2010 French Open men's final: Nadal def. Soderling 6-4 6-2 6-4

On match point, after two hours and nineteen minutes, Robin Soderling hit a forced backhand error into the net, ending the two-week event and handing Nadal, whom Soderling defeated last year in the fourth round, his fifth French Open title in six years. Overcome with emotion, Nadal sank to the clay, curling himself into a ball to begin his metamorphosis into the insect Gregor Samsa, who will defend the title next spring.

For the second time Nadal won the tournament without dropping a set. Only Bjorn Borg, who holds the record for French Open titles (six), has equaled that feat, once in 1975 and again in 1978. More impressive, though, Nadal conceded fewer games against Soderling in the final than he did against Lleyton Hewitt in the third round. His only competition came in the quaterfinals, against Nicolas Almagro, the dangerous Spaniard who nearly upset Nadal in the Madrid semifinals three weeks earlier.

Since the summer of 2009, when chronic knee tendinitis prevented Nadal from defending his title at Wimbledon, fans and professional cranks have speculated on the champion's health, and, specifically, warned that Nadal's aggressive, athletic style of play will lead to a premature retirement. His career, they cautioned, cannot continue under such pressures; the Majorcan's vitality will not last.

After a lackluster return to the North American hardcourt circuit in August, 2009, Nadal suffered a series of further disappointments. In Toronto, favoring his fragile knees, he overcompensated for his slower court coverage, hitting too hard from the shoulder and excessively rotating his core. As a result, he tore an abdominal muscle. Later that fall, during the US Open, he tore the muscle again, aggravating the injury with every service toss. With a weak serve and weaker movement, and riddled by self-doubt, he met the powerful, slugging Juan Martin del Potro in the semifinals, where the Argentine demolished him.

In Shanghai and Beijing, Nadal hit the nadir, dumping routine matches against second-tier opponents. In London, at the Year End Championships, he lost three consecutive round robins, including one to Soderling, and was eliminated before the semifinals. In January, 2010, as the Australian Open defending champion, he reinjured his knee in the quaterfinals, withdrawing in the third set against Andy Murray. In Indian Wells and Miami this spring, he posted equivocal results, making the semifinals in both, winning the first set in both semifinals, but ultimately losing both semifinals to players he regularly dominates. By April, at Monte Carlo, as the clay season started, Nadal wondered whether he would ever reach a final again.

He did, winning all three clay Masters events at Monte Carlo, Rome, and Madrid, against Verdasco, Ferrer, and Federer. One week after his Madrid win, Nadal found himself back in Paris, still uncertain of his abilities, worried that, as the tension increased, his confidence and ability would desert him. Facing the youngest player in the draw in the first round, he routed his opponent but looked clumsy in the process. Through the second and third rounds, his play improved, but he continued to hit short balls to the service line, afraid to go deeper, nervous about losing control of his groundstrokes. In the quaterfinals and semifinals, he began to let go, hitting farther, serving bolder, scrambling faster. When Soderling won a grueling, five-set marathon against Tomas Berdych to take his place in the final opposite Nadal, sportswriters worldwide predicted that whichever player hoisted the Coupe des Mousqetaires, he would do so only by great effort. Everyone anticipated a close match. Nadal, the undisputed best clay player of his, or any, generation, would contest the only player ever to have beaten him in Paris. A victory for one would be revenge, and for the other, vindication.

But after only two hours, well less than half the time we all had expected, Nadal lay on the court's crushed red brick, dirty and exhausted, unable to keep himself from crying. He rose to his feet, jogged to the net to congratulate his opponent, thanked the chair umpire, and then collapsed a second time, in a sort of tumble. He had won. Despite his anxiety. Despite his precarious health. Despite history. Against Soderling he played the most athletic defense of his career, sprinting corner to corner, often ten or fifteen feet behind the baseline, with his head down and his leg extended, ready to slide through the dry dirt. He ran his opponent to confusion, exasperation, and, finally, resignation. By the middle of the third set, with Nadal leading by a break, Soderling looked baffled, and very slightly amused. He was a witness to the rarest experience: when one learns to enjoy losing. He had thrown everything he had at Nadal, who only threw it back faster, harder, and smarter. What was left but to appreciate his own destruction? Later, at his press conference, when asked why he had struggled for much of the match, Soderling lowered his eyes, mumbling repeatedly, "it's tough, you know, it's tough." At least he didn't admit to delighting in his defeat.

I will remember this French Open as much for Soderling's stunning performance as for Nadal's even more stunning erasure of it. Although he got creamed in the final by a much better, much more experienced, younger talent, the Swede demonstrated a maturity and patience that we hadn't previously seen in him. From his conversational ease and relaxed pleasure, and his cool grace, we could see that Soderling, the perpetual enfant terrible, had grown up. He continues to play tennis like a spastic albatross, but his personality is quieter and his head clearer. He's a decent guy, and however ungainly his execution, he's an athlete worth respecting. And although none of this new behavior exactly cancels the last five years of his malicious bullshit, each softer, more guiling expression does add an interesting wrinkle to his public face.

Most tennis matches, even the ones that don't look close, pivot on only a clutter of points. A few bad reflexes count the difference between a win and a loss. But when he beat Federer in the quaterfinals this year, delivering as sound a thumping as he would receive from Nadal, Soderling strode like a giant, always unshakable, entirely in control. Wacthing that match, I had the feeling that Federer would never win it, no matter how long it went. Soderling owned him. It wasn't a freak upset or professional accident; Federer didn't have an "off" day. In fact, he played pretty well. But Soderling played better. You have to admire him for that. He smothered the court with his Scandinavian, total dismay, and his opponent, accustomed to Alpine cheerfulness, suffocated. No idylls. No frolicking daisies. Soderling turned that rectangle into a soggy, ancient bog. In it, after a thousand years, we will discover Federer's corpse, still preserved, stiffly aristocratic, historical with germs.

When you follow a sport closely, as I do, you come to exercise, however unintentionally, a kind of transference on the players you like. You identify them with mythical heroes or historical figures; you imbue them with moral content; you inflate their social or political or aesthetic values. Around them you grow superstitions, which evolve into religions, which then degrade into prejudices. When they lose, your heart breaks, and your universe meekly consents to be decreated. But your heart also breaks when they win. Chaos throbbing in your veins erupts, nourishes, and persists, consuming all order and sense. In its wake, you feel just as threatened and worldless as you would had they lost. Life is never comfortable when you love something.

I shared the last difficult year with Nadal, and although, I'm certain, its obstacles and uncertainties were much harder on him than they were on me, nevertheless I did hurt, and every time he took the court, win or lose, we divided his burden. Last year, when Soderling shocked us by ending Nadal's undefeated reign at Roland Garros, my life, my heart, my body stopped. It was, literally, as though a god had fallen. People, myself included, stared in disbelief at the headline, unable to process, let alone accept, what seemed to many of us a scientific impossibility. After that, nothing could be trusted. Like a million Ivan Karamazovs in miniature, we discovered that everything is permitted, and it ruined us.

When I heard that Nadal would not defend his Wimbledon title, I pretty much freaked out, stopped following professional tennis altogether--it was too painful--and abandoned any hope of enjoying the sport vicariously again at that level. At the US Open, I was lured into hope, only to have it crushed, and then remolded, by my other adopted master, Juan Martin del Potro, who routed both Nadal and Federer in back-to-back wins to capture his first Major title. The fall and winter were unthinkable. In Beijing, Nadal fell to Marin Cilic. More than once--in Shanghai and London--he lost to perennial place-holder Nikolai Davydenko. Most of us, as we watched these forgettable workmen dismantle him in match after match, surmised that Nadal's game had become obsolete. The paradigm had shifted, and the Majorcan's topspin, which is his most potent weapon, proved to be a disadvantage against the newer, taller players, who hit balls hard and flat to the corners, sending Nadal, on his failing knees, to chase after them.

Even if it lasts only a few more months, Nadal's renaissance has rescued me from a self-loathing spiral precipitated by the ugly knowledge, gleaned also from Nadal's example, that desire is merely an accident to its object. Life doesn't know what we want, and if, somehow, it did, it wouldn't care. I can't control whether Nadal wins or loses any more than I can the thoughts in my rabbit's head. And when the arbitrary basis of desire reveals itself--when we fail to get what we want, or get it, only to find that we never wanted it--we grieve for our expectations. They live their little lives and die their little deaths. That insight is as old as time. But what I'd forgotten, and what I remembered, watching my beloved, my Rafa, overwhelmed and weeping, like a child, on the ground at Roland Garros, is Ivan Karamazov's other, less publicized revelation: hell is not being able to love. People live and die, and nothing lasts, and heroes conquer and are subdued, but we must endure their vicissitudes with kind hearts, and open hands, and patient minds. Rafa, we both came through a tough year. I apologize for every match of yours I ignored, fearing its outcome; for every craven word, hoping in my cowardly way to invert fate; for every blaming thought, each one like a love refused. I remember that I love you more than I fear for your future; that I support you even if you never win another title; that we are, as I wrote of you last year, family. Last, but probably most important, I remember, as I scan your reverse forehand in slow-motion, why I follow professional tennis. There's more to the human body than mere function. Federer, like an Apollonian, carves space in perfect measures, his movement symmetrical, feline, liquid. Soderling, big drunken bird that he is, like an Aristophanes victim, burlesques his own body, turning motion into farce. And you, Rafael, like Prometheus, who defied perfection and suffered its consequence, content yourself with the gritty-human. You want bone, not alabaster, and your fingers are dirty with work. You bleed energy. No one plays as you do; only you, bowed low to the earth, as always, celebrate your body. You do not seek to transcend or mock or evade it. One day it will fail you for good, and your career will be over. But as you've reminded me, none of that matters. Today, beautiful and young, you steal fire, you shape bodies. We make art for today. No one, unless he's Melville, writes a book about how one day he will not write a book. A