YEARS ago – in keeping with his reputation as a man who didn’t mind a challenge – Rafael Nadal was asked if he was glad that fellow tennis great Novak Djokovic existed.

“No,” deadpanned the Spaniard to howls of laughter, adding. “I like challenges, but I’m not stupid.” Nadal has had two defining rivalries in his storied career: one against the incomparable Roger Federer and the other against the indefatigable Djokovic.

But while the stoush with the retired Federer was more captivating to the public – thanks to the unlikely friendship between the two and the stylistic contrast in their play – the 24-16 head-to-head record in the Spaniard’s favour suggests it was a lopsided contest.

If the results between Djokovic and Nadal are anything to go by, the Serb is the riddle the Spaniard – weaned on problemsolving tennis – hasn’t quite been able to decode in over a decade of competition.

The Serb has gone to the ends of the earth in his pursuit of Nadal, to the point where the two are now inseparable on top of the men’s tennis tree with 22 Grand Slam titles apiece. Djokovic also leads the head-to-head record by the anorexic margin of 30-29 and is the only man to beat the Spaniard twice at the French Open, a tournament he has won 14 of the 18 times he has entered it.

Yin and yang

What makes the rivalry more authentic than Federer and Nadal’s is that it exudes none of the warmth, with two very different men bound together by one thing: respect, if not tolerance, for the other’s ability.

Nadal is a clay court genius whose ultra-physical style has all but turned tennis into a contact sport, while Djokovic is an allcourt player whose grooved technique is a nod to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10 000-hour rule.

If the racquet is a blunt object in Nadal’s hand, it is a scalpel in Djokovic’s.

Other than the scarcely believable achievements and records – Djokovic has also been number one for the most weeks in history, won the Australian Open a record 10 times and accumulated the most prize money – the one thing they have in common is that they are both regarded as the toughest opponents to beat on the circuit, mentally.

At 36 (Nadal) and 35 (Djokovic), the two still play at a level they have no right to in what is a younger man’s game. This is because they are “Mentality Monsters”, to borrow from Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp.

Two stubborn hombres

The snapshot of their stubborn refusal to be beaten by anyone in general, and each other in particular, was the 2012 Australian Open final, where the two engaged in a brutal baseline war which took five hours and 53 minutes to complete, a Grand Slam record for the decider.

The only time either of them relented in that game – won by the Serb – was when they asked for chairs to sit on during the post-match ceremony.

John-Laffnie de Jager, the former SA Davis Cup player who made a name for himself on the ATP Tour doubles circuit and is now a high-performance coach, uses that final as evidence of the challenge a typical player has when facing mental giants like Nadal and Djokovic.

“The amazing thing for me about that match was the length of time they were able to keep their focus,” De Jager remembered. “Physically they were dead, so the last set was purely mental with both of them pushing past boundaries. “If they’d played anybody else that battle wouldn’t have taken as long.”

‘Not him again’

‘Not him again’ Listening to the two players talk about the arduous task of facing each other, there’s a hint that those encounters carry the kind of mental and physical bruising they don’t necessarily look forward to but find a place in the depths of their souls to front up to.

“[If I’m] being honest, it’s better to not play against one of the best players in history,” is how Nadal has summed up the Djokovic challenge in the past. “I’m not one of those stupid guys who say ‘I want to play him’.

“When I have to play him I’ll play him and do my best to win. But you prefer [playing] easier opponents than Novak.” Djokovic had similar feelings of dread about playing Nadal in a virtual chat with fellow tennis player Andy Murray in 2020: “The intensity he brings, when you see him jumping around before you walk onto the court, intimidates you. “It almost creates the challenge in your mind that ‘Oh my God, I’m going in with a gladiator’. He’s a mental and physical giant.”

De Jager describes mental toughness as “how many times you can take yourself out of your comfort zone and how that discomfort becomes your comfort zone”.

Living rent-free in mere mortals’ minds

With their exploits over the years meaning their mug shots probably elbow for room to be the face of that definition in the dictionary, spare a thought for the mere mortals who have to play against them when they’re not creating history against each other.

“In a way they influence the way an opponent is thinking,” says De Jager. “If you’re playing against Novak and you’re up two sets to one and a break you’re thinking: ‘Shit, this guy’s not playing well, when is he going to start playing well?’

“When your opponent starts thinking of you, when you walk onto the court you’re three-love up.”

While playing them is universally seen as scaling essentially the same Mount Everest, mentally, Nadal and Djokovic couldn’t have arrived at their “Mentality Monster” status more differently – their ascent a study in inverting the psychological theory of nature versus nurture.

Nature vs Nurture

Nadal is the upper-middle-class son of Sebastian, a businessman from Manacor, located on the island of Mallorca. Where his want-for-nothing upbringing could easily have dimmed his desire for greatness, he was turned into a killer by his uncle Toni, a self-taught tennis coach hell-bent on using his gentle nephew as a subject in an experiment to produce the toughest tennis player there ever was.

“Uncle Toni” took his mafia nickname a little to heart by being particularly hard on his nephew. If Nadal forgot his water bottle for a match, he played it without drinking a drop of water. If he broke a finger before a match he played (and won) it anyway. And when he did win, Toni was at pains to show him how little it meant in the greater scheme of things.

When Nadal won the Spanish under-12 title his uncle showed him a list of past winners, the goal being to emphasise that not many of those champs became professionals. Toni was also miffed when Nadal’s parents threw him a party upon his return from winning a Nike Juniors event at Sun City.

Another contributing factor to Nadal going against the grain despite his cushy upbringing was the fact that his family already boasted a professional athlete in his other uncle Miguel Angel, the former Barcelona and Spain defender nicknamed “The Beast” because of a physical style of play.

“Rafa growing up with an uncle that played professional sport, practising against the world number one in [current coach] Carlos Moya and with Uncle Toni being so strict with him embedded in him from a very young age how to be mentally strong,” says De Jager.

The mind can be bullet-proofed

In contrast, Djokovic grew up in the shadow of NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999 to pizzeria owners Srdjan and Dijana and was discovered by the same former Yugoslavia tennis player (Jelena Genčić) credited with helping find Monica Seles, his current coach Goran Ivanišević, and Iva Majoli, among others.

Where growing up in a warzone and having such an accomplished tennis coach would have been expected to make Djokovic’s understanding of the mentality required for the top seamless, it was only after he’d developed a reputation as a gifted player who bailed in matches when things got tough that he became mentally resilient.

After a doctor discovered the irony of him being intolerant to gluten, Djokovic audited everything about his game and transformed himself from mentally suspect to bulletproof. His diet, conditioning, every single shot, and even his mindfulness (he has a spiritual guru, Pepe Imaz, with whom he regularly consults) came in for scrutiny.

The result of the overhaul sees Djokovic as a celery-juice-drinking yogi who journals regularly, talks about befriending his ego and visualising his upcoming victories, and can be relied on to hit a tennis ball with metronomic accuracy for as long as it takes to win.

“Novak doesn’t want to train in gyms anymore, he wants to be outside, smell the ocean, be in fresh air and hear the birds sing,” De Jager, who is close to the Djokovic camp, says of the alternative transformation.

“Some people think it’s crazy but that what he decided to do to become the best ever and he does it every single day. Novak was getting into ice baths and freezing water at 2 am before everyone else was doing it.

“His [volatile] personality shows that he can still lose his shit, but it also shows you how hard he needs to work to keep it together. Novak learning to be mentally strong proves you can learn to be mentally strong because people don’t train mental toughness like they do the serve — but you’re not born with it.”

Same but different

Nadal’s assortment of knee, foot, hip and abdominal injuries – from which he has returned seemingly even better – have embellished the myth around his mental strength, while Djokovic’s uncanny ability to feed off a hostile crowd’s energy to fashion a win is legendary.

(It’s ludicrous that the Serb once claimed to hear his name when the whole Wimbledon centre court was chanting Roger Federer’s name, but with him, that’s somehow plausible).

Maybe the simplest way to sift through the differences in what makes Nadal and Djokovic tick is the fact that the former was practically a poster boy for COVID-19 vaccinations while the latter became known as Novaxx as the anti-vaccination “villain”. Looking at what still drives them, Nadal appears to understand the athlete’s lament that one is a long time retired, so he carries on playing in instalments between injuries.

Djokovic, whose prickly personality and passive-aggressive style of play means he’s never quite captured the hearts of tennis fans like Nadal and Federer, seems hell-bent on breaking every record to end the debate about the greatest player of all time between the three.