If these new treatments do not work, Nadal said, then he will need to consider having what he termed major surgery - and, eventually, a “decision about what’s the next step in my future.” Play begins at the All England Club on June 27. Nadal said afterward he will try other methods of helping his foot - including, even, a way “to burn, a little bit, the nerve” - over the next week to see whether that might allow him to enter Wimbledon, where he has won two of his men’s-record 22 Grand Slam titles. “When you are playing defensive against Rafa on clay,” said Ruud, a 23-year-old Norwegian who was participating in his first major final, "he will eat you alive." 1 seed - and again on this afternoon, even while competing on a foot devoid of any feeling. Nadal is nothing if not indefatigable, just as he was in consecutive four-hour-plus victories earlier in the tournament - including against Novak Djokovic, the defending champion and No. That never-concede-a-thing attitude propelling Nadal from side to side, forward and backward, speeding to, and redirecting, balls off an opponent’s racket seemingly destined to be unreachable. That ability to read serves and return them with a purpose still stings. Here’s what hasn’t changed along the way to his 22 Grand Slam titles in all, another record, in addition to his between-point mannerisms and meticulous attention paid to the must-be-just-so placement of water bottles and towels: That lefty uppercut of a topspin-slathered, high-bouncing forehand still finds the mark much more frequently than it misses, confounding foes. The white capri pants that ran below his knees back in the day were long since traded in for more standard shorts Sunday’s were turquoise.
The chartreuse T-shirt he wore Sunday had sleeves, unlike his biceps-baring look of nearly two decades ago. He is the oldest champion in the history of a tournament that began in 1925, and his hair is thinning on top. And so even if Nadal, a French Open champion for the 14th time now at age 36, is in obvious ways different from Nadal, a French Open champion for the first time all the way back in 2005 at age 19, that desire to give his all, no matter what, to “find solutions" - one of his oft-used phrases - remains the same.
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