After tennis, Rafael Nadal can look forward to spending his days in sunny Mallorca with the people and things that he loves. There's his fishing gear, which he brings to the shore to savor "the calm and tranquility, the beauty of the sea." There's his wife María Francisca, who he met in 2005, the same year he won his first French Open. And there's his one-year-old son Rafael (Jr.), who carries a miniature racket and a patrilineal frown wherever he goes. This life seems far, far away from the life he's had for more than twenty years—one that has carried the aging Nadal through punishing cycles of elite competitive tennis, and to the extreme reaches of ecstasy and despair.
But to enjoy the promise of a new life, Nadal has to be reborn, and in order to be reborn, Nadal first has to die.
