Rafael Nadal had never seemed so calm—not at the U.S. Open, not in any
Grand Slam final, perhaps not on any tennis court. With the final about
to begin, he tapped his feet in that ants-in-his-pants way of his, but
not frantically. While preparing to serve, his pre-ball-toss tics—the
tug-on-the-back-of-his-shorts thing, the tucking-the-hair-behind-his-ears thing—came off as casual, somehow.
When, in the first set, he earned break points in each of the first
three service games by his opponent, South Africa’s Kevin Anderson, and
then failed to convert even one of them, he did not so much as grimace.
Only when he was serving for the match, a match that it was
inconceivable he’d lose—he entered the Open ranked No. 1 in the world,
while Anderson was No. 32; he hadn’t lost to Anderson in four previous
meetings—only then did he grow a little flustered, as fans, tipsy and
hoarse, shouted “RAFA!” from the far heights of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s
upper tier. Still, when he closed out that last game with a backhand
volley winner, and secured the match 6–3, 6–3, 6–4, he did not fall to
the ground and cover his eyes and lay on his back, spent and overcome,
as he did when he first won the Open, in 2010, and when he won it again,
in 2013, and as he has done after each of his Grand Slam final
victories. He stolidly raised his fists to the sky, and, before you knew
it, was getting himself out of his sweaty tennis shirt and into his
fresh salmon-colored warmup for the trophy ceremony.

A couple of hours later, I asked Nadal about how relaxed he’d appeared.
He looked at me at first as though he didn’t understand what I was
talking about, and then—his head tilting, his brow furrowing, his eyes
narrowing—as if I might be insulting him. “I was not calm,” he said
emphatically. “I am not calm in a Grand Slam tournament. I was nervous.”
He went on, “The body language . . . it depends just on me. I try to do, to
have, positive body language. Even when there are opportunities missed,
I want the body language to be in a positive way. It was not a day to
have negative body language.”

Anderson, for his part, was serene, too. But then he has always been a
rather placid player on the court. He’s tall, six feet eight inches, but
too lanky to loom; and his best shot, his serve, while routinely
reaching a hundred and thirty miles per hour, is delivered with an
almost delicate ease. Nadal brought the first game of the match to
deuce, and Anderson was only able to hold as a result of three service
winners and two aces—he did not win a point that entailed his hitting a
groundstroke. But he showed no signs of stress. He was, as he’d said
before the match and would say after, happy to have made a Grand Slam
final for the first time, happy for the “experience.” When he’d won his
semifinal match, on Friday, he’d leaped into the stands to hug his
coaches, as players often do when they win a final. At thirty-one, with
a career plagued by injury, Anderson had perspective. He didn’t enter
the final with unrealistic expectations. He’d worked through a depleted
half of the men’s draw to get to a match with a man who had already won
fifteen majors. He was going to enjoy it.

This made for a strangely pleasant three sets of tennis. It was neither
loud nor long. The crowd understood that Nadal was quietly overwhelming
Anderson, but no one headed up the aisles toward home, and few people
near me in the loge were staring down at their smartphones. Anderson’s
serves kept things close enough. There were many taut deuce games.
Mostly, though, there was Nadal. He is playing some of the greatest
tennis of his career, which is saying a lot. He spoke after the match
about his undiminished desire to keep improving, and, in truth, at the
age of thirty-one, there are aspects of his game that are better than
ever. After his French Open victory, I wrote about the increased pace and accuracy of his serve; on Sunday, remarkably, he won more than eighty per cent of his
first-serve points and seventy per cent of the points on his second serve, as he mostly spun them up and away from Anderson’s backhand. Nadal, who built his career on baseline grinding, also won every point
on which he came to net: sixteen for sixteen. And, as seldom before, he
frequently employed a low, biting backhand slice that had the towering
Anderson stooping like a pensioner, providing Nadal the opportunity to
move forward. At some point during the third set, as Nadal broke
Anderson one last time and the end neared, I found myself imagining what
it might be like to watch Rafa play Roger Federer if both abandoned the
baseline and came in.

It might not be so far-fetched. The story of the men’s game in 2017 is
the renaissance of Federer and Nadal: each came back after months spent
away from the game due to injuries, and each then won two Grand Slams;
entering the season’s final stretch, Nadal’s Open win all but insures
that he will finish the year at No. 1, with Federer comfortably
ensconced at No. 2. It’s a story that the tennis world rightly loves and
does not want to see fade away. As they’ve aged, both men have taken to
shortening points. Federer already is getting to the net more and more.
And with those improved serves, slices, and volleys, Nadal seems ready
for it, too. Why shouldn’t they try serve and volleying, and chip and
charging, like it’s 1999? It would, however, be anything but calm.