At some point this week, Rafael Nadal will be retiring from professional tennis.
That’s a difficult sentence for tennis fans to digest, but it’s the reality as Nadal announced previously that he plans to retire after the 2024 Davis Cup, which begins on Tuesday. If Team Spain falls to the Netherlands on Tuesday, Nadal’s career will be over. Otherwise, he could retire as late as Sunday if Spain makes it to the finals.
Whenever the moment comes, Nadal doesn’t want the Davis Cup and the tennis world to focus solely on his retirement. He wants to compete and perform well for his home country before he even thinks about retirement—that’s not his main focus this week.
“If I’m on the court I hope to control my emotions. I’m not here to retire, I’m here to help the team win,” Nadal said on Monday. “It’s my last week in a team competition and the most important thing is to help the team. Emotions will come at the end. Before and after I’ll be focused on what I have to do.”
The Davis Cup will surely have a retirement celebration planned in Nadal’s honor whenever Team Spain is out (or after they win the tournament, if that happens). Nadal isn’t against this, per se, but he isn’t focusing on that throughout the week.
It doesn’t sound like the 22-time major champion has thought a lot about his life after tennis either as he’s been dialed in to the Davis Cup. He isn’t worried about what the future holds for him, though.
“I am not worried about the next chapter in my life,” Nadal said. “I have been always happy without tennis, and I had a lot of moments in my life that I was not able to play tennis because of injuries, so I spent a lot of months doing other things.
“But at the same time always accept the challenge of an important change in my life that for everyone, when you have important changes in your life, you need to accept the process and accept that the things at the beginning gonna be a little bit, I don’t know if difficult, but different, and you need to respect the process, no? So I don’t know how the things are going to be.”
Regardless of what Nadal does next, tennis won’t be the same without him. Hopefully we get some memorable matches on the court this week from the tennis powerhouse.
