Rafa in NY Times, "Ripped or Torn Up".

NY Time published an article about Rafa by Cynthia Gorney, "Ripped or Torn Up", and what an article it is, although I feel the need to warn you that it is a 7 page monster. But it's Rafa. So it's worth it.

This one is probably my favorite part of the whole thing:

He thrills people. Federer thrills people, too, but the Nadal thrill is so different from the Federer thrill that studying the two of them is like a gorgeous immersion course in the varieties of athletic possibility. Federer is elegant and fluid and cerebral, so that his best tennis looks effortless even when he is making shots that ought to be physically impossible. Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will. His victories and his taped-up knees and his years as a very good No. 2 in the world all resonate together, as though the rewards and the wages of individual effort had been animated in a single human being: if you hurl yourself at a particular goal furiously enough and long enough you may tear your body up in the process, but maybe you can get there after all. People have loved watching Nadal create trouble inside Federer’s head. This is how they characterize it in tennis, that Nadal makes Federer crazy, that Nadal’s refusal over and over to be beaten by Federer in Paris was the one problem that Federer — who usually has uncanny on-court telepathy about what his opponent plans for three shots hence and exactly how to wreck it — was unable to figure out.

Then Nadal finally beat Federer at Wimbledon too, and then at the Australian, where Federer famously picked up his runner-up trophy and looked at the assembled reporters and burst into tears, causing Nadal to put an arm around him, the young Spaniard at once respectful and consoling, and murmur something private into his ear. That Nadal now has the capacity to outplay Federer on multiple surfaces — that the signature game of the world’s highest-ranked tennis player is not a beautiful ballet unto victory but an imperfect, bruising, savage refusal to yield — this is why Nadal thrills people. This and the biceps. “Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer,” Philippe Bouin told me. “But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different.”

The article is also full of Rafaism quotes.

“They were saying this three years ago, that I couldn’t last,” Nadal said. “And after four years, I’m better than I ever was. This irritates me, no? I’m tired of people telling me I can’t go on playing like this. In the end this is what makes me win, lose, everything. I can’t control how I play. I want to keep getting better. And the most important part is the head.”

“I promise you, I don’t get up in the morning thinking about being No. 1. I get up in the morning thinking that I’ve got a match, and I need to try to play as well as I possibly can.”

It's intimate, it's revealing, it's Rafa. That should be enough to get you to read it.