A Curious Career by Lynn Barber Page A

property investments in Mexico and thought it would be good to have a base near there for when he retires from tennis. He also has a charitable foundation, run by his mother, which has already opened a school with three tennis courts in India.
    Anyway, back to the interview. Since I was perforce staring at his underwear, I decided to ask about it. Frankly, I’m amazed that any underwear company should want to sponsor Nadal, given that his on-court behaviour always screams, ‘My pants are killing me!’ He can’t go five minutes without fiddling with them – they seem to get stuck between his buttocks and then he has to pull them out. I remember the first time I saw him at Wimbledon thinking: Gosh he’s supposed to earn millions – you’d think he could afford some decent underwear by now. Anyway I asked whether his contract stipulated that he should wear Armani underwear on court and he said, ‘I don’t have to but I am very happy to wear Armani because their underwear is fantastic.’ But then why is he always fiddling with it? ‘That is something I am doing all my career, something that I cannot control.’ Has he ever tried to stop? ‘It is difficult for me because it bothers me all the time and I play with different underwears – long, short – but it is impossible to stop.’
    Perhaps it’s just another of those rituals that all his fans adore. Every time he comes on court, he waves at the crowd, sits down, gets his water bottles out of his bag, takes a sip from each, and then carefully lines them up so that their labels all face precisely the same way. It takes a long time and his opponent is meanwhile standing by the net, waiting for the coin toss, getting quite irritated I imagine. Eventually when Rafa has faffed and fiddled enough, he leaps to his feet and does a sort of Superman swoop across the court and starts jumping up and down in his opponent’s face while the umpire tosses his coin. Then he races to the baseline as if he is dying to start the match and his opponent has been cruelly delaying things. The fans love it. What can I say? I asked if he suffered from OCD but of course this required translation and much conferring with his PR and produced the eventual answer, ‘It is something that you start to do that is like a routine. When I do these things it means that I am focused, I am competing – it’s something I don’t NEED to do but when I do it means I am focused.’ Does he have other rituals, perhaps in the locker room, before the match? ‘I always have a cold shower.’ And any particular rituals last thing at night before he goes to sleep? ‘No. I have to have the TV or computer on, but I turn it off if I wake up. What I normally do is have dinner, do some work with Rafael my physio, then sleep.’ Gripping stuff.
    As far as I can see, Nadal has made only one (mildly) controversial remark in his life and that was in 2009 when he criticised Andre Agassi for saying in his autobiography, Open , that he had taken crystal meth while he was still on the circuit. Nadal said that tennis was a clean sport, and it was very bad of Agassi to suggest otherwise. Was it really news to him that anyone in tennis took drugs? This requires some heavy conferring with his PR but he eventually comes back: ‘Well that’s something that’s all in the past. But I was shocked. I know Agassi did a lot of good things for tennis but that book wasn’t one of those things. You didn’t feel bad when you were playing and then you feel bad five years after you retire – it’s not a moral thing. Anyway, that is something that is impossible today. We have twenty-five drugs tests a year.’ Random ones? ‘Sure. A lot of times.’
    Agassi also said in his book that he grew to hate tennis, having played it so relentlessly for so long. Nadal says that could never happen to him – he loves tennis – but he wishes the tour could be shorter. All the ATP players have to commit to playing sixteen obligatory