“Rafa”: the Destruction of a Man, and the Making of a Legend

Photograph courtesy Netflix Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.About midway through Zach Heinzerling’s new Netflix docuseries, “Rafa,” we see its subject, the legendary Mallorca-born tennis champion Rafael Nadal, receiving physical therapy before he competes in the Barcelona Open. It’s April, 2024, and Nadal, who is nearly thirty-eight—by no means old in regular-human years but positively ancient by tennis-pro standards—is about to return to the court for the first time since 2022, when a bad hip injury forced him to stop competing. As he lies on the treatment table, the Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper duet, “Shallow,” from the 2018 movie “A Star Is Born,” begins to play softly in the background, the song’s notes blending with the faint electric buzz of the physiotherapist’s massaging device. “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in / I’ll never meet the ground,” Gaga sings. “Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us / We’re far from the shallow now.” Nadal hums along, his disrobed and inert figure pushed and prodded in preparation to go out and perform, as he has done so many times before.

Watching this scene, I found my thoughts turning to the gap between these familiar lyrics and Nadal’s life, as it emerges in “Rafa.” Gaga, in the role of Ally, the titular emerging star of “A Star Is Born,” sings of her desire to free herself from the pain that others might try to inflict upon her; Nadal sees pain not as something to try to run from but, rather, as something to endure and even embrace in order to achieve success. This pain is, first and foremost, physical: almost from the beginning of his record-shattering career, Nadal has weathered a series of intense bodily ailments, from a rare and chronic foot syndrome to knee, back, and hip problems, which made his everyday life and, needless to say, his tennis playing, an exercise in near-constant anguish. But this pain, especially as the years went on, became almost a belief system. “It was a philosophy. To learn how to suffer through sport,” his mother, Ana María Parera, tells the camera at one point, a sentiment that his longtime physical therapist, Rafael Maymó, echoes: “Rafa likes to suffer, to have the feeling that he’s pushed himself to the maximum.” For Nadal, in other words, pain has always felt like weakness leaving the body, and “Rafa” shows the boons of this ideology, as well as its undeniable costs.

Heinzerling’s docuseries alternates between two parallel time lines, each proceeding chronologically. In one, told through a wealth of archival materials, we follow Nadal from 2004, when, at only eighteen, he won the prestigious Davis Cup for Spain, becoming a tennis sensation—and a national hero—overnight. This early triumph led to a long run as a world-famous icon of the sport, mastering, first, the clay court of Roland-Garros, and then, within less than half a decade, the hard courts of the U.S. and Australian Opens and the grass court of Wimbledon. (In sum, Nadal has won twenty-two Grand Slam titles during his two-decade-long career, second only to Novak Djokovic’s all-time record of twenty-four.) The second, tighter time line focusses on more recent events. After winning the French Open in 2022 at the unprecedentedly advanced age of thirty-six, Nadal had to step away from the sport because of his hip injury, and Heinzerling’s film crew joined him to document his return two years later, following him through several tournaments in the lead-up to that summer’s Roland-Garros. The journey is haunted by the spectre of a retirement that everyone on Nadal’s team—everyone, perhaps, except Nadal himself—realizes must not be far off.