Chapter 1: The Clay God
In 2007 and 2008, Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal on hard courts in a way that looked reproducible, but Nadal's overwhelming physical skill and mental reserves made him impossible to beat on clay.
The Djokovic-Nadal rivalry was on after the 2007 Miami quarterfinal, but there were signs that the matchup was special even earlier than that. At Roland-Garros in 2006, Djokovic and Nadal played in the quarterfinals, marking their very first meeting. Nadal was not only the defending champion, but had won the Monte-Carlo, Barcelona, and Rome tournaments leading into the 2006 Roland-Garros tournament. Despite being only 20, he was the favorite to win Roland-Garros for a second straight year, even above Federer, who was well into the peak phase of his career. Djokovic’s back seized up on him during the match, so he had to retire with Nadal leading 6-4, 6-4, but what was remarkable about this early meeting was not anything that happened tennis-wise, it was what Djokovic said afterwards.
The quotes are much less unbelievable in retrospect given what Djokovic went on to achieve, but at the time they had a huge impact. On ESPN, Brad Gilbert jokingly suggested that Nadal had beaten Djokovic so badly as to mess up his head. Here are the most notable soundbites from the famous Djokovic presser:
“I think I was in control, because I think everything was depending on me.”
“I realized today that I don't need to play anything special.”
“It was a difficult position for him. He was not in control of the match.”
“For sure, [Nadal is] the best on this surface, but he’s not unbeatable. That’s for sure.”
The veracity of some of the quotes is doubtful, since Djokovic was behind from the jump. But the quotes signaled something many didn’t understand at the time, which was Djokovic’s ability not to be cowed by an occasion or an opponent, no matter their magnitude. In 2006, Nadal had won just one Roland-Garros title of the 14 (you read that right) he would go on to assemble, but he was already such a brutal opponent that many rivals would mentally concede defeat before stepping out on court against him. The proceeding match was just a formality. Djokovic had emphatically declared that he was different, and though he would try and fail five more times over nine years before beating Nadal on the Parisian clay, he saw a path to victory against Nadal at Roland-Garros. Nadal’s mention of the match in his autobiography Rafa even gives some credibility to Djokovic’s claims: the Spaniard wrote that he was “preparing for a long afternoon’s work” after winning the first two sets, implying that he thought the match was nowhere near done. “Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for me,” Nadal wrote, “he had to pull out with an injury.”
Juan José Vallejo, the co-founder of the tennis website The Changeover and a former tennis writer for Rolling Stone, watched Djokovic for the first time during Roland-Garros in 2006 and immediately declared that he would one day be number one in the world and win all four major tournaments. “I just saw this kid fearlessly firing stuff back at Fernando Gonzalez,” Vallejo told me in a 2022 interview. “I just saw the two wings [forehand and backhand]. The ability to do so many things off two wings. It just felt like he could control the ball with ease.” Even then, as a mere 19-year-old, Djokovic brought a level of balanced tennis to the tour that most veterans couldn’t match in their dreams. “He could put a ball anywhere on the court, from anywhere on the court, off either wing,” Vallejo said. “And I thought that was just very rare.”
Djokovic continued to impress in that match against Gonzalez. Having taken a two-set lead, he found himself pegged back to two sets all, but managed to recover to win the fifth 7-5. It’s not uncommon for a youngster on the ATP Tour to blow a two-set lead—Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Lorenzo Musetti, Borna Ćorić, and Sebastian Baez have all done so in the past four years—and were all older than 19 at the time. Even Nadal fell from two sets up to Federer in the 2005 Miami final. Most players will surrender a two-set lead a few times in their career. Djokovic has only ever done it once.
“Toni and I had been talking about him and I’d been watching him in my rearview mirror, looming closer, for a while now,” wrote Nadal in Rafa with respect to their first meeting in 2006. Even before that maiden edition of the rivalry, Djokovic had established himself as a threat.
The best matches in the first phase of the Djokovic-Nadal rivalry came on clay. Nadal was a teenage prodigy, and having grown up on clay, he mastered the surface with alarming speed. He won Roland-Garros the very first time he played it in 2005, then didn’t relinquish the title until 2009. He was the gold standard on clay before his 19th birthday. Djokovic took longer to develop, but he also played on clay during his formative years. He actually wouldn’t beat Nadal on the surface until 2011, but was able to push the Spaniard enough even in his losses to cement himself as an early rival.
If you’re wondering why Djokovic couldn’t beat Nadal on clay despite having the ability to place the ball in the corners at will, it’s because Nadal was a true menace on the surface. Clay produces higher bounces than hard or grass courts, and Nadal optimized the surface’s tendencies by hitting with overwhelming amounts of topspin to produce towering bounces. It’s much more difficult to generate pace from a high contact point—players either hit the high balls and failed, or tried to time them early after the bounce and inevitably made errors. Rafa’s lefty forehand, in particular, would grind opposing players’ backhands into a pile of errors, and sported more than enough of firepower to hit winners when he chose to. The backhand could be aggressive when Rafa wanted it to be, and when he was more passive it rarely leaked errors.
Then there was his speed. Time and again, players would execute their patterns exactly the way they wanted to against Nadal on clay and his extraordinary foot speed would negate all their good work. With his forehand as a sword and his backhand as a shield in addition to his world-class speed, Nadal was an unsolvable riddle on clay. His skillset was so imposing that he could afford to use his serve—the consensus pick for the most important shot in tennis—as little more than a point-starter. Though Djokovic was capable of posing problems to Nadal, as Rafa alluded to after their 2006 Roland-Garros quarterfinal, even his exceptional timing and ability to take the ball early wasn’t a match for Nadal’s arsenal.
Their first truly great match came at Hamburg in 2008. Djokovic had just won his first major title at the Australian Open. Nadal’s dominance on clay was reaching galactic levels; the previous year, he had seen an 81-match winning streak on the surface come to an end at the hands of Roger Federer. (Naturally, he then avenged that loss in the most important match on clay of the season: the Roland-Garros final.) He had won Roland-Garros each of the past three years. But Djokovic, with his already-plentiful self-confidence bolstered by a recent major title, began the match by bludgeoning the ball. He broke Nadal’s serve immediately, consolidated, then went up love-40 with Nadal serving down 3-0. Djokovic was all over the Spaniard.
Then the tide turned. A 3-0 lead is usually sufficient to win a set, regardless of whether it’s a single or double break. Against Nadal on clay, though, it must be made a 4-0 or 5-0 lead if possible, otherwise Nadal can reverse the deficit in a matter of moments. Djokovic missed a couple regulation backhands. His early aggression had been a match for Nadal’s astonishing defense early on, but he started to make errors in a marathon 3-1 game. Though Nadal had been reacting to Djokovic’s aggression during most of the rallies, on a break point, he took the initiative and slotted a gorgeous forehand winner down the line. A few minutes later, when Djokovic forced Nadal into a netted backhand to hold for 4-3, it felt like he had been allowed a breath of air seconds before drowning, a dramatic departure from the first few games of the match.
The passage of play was a reminder that no matter who you were, you could not redline your way through a match against Nadal on clay. His defense was too stifling. Misses became inevitable—you’d favor pace over placement and bash the ball long or you’d lose the timing on the backhand down the line, and if that didn’t happen, Nadal would force his way into the match himself. He had to be beaten by being matched every step of the way. You simply had to play Nadal’s game, and somehow find a way to play it better than he did himself. Extreme patience was required, not to mention fitness. (More on that on Wednesday.) Opponents had to defend Nadal’s forehands as well as he defended theirs. It is as hard as tennis gets. And Djokovic, in 2008, wasn’t yet ready for such a complete challenge.
At 5-all in the first set of the Hamburg semifinal, they played a point that represented this dynamic. Djokovic hit a good sliding serve out wide. Nadal’s return was short and central, and Djokovic destroyed an inside-out forehand into the left corner. Most players would not have gotten the ball back; some would not have run for it. Nadal went into Energizer Bunny mode, ran it down, and landed a forehand down the line on the sideline. Djokovic bashed a crosscourt forehand into the open court, which Nadal also chased down—running across the entire baseline to do so—and cut a low backhand slice over the net. The ball was so close to the ground when Nadal made contact that his racket bumped against the clay on the follow-through. Djokovic attempted to put away the short ball, but the backspin was too tricky, the risk of Nadal getting to yet another ball too great, and he slammed it into the net. The Serb smiled and shook his head in disbelief. He could hit through Nadal at times, and he himself was very good defensively, but he couldn’t match that level of insanity, which Nadal was prepared to replicate on every point for the remainder of the match if necessary. Djokovic’s blips might have been small, but they were enough to prove decisive in the face of Nadal’s relentlessness. Nadal went on to win the next two games, winning the first set 7-5.
Djokovic managed to win the second set 6-2, putting on a phenomenal show of power tennis (just look at how many overhead smashes he successfully buries), but his level slackened slightly at the start of the third as Nadal’s rose, and he lost the decider by an identical score. It was yet more evidence that Nadal had bulletproofed his game from redlining opponents. Djokovic had hit a barrage of winners, forcing Nadal onto the back foot for an entire set, but doing so for another set was too hard. The misses would come, or Nadal would get better depth, or Nadal would start hitting winners of his own, or fatigue would set in, whichever came first. Djokovic needed a less taxing way forward. It might look less spectacular or achieve headway more slowly, but Nadal had to be matched to be beaten with any reliability, not blown away.
Not only that, but Nadal was unflappable mentally. Well aware that each set was a new opportunity, he would seldom allow the negativity from a lost set to bleed into the next one. After being outplayed by Djokovic in the second set, he passed his opponent cleanly with a crosscourt backhand to break in the first game of the decider, and immediately he had control of the match again. Djokovic’s shots strayed wide more frequently than Nadal’s, but the Spaniard was also more firmly in control of his temperament. Had the two been NASCAR drivers, Nadal’s speed would have remained steady at the highest level possible, carrying him smoothly across the finish line in first, while Djokovic’s would oscillate wildly, overrunning turns and burning rubber in his efforts to outpace his rival.
And yet, Djokovic still made his mark. Watch the final game and you can see the first traces of his match point magic. His fierce stand in that game was reminiscent of Nadal’s in the 2007 Miami quarterfinal—except instead of defending like a madman, he repeatedly yanked Nadal forward with drop shots. Though he missed a couple, he stuck admirably to the tactic, winning several more points with it than he lost. Nadal had to face four break points but, unsurprisingly given his affinity for playing well under pressure, saved them all. Having served out wide to Djokovic’s backhand all match, Nadal served a flat bullet down the middle on the second break point, and the Serb could only flail at air. On the next break point, he went back to the reliable wide serve, drew a floaty return, then sprinted like hell up to the net to slam-dunk away the smash. The next one, another missile down the T that drew a missed return. All told, Nadal saved 15 of 19 break points. When he closed out the match, it felt hard-earned but inevitable.
The exhausting semifinal would have taken a physical toll on practically anybody else, but again Nadal was impervious, having established his unparalleled endurance way back in 2005 against Guillermo Coria in a Rome final almost sadistic in its length. In the Hamburg final the following day, Federer led Nadal 5-1 in the first set and 5-2 in the second, but the Spaniard stormed back to win the first (and took the second all the way to a tiebreak). He won the third comfortably.
Nadal’s back-to-back wins over his rivals were a microcosm of his clay-court dominance. Both Djokovic and Federer had played very well, and they had nothing to show for it. After the 2008 Hamburg tournament, Nadal would have a combined 12-1 record against them on clay. Djokovic and Federer were both excellent clay-courters. They had played on the surface from a young age. They attacked patiently and defended well. Yet they had a rival in Nadal who ate them alive, time after time. At Roland-Garros in 2008, Federer and Djokovic again went deep, yet Nadal beat the latter in the semifinal and the former in the final.
In straight sets.
Thanks so much for reading The Golden Rivalry. I hope you liked this edition—it’s the best example so far of what you can expect from this project: match analysis, charting the trajectories of one or both players, and the way the rivalry unfolded from initial magic into some of the best tennis ever played. I’ll be back on Wednesday, when we’ll delve into an early Djokovic-Nadal match on clay even better than the 2008 Hamburg semifinal. Can’t wait to see you then. -Owen
This Hamburg match has echoes of their 2021 final in Rome
This Hamburg match has echoes of their 2021 final in Rome