Nadal on good and evil

Nadal on good and evil

"Out!" yelled the line umpire. Nadal, employed in a strike, sends a backhand but the ball gets stuck in the net. Soderling asks that Hawk-Eye judge that. The computer shows the ball biting from the dusty line on the back of the green. Point to Soderling, decides umpire Pascal Maria. Surprised, Nadal goes to the umpire: "OK, but I hit the ball. .." Pascal Maria refuses to change her decision. Nadal repeats with sorrowed awe, like a kid who's being mistreated by his teacher: "But I hit the ball..." He looks back to the stands: uncle Toni calmly waves at him: "Vamos, Rafa. You'll still beat him".

So advantage Soderling it remains, break point. Nadal doesn't insist, his body language doesn't say anything, he just goes to serve. He sits there for a few extra seconds with an expression that shows child-like awe mixed with just a tad of scorn to the injustice he's feeling. What follows are three points during which Rafa sends missiles to Soderling, assuming, with teeth clenched, maximum risk at every blow. The northern giant is dumbfounded. Game Nadal, 3-0, after 3-6, and Rafa's high jump, who actually floats for a moment, with his legs in a split and his hands made into fists, one meter above the green.

"It was a serious error in arbitrage", stated Nadal during the press conference, after he had beat Soderling in 4 sets. He's perfectly right. According to the rule book, if a line umpire yells "out!" and the decision is corrected by himself, the umpire or the computer (as was the case here), the umpire can decide for the point to be replayed (what Nadal was asking for) if one or both players were inconvenienced by the line umpire yelling "out!" or otherwise to award the point to the player that sent the ball on the line. Nadal said, and he was telling the truth, that he hit the ball right when the line umpire yelled, and that he was inconvenienced in hitting the ball he sent in the net. On the other hand, Pascal Maria couldn't change her decision, because regulations specify that an umpire cannot change a decision at the request of a player.

"But anyone can make a mistake, and it's not always easy for an umpire to make the right decision", continued Nadal without any spite in his voice, but also without undermining the gravity of the situation. "It was a very important moment, had I have lost that game I couldn't have gotten over the arbitrage error..."

Something far beyond tennis struck me in Nadal's attitude, and I couldn't exactly realize what it was until after the game. Countless times in my 20 years of public writing and public speaking I've been unjustly insulted, unjustly accused, unjustly found guilty. Too many a times I've reacted harshly to those that have done such things to me, and entered into battles with them, consuming myself in an attempt to prove I was right. And that is fundamentally wrong, as 24 year old kid Rafa Nadal proved to me. Instead of getting in a fight with the umpire, he chose the best answer in the world: "If you don't want us to play the point again, I'll just win it. And not only this one; every single point you take from me I'll win twice, because I'll play twice as good". And he did it.

We expend enormous amounts of our energy to each impose our own justice. Why should I bother responding to those that tell me I'm a bad writer, I don't know anything, I'm stupid, evil, just an engineer, Iliescu's man, Băsescu's man, a sci-fi writer, victim of syphilis, a member of the Securitate, a member of the KGB, etc...? People that make such accusations are immune to any rational reasoning anyway. The only valid response I can give is to try to write better. To reply with a better text for each and every insult.

The Romanian TV stations are full of people trying to prove they're right and the others are the a*holes in the very serious situation we're going through. And they're not all journalists; some of them are powerful decision-makers. I wonder how things would be if when told they're doing their jobs badly, instead of bending over backwards trying to prove they're doing their jobs right, they'd actually try to do them better?

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