Sweet bouncing balls, thanks for nearly giving me a heart attack Rogelio. 76 76 against Jarkko Nieminen!
Anyway, so, it turns out Gilles Simon has a serious Rafa-mancrush going on. Good taste, right?
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mion_mion kindly translated an interview from a French magazine, where he squees helplessly about Rafa. Among other things:
Q : In Madrid, what did he say to you at the net?
GILLES SIMON : He said, "congratulations, you deserved it. You were very strong today."Trust me, I'm so going to remember that next time I won't feel good on court! I'll tell myself : "Rafa said I was very strong!"
( Rafa net cuddle )Peter Bodo has
an interview with Uncle Toni (I love how Toni Nadal is universally known as Uncle Toni), which casts further light on his style of tennis coaching and how he's shaped Rafa's attitude to life in general:
"For example, (Carlos) Moya is a very kind person, a good person, but he was here and when he need a car I see that he told his coach, “Phone for the driver.” When you get used to doing nothing for yourself, it’s too easy. With Rafael, I say in that situation, do it yourself. It’s better. This was my work with him.
For me, at the moment it seem that young people have not too much interest in things, because everything is too easy for them."
It seems he's really concerned to make Rafa grounded about his talent and his fame, and it seems also to have worked. In
another interview this year, he says:
“Ever since Rafa was a young child, I have told him, ‘When you lose, it is your fault, not mine. It is not the rackets, not the balls, not the wind’. It’s true. In life there are so many people who have other excuses. For me it is very bad when you have a problem and you have a bad face.”
And when Rafa cried in 2007, after losing to Roger at Wimbledon:
Toni recalls: “I looked at Rafa as he cried and I did not like it. I said, ‘You must not do that. It would be the same as me crying just because I don’t have a Jaguar motor car’. He told me it was maybe his last opportunity to win Wimbledon. I said he was the champion of Roland Garros and No 2 player in the world. I told him his life does not change because he has not won this match.”
He told Rafa he was allowed to be sad for one week. It's probably not easy to be Uncle Toni's nephew sometimes.
