As a sports activities author, Christopher Clarey lined greater than 100 Grand Slam tennis tournaments (and 15 Olympics) for the New York Instances and the Worldwide Herald Tribune, apart from authoring the acclaimed 2021 e book The Grasp: The Lengthy Run and Stunning Sport of Roger Federer.
His newest e book, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay, is the definitive quantity on the definitive clay court docket participant of all time. (As Clarey is fast to level out, nevertheless, Nadal additionally gained eight different Grand Slam tournaments on different surfaces, together with an Olympic gold medal and just about each different accolade the game of tennis has to supply.) We chatted with Clarey not too long ago about his revelatory research—and requested him to highlight a handful of gamers on each the lads’s and ladies’s aspect to maintain a detailed eye on because the French Open kicks off on Sunday.
Vogue: Early in your e book, you offhandedly seek advice from your means of placing it collectively as “methodology writing”—it’s constructed from this collection of 20 chapters, that are centered on every part from Nadal’s biography and growth to, say, lovely excursions into the historical past of clay courts in Europe and the sooner champions of the French Open. We additionally get a technical clarification of why Nadal’s strokes made him so formidable. It’s absolute catnip—however how did you determine to do the e book like this?
Christopher Clarey: I wrote a e book about Federer referred to as The Grasp, which got here out in 2021, and whereas that was not written precisely chronologically, it was very a lot his story, along with his rivals and his private biography. Once I considered writing about Nadal—like Federer, I had lined him from his early years on the tour—I didn’t need to plow the identical discipline creatively. And in some way the quantity 14, as soon as Nadal hit it [Nadal holds an almost unbelievable 14 French Open singles titles], I stated to myself, That’s going to be a quantity that anyone who cares about tennis goes to carry inside them for a very long time.
I’ve typically considered writing a e book about Roland-Garros. My spouse is French, my children are French-American; I lived there a few years, nonetheless have a pied-à-terre there, and I simply really feel so linked to that event, and I needed to discover a strategy to inform that story. And I feel placing the 2 collectively…they modified one another. Rafa modified Roland-Garros, each materially and symbolically—you may have the statue of him proper there by the doorway now—and he modified the notion of what’s attainable there, and on clay. And Roland-Garros modified Rafa: It allowed him to maximise his potential in some ways. It was, in some ways, the proper storm and the proper match.
