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, moreover authoring the acclaimed 2021 ebook The Grasp: The Lengthy Run and Lovely Recreation of Roger Federer.
His newest ebook, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay, is the definitive quantity on the definitive clay courtroom participant of all time. (As Clarey is fast to level out, nonetheless, 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 examine—and requested him to highlight a handful of gamers on each the boys’s and girls’s aspect to maintain an in depth eye on because the French Open kicks off on Sunday.
Vogue: Early in your ebook, you offhandedly consult with your strategy of placing it collectively as “technique writing”—it’s constructed from this sequence of 20 chapters, that are targeted on every little thing from Nadal’s biography and improvement 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 rationalization of why Nadal’s strokes made him so formidable. It’s absolute catnip—however how did you determine to do the ebook like this?
Christopher Clarey: I wrote a ebook about Federer known as The Grasp, which got here out in 2021, and whereas that was not written precisely chronologically, it was very a lot his story, together with his rivals and his private biography. After 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 mentioned 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 usually considered writing a ebook about Roland-Garros. My spouse is French, my youngsters 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 technique to inform that story. And I feel placing the 2 collectively…they modified one another. Rafa modified Roland-Garros, each materially and symbolically—you’ve got 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.
