SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER!
 
 
Facebook Social Button Twitter Social Button Follow Us on InstagramYouTube Social Button
NewsScoresRankingsLucky Letcord PodcastShopPro GearPickleballGear Sale


By Chris Oddo | Monday December 17, 2018

 
Rafael Nadal

Once again Rafael Nadal showed tennis why he is the game's premier pugilist in 2018, and for that he locks down our Best Fighter Popcorn Award.

Welcome to the inaugural Tennis Now 25, where we celebrate the best popcorn moments of the 2018 tennis season, and award 25 “Popcorn Awards” to honor the most breathtaking and memorable performances of 2018.

About the Awards:

The #TN25 is designed not simply to remember the best matches, comebacks or Grand Slam performances. What we aim to accomplish here is to dig deeper into the archives so that we may celebrate some of the more offbeat and difficult-to-quantify performances.

This is our first time doling out these awards, and our attempt to veer away from the typical year-end rundown is genuine in that we feel it echoes the season of giving. What we aim to give is praise and thanks to those who made the season memorable on many levels...

Surely, with this being a new process for our editorial staff, there will be a few bumps along the road. Here and there we suspect that our valued readership may find a few things to disagree with (suprise!). If that’s the case, take to social media using the hashtag #TN25 and tell us what we missed or where we could have done better.

As the players like to say after they win their titles--none of this would have been possible without you guys, and that’s why we are going to put some of the awards to a Twitter vote in December, so stay tuned for that.

But for now, we must get to the awards…


Best Fighter, ATP: Rafael Nadal

The Golden Glove Award goes to the player that absolutely fought the hardest in a match by match point by point basis in 2018.

And the winner is... Rafael Nadal

We hear the buzzword “fighter” used a lot in tennis terms, and there’s a reason for that. In a sport that many consider to be a hybrid of boxing and chess, FIGHTING MATTERS. And it matters a lot. Over the course of a tennis match, and over the course of a tennis season, players are subject to giant emotional vicissitudes that take them on a roller coaster ride of emotional angst pretty much on a weekly basis.

It’s easy to get sucked into the undertow of life on the tour and, from time to time, to come out flat in a match. Furthermore, it’s also easy from time to time to have a negative response to such a scenario. Thanks to fatigue, stress, loneliness and more there’s a constant, magnetic pull that all tennis players must process and effectively compartmentalize, and the option of throwing in the towel or taking the easy "L" is a temptation that many give in to.

But the true tennis fighter steps into the cauldron, allowing both feet to catch fire, and ceases to feel the pain. The true tennis fighter lives and breathes for the moments when all looks to be bleak, for this is his or her ultimate test and the perfect opportunity to reduce sport to an empirical matchup of will vs. will.

Who wants it more and who refuses to lose?

In 2018, Rafael Nadal was that player more than anyone else on the ATP Tour. This spring, on the clay, he performed at such a high level that he never really found himself on the brink. He was too dialed in from the start and he punished opponents early and often as he racked up titles in Monte-Carlo, Barcelona, Rome and Roland Garros. His title at Rome was a good example of the type of competitor Nadal still is in his early 30s. Down a break in the third set Nadal was being outplayed by Sascha Zverev but managed to find a way through a difficult match based on belief, gusto and experience.

But Nadal’s biggest tests in 2018 came in the second half of the season where he put forth his best Wimbledon since 2011, battling through an epic quarterfinal with Juan Martin del Potro before falling to Novak Djokovic in a thrilling semifinal, 10-8 in the fifth.

These were chances for fans to see Nadal at his bristling, furious best, pulling out all the stops against world-class competition on the game's grandest stage. It took a magical performance from Djokovic to deny Nadal the title at Wimbledon, but nobody could deny the pride he took away from Wimbledon, having given everything he could in the quest for supremacy on Wimbledon's hallowed lawns.

At the U.S. Open Nadal was again put to the test and battled through difficult (surprisingly so) contests with Karen Khachanov, Nikoloz Basilashvili and Dominic Thiem before finally falling prey to injury and retiring against Juan Martin del Potro in the semifinals.

But we mustn’t get bogged down too much in numbers and match results. When zeroing in on Nadal’s superiority as a competitor there are larger forces at work. What the Spaniard exudes on a tennis court, how he demonstrates his battle lust, and how he responds, in a spiritual sense, to adversity are what lock down this award for him.

There is something that everybody takes away from Nadal when we watch him fight: Positivity. In a sport where players, even those blessed with the most athletic prowess, are quick to give way to anger, frustration and sometimes even rage, Nadal is the master of relentless positivity in the heat of battle. His form of fight is to embrace the struggle, not to rail against it. It makes for a viscerally moving display, and this is why Nadal’s fight trumps the fight of others in contention for this award. There were many deserving fighters on the ATP side—think Djokovic, who resurrected his career and proved once again to be the best in the game, or Alex de Minaur, who burst onto the scene with a never-say-die attitude, or Del Potro, who is the epitome of a warrior, battling through career-threatening injuries for the love of the game.

But in this category, all roads lead back to Nadal, who isn’t just the most bullish competitor in the sport, he’s also the one that embodies the spirit of the fight better than anyone else.


 

Latest News