An Inimitable Force of One

It's odd to call someone elegant when they're so dirty, but that's what Rafael Nadal is at the French Open. He's dirty-elegant, and the impression only has partly to do with the fact that he's encrusted from hair to socks with that Sienna red dust that looks like it should be used in cave paintings. Nadal doesn't do anything pretty, or the way it's supposed to be done. He doesn't seem to care about proper biomechanics, or time-honored rules of how to strike the ball cleanly, any more than he cares whether his colors clash.

Nadal arrived to begin play at Roland Garros clad in a magenta shirt, dark blue capris, and an acid yellow headscarf, an outfit that should have been ludicrous. Instead, like the player who wore it, it was somehow gorgeous and riveting. "It's better than dress the same color every week, no?" he said.

You want to play like Nadal? Study a door that swings crazily on a broken hinge and slams shut. That's the closest equivalent to the wild, heretical action Nadal calls his forehand, which is the biggest shot in the game right now. Only a corporal genius could organize all of those contradictory motions -- the open stance and the closed racket face, the outstretched arms yet folded knees -- into such powerful strokes. And not just organize them, repeat them. In fact, Nadal might be the best athlete in the world right now. For a virtuoso combination of dexterity, reactiveness, power, consistency, stamina, smarts, and dedication, who matches him? Roger Federer? He has all the grace and classicism on his side, but his career record against Nadal is 7-13, and he's lost three of the last four Grand Slam finals. LeBron James? Maybe, but I'm not sure even LeBron could match Nadal's agile footwork.

"As much as you can hand every artistic and aesthetic accolade to Federer, Rafa Nadal has changed the way the game is played, not just on clay but anywhere," says ESPN and NBC commentator Mary Carillo. "If you want to be the greatest tennis player you can be, you watch Nadal."

The trouble is, Nadal is profoundly hard to imitate. His movements are too fluent and intuitive, especially in that deep, blood-colored sludge that is the dirt of the French Open, where he is just one victory shy of breaking Chris Evert's record of 29 consecutive match wins. He'll surely achieve it in the second round Wednesday, seeing as how he has never lost in this tournament, which he has won the last four years.

You want to try to imitate that? Go ahead, give it a shot. Start by becoming left-handed, and gripping your Babolat racket by the heel of the handle, and twirling it like a pinwheel, constantly rotating your grip. Next, pluck at your underwear. Okay. We're ready to begin.

1: Load up. Turn your shoulders perpendicular to the net, widen your stance, and flex your knees until you are practically sitting in a chair, only without the chair. 2: Engage. Plant your left leg and drop your racket, closing the face toward the ground. Now pull your body open hard, shoulders and hips swinging around like that one-hinged door. While transferring your weight in mid-air, fall slightly away from the ball, and hit out at it from off your back foot. Lash the racket up and across your torso, like an uppercut, flipping open the face, not so much striking the ball as strafing it. 3: Finish: Don't follow through. Instead, wrap your left arm up and around your chest as if you're trying to strangle yourself.

Of course, if you really want to approximate Nadal's movements, you have to perform them while sliding in the clay, timing them to the arc and bounce of the ball, without stopping too short or going to far. And it's not good enough just to hit one shot. You also have to recover, get back in position for the next shot, and do it over and over again, in 10- and 20-shot rallies.

Nadal is rewriting the instruction manuals. He's a source of endless fascination and analysis for tennis coaches, who deconstruct his strokes in slo-mo. How, they wonder, does he generate such racket speed and that dipping, bounding topspin? An analyst named John Yandell, who founded a Web site called http://tennisplayer.net, counted his revolutions per minute, and came up with a figure of 3,300 on average. That's higher than any other contemporary player by 500 to 600 revolutions.

How, they wonder, can he control that swing so consistently? Nadal is one of the most impressive punchers of the ball in tennis, but more importantly he's the greatest retriever and counterpuncher. He breaks the will of opponents by forcing them to hit one more ball than they want to. Just when they think they've struck a winner, they find they have to hit another. In his 2008 French semi against third-ranked Novak Djokovic, he won 32 of the 48 points that lasted 10 strokes or more.

Paul Annacone, the former coach of Pete Sampras, noted in a Tennis magazine analysis that the end result of Nadal's seemingly wasteful, muscled action is a natural recovery into a new stance. As he comes to a stop, "his trailing leg slides along to the ready position without sending him any farther from the center of the court." While it may seem inefficient, it isn't. "He might look rugged and violent out there," Annacone says, "but Nadal moves economically and precisely. On clay, no one does it better."

Don't miss a chance to watch Nadal at the French, but not because you can learn from him -- you probably can't. Watch him simply to appreciate such a glorious anomaly, a spontaneous wildflower of a talent. Watch him because he's probably on his way to becoming a historical great, with six career Grand Slam titles already at the age of 22, the second-youngest man to win so much so quickly, behind Bjorn Borg (whose men's record of 28 straight French Open wins Nadal just eclipsed), but who knows when the hot streak might end or how his knees and body will hold up under the punishment. Watch him particularly at the French because, as versatile as he is and capable of winning on grass and hard courts, clay is his habitat, the surface on which he is most natural. Watch him because he's the greatest player in the world at the moment, in the tournament that remains the truest test in tennis. As Carillo says, "it's still the most beautiful expression of the sport." Dirty, but beautiful.