together for Nadal’s “whipping left-handed forehand stroke” and his “gladiatorial mindset.” It’s also where Nadal developed routines and rituals, like sprinting to the baseline after the coin toss and meticulously lining up his water bottles.

While The Master was based around locations and focused on Federer’s development and global outlook, according to Clarey, The Warrior goes about taking in Nadal’s full career – but it zooms in throughout on the clay and Roland-Garros, the major he will always be most associated. While it is a dual profile, in a sense, Clarey wanted “to go deep on the man and the place.”

In the opening chapter of The Warrior, Clarey writes: “To explore Nadal properly it feels like you need to follow his lead by sweating and suffering: going the extra mile, even on your off days. As I wrote this book, I was drawn, Rafa style, to rituals – early-morning walks, coffee grinding, deep breathing – to keep my mind off the finish line. There is Method acting. This is Method writing, and the more you learn about Nadal the more you don’t want it to come easily, don’t want it without problems to solve and heavy brush to clear. When riffing on Roger Federer, as I did in my book The Master, the ideal state is surely the flow state. Writing on Nadal, you feel as if you need to sense the strain, feel the burn, as you build the narrative red brick by red brick with an occasional tug of the seat of the sweatpants to keep things moving along in orderly fashion at the laptop.”

How Nadal changed tennis history by winning 14 Roland-Garros titles

As Clarey wrote early on in The Warrior: “Clay is to Nadal what water is to Michael Phelps, which helps explain one of the most impressive sports achievements of the twenty-first century.”

Yet, consider this: The French championships at Roland-Garros in Paris were 114 years old when Nadal arrived on the scene where he would he enjoy his greatest triumphs as a professional tennis player. As Clarey describes, “But Paris, even Paris, had never seen anything quite like him, and now its cosmopolitan denizens can see him whenever they like. All they need to do is peek through the front gate at Roland-Garros.”

Indeed, inside the front gate at Stade Roland-Garros, a statue of Nadal by the Spanish sculptor Jordi Díez Fernández that is constructed entirely of steel and stands 3 meters tall, 4.89 meters wide and 2 meters deep, pays tribute to the King of Clay. It was revealed on May 27, 2021 – 16 years after Nadal made his Roland-Garros main-draw debut in 2005 and clinched his very first French Open title the same year. It is now an integral part of the Roland-Garros landscape.

Not far away are the statues of the Four Musketeers – four men Nadal never met who played their best tennis nearly a century ago – Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet and René Lacoste – who laid the foundation for French tennis for generations to come, thanks to their surprising 1927 Davis Cup triumph over the United States. Each helped shape the character of Stade Roland-Garros, constructed in 1928 to host France’s first defense of the Davis Cup, and saw it turn into a charming tennis venue during their lifetimes.

Roland-Garros was symbolic for the author, too

It’s not surprising that the stories of Nadal and Stade Roland-Garros are intertwined. That’s because in addition to writing about Nadal, Clarey rhapsodizes about the Roland-Garros venue in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, where he once lived just a few blocks away for several years with his French-born wife, and saw the grounds transform and modernize as Nadal began to show his unprecedented dominance of the French championships.

“Roland-Garros was symbolic for me, a tournament that represented all the change in my personal life,” Clarey writes.

“I covered it for the first time in 1991, a week after moving to France from the United States and a few weeks before my marriage to Virginie, a Parisian whom I had met in San Diego when we were college students. It took quite a series of happenstances – what the French would call ‘un concourse de circonstances’ – for us to meet at all.

“Her English was limited. My French was embarrassingly nonexistent despite four years of studying it in high school. But we struck up a friendship and stayed in touch when she returned to France after her freshman year. When I finished my undergraduate studies, I taught tennis for a summer of Long Island and saved enough money to fund a yearlong trip on a shoestring to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia with my Williams College roommate Doug Robie.

“That was and remains one of the best decisions of my life. Nearly forty years later, I can still remember the places and faces with the kind of clarity I often lack about much more recent events. Our journey was a chance to put a liberal arts education to immediate use, an extended opportunity to experience man of these times and cultures that I had studied only from afar. …”

“Roland-Garros felt like a safe haven, a symbolic link between my more secure past and more uncertain future that represented my ability to still pay a few bills as an expatriate. What made it even closer to home was that the back gate of the stadium was only a few blocks from our tiny studio apartment in Boulogne.

“For at least two weeks a year I could walk to work, my quiet quarter abuzz, transformed into a global talking point. The locals at Wimbledon experience it each year, but it was new to me, and as I write in the International Herald Tribune, there is a certain thrill to seeing such as familiar place don a more glamorous guise. When we lived in Seville in southern Spain I would get the same feeling as the narrow, cobblestones street where we bought our groceries and newspapers became, for the brief span of an illuminated Andalusian night, a place of pilgrimage during the Holy Week processions.”

Nadal’s rituals made him great but humanized him, too

Clarey spent an entire chapter – Chapter 14, titled “The Rituals” – in which he dove into the tennis player’s famous routines.

“Most of us covering tennis were still getting to know the eighteen-year-old, and Nadal and I were sitting above the center court at the 2005 Monte Carlo Open, discussing his tic of – and there is no elegant way of putting this – adjusting his underpants by picking at the back of his shorts between points.

“Nineteen years later, as he prepared to retire, it was clear that breaking the habit was even harder than Nadal thought.

“He was still doing it.

“It’s one of those things that makes him him,” said Brad Gilbert, the veteran coach, former top 5 player, and coauthor of Winning Ugly.

“Nadal was hardly alone in relying on routine. In a pressurized profession with lots of downtime, the mind can wander, either in the twenty-five seconds between points in those ninety-second changeovers, or in the hotel room the night before that big match.

“Like Nadal, Maria Sharapova did not step on the lines when she walked back on court after a break. Goran Ivanisevic wanted the same ball for the next serve if he had just fired an ace and would go to great lengths to secure it. Ivan Lendl tugged at his eyebrows. Vera Zvonareva draped a towel over her head on changeovers, blocking out the world and trying to block out the stress. The list goes on (and on), and not just in tennis. Watch some baseball or golf.

“But Nadal was exceptionally committed to his rituals and exceptionally visible for twenty years as he piled up the victories on five continents. He and his habits became part and parcel in the public eye, from the sprint to the baseline after the coin toss to the water bottles aligned meticulously in front of his chair on the changeovers.”

Memorable passages that chronicle Nadal’s rise to fame

Throughout The Warrior, there are many memorable and enjoyable passages that chronicle Nadal’s rise to fame. Here are a few to enjoy and appreciate:

• “Toni’s true talent was not teaching his nephew about forehands and backhands. He was certainly not better at that than coaches with much stronger technical backgrounds. Toni’s gift – maybe even his genius – was providing a framework for lifelong achievement by cultivating a taste for challenges and effort and inculcating a code of behavior to go with it.

“My main goal was that Rafael would be self-sufficient,” Toni explained.

“Rafael’s often-fragile body and go-go playing style (and practice style) might not have been ideally suited to the long haul, but his philosophy was built to last. Its core principle is that Rafael draws motivation not from being better than others but from being better than Rafael. Complacency was thus not an option.

“When it comes down to it, surpassing others is not always possible but surpassing yourself, that’s the great challenge,” Toni said. “That’s what Rafael was essentially required to accept from the earliest age. He understood it and embraced it.”

• “There was not much mystery in Nadal’s approach on clay. He would push you back or force you out of your comfort zone with his spin and precision, wait for the short ball or hanging ball, and then express his inner peace by ripping it with his forehand for a winner.

“You know what’s coming, but it doesn’t help,” said Gilles Simon, as we sat on a terrace at Roland-Garros one spring day.

“To play Rafa on clay is the worst experience a tennis player can have,” Feliciano Lopez said. “First of all, because it’s 99.9 percent sure you’re losing, and second of all, because he makes you feel so vulnerable. You can lose 6-1, 6-1 without doing anything wrong.”

• “No leading tennis player has looked as intentionally at Nadal’s methods and mindset as Iga Swiatek, the young Polish women’s star whose best surface, like Nadal, is clay and who, like Nadal, rose to No. 1 on the strength of her heavy topspin forehand, explosive movement, and a focused approach to competition that resembles a full-court press. Unlike Nadal, she did not possess that relentless quality from an early age. Sensitive and intelligent, she had difficulty with her nerves, sometimes crying during matches. She told me she was often easily distracted. To demonstrate her younger self, she opened her eyes wide and rapidly twisted her head right and left.

“Suddenly my head was like a pigeon,” she said. “I was looking everywhere but where I should have been looking.”

“Nadal was her inspiration, the only player whose matches she regularly watched, and long after Swiatek had reached the top ranking and won multiple French Opens, she still had a Nadal poster and a tennis shirt signed by him on the wall of her room at her family home near Warsaw.”

What Djokovic and Federer had to say about Nadal

In an interview with Roger Federer about longevity, in which he could have easily been talking about Nadal, he said: “This is what we all love doing, and you want to prove to yourself you can do it over and over again. You can just never get enough until you hit the wall and say I’m done now.”

Though Federer and Nadal started in different places – one in Switzerland, the other in the largest of the Balearic Islands of Spain – they shared a similar headspace as their careers matured.

“It’s to prove to yourself that you can do it, and not prove it to other people,” Federer told Clarey. “That’s why for me, the rivalry with Nadal, okay, it’s interesting maybe. But in the end, I care about winning the tournaments. That for me is the bottom line, and if Nadal happens to be on the other side of the net, even better because then I can beat the main rival or make a great story on top of that. But you want to do it the best you can. It’s important you can wake up in the morning and go to bed and feel good about yourself.”

Meanwhile, Novak Djokovic heaped praise upon Nadal. “He has been the greatest rival that I ever had,” Djokovic told Clarey after facing Nadal for the final time at the Paris Olympic Games in the summer of 2024. “Matches against him on clay have frustrated me so much in my carer, but they also made me a better player, made me understand what it takes to really try to surpass him.”

Advance praise for ‘The Warrior’ has been positive

• “This insightful, wide-ranging book could serve as a model for other sports biographers. An inspired portrait of an unusually dominant athlete.”

– Kirkus Reviews

• “Though the narrative focuses on Nadal, Roland-Garros’s clay courts become a character in their own right as Clarey provides rich background on the event’s history. … It’s a meticulous recap of one of tennis’s great achievements.”

– Publishers Weekly

• “Here comes Christopher Clarey, longtime tennis journalist, with a new book ‘The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay.’ On the heels of his examination of Roger Federer, The Master, Clarey rolls up his sleeves, adjusts his water bottles and focuses on Federer’s rival.”

– Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated

• “A career relentlessly put together by Rafael Nadal has been painstakingly chronicled and analyzed by author Christopher Clarey in his new book ‘The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay.’ Chris describes the teenage Nadal he knew, his unprecedented, absurd dominance at Roland Garros, and the backlash to his success that followed in France.”

– David Law, co-host, The Tennis Podcast

 

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