Here is an article that I typed out from a magazine article Radio Times, England. If your going to use it please give me credit!

BBC Radio Times 5 Live.




Ace Returner

Despite his Grand Slam, Fortune - and Shakira World no1 Rafa Nadal still goes home to mother.


There's something different this year about Rafael Nadal, which was noticeable even before his triumph at Roland Garros made him the worlds' bet tennis player again.
A period without playing forced on him by a knee injury, seems to have wrought a transformation. The changes are good news for those who want a repeat of the greatest tennis match of all time the five set epic that saw him finally grab the Wimbledon title off Roger Federer in 2008.
Although rain and fading light added extra drama, the key lay in the determination of Rafa to adapt his devastatingly successful clay -court game to grass. "it was the most epic match
I've ever played," he tells me when we meet in Madrid. "Everything that happened seemed to pile on the tension."

Rafa now loos even more like a grass player. The big muscled boy machine who walked on to the court at Roland Garros in Paris five years ago, just shy if his 19th birthday, to pummel his way to his first Grand Slam title, now seems light footed. "I weigh exactly the same," he insists, adding that he hasn't changed his game to protect his dodgy knees. But that weight seems to have
been distributed to provide a more balanced redefined body. He seems fuller and more rounded as a person, too - even if, aged 24, he still lives with his mum.

The transformation comes without the loss of some of the innocently charming attributes he has bought to the high-octane world of first-class tennis. This, after all is a man who still thanks ball-boys and always stands aside so his opponent can sit down first in the break between changing ends. Rafa, Spaniards agree, is a "buen chico." In fact he's so normal that, actually, he's quite exceptional.
And this very family-centered, Spanish version of normality is an essential ingredient in his success.

What Rafa definitely hasn't managed to overcome however, is his obvious discomfort at being interviewed. Before meeting him, I watched his first ever television interview on You-Tube. A 12 Year old Rafa had just lost the final of the Spanish under 14s tournament, but was clearly destined for a future in professional tennis. Little Rafa spent most of that interview talking to his shoes, only occasionally squinting
up at the camera. Twelve years later our interview turns him into a squirming mass of limbs that stretch, bend and knot themselves together uncomfortably across the sofa while he peers continually across the sofa while he peers continually at his watch.

Rafa talks best with his racket - a record 18 ATp Masters 1000 and seven Grand Slam titles shouting his brilliance louder than words ever could. Even speaking in his native Spanish, as we do in the interview, he can hardly be described as loquacious. When I said that I expected to spend an hour with Rafa, his press man told me that keeping him talking that long would be a rare feat. He was right.
Rafa is polite, but it seems an act of kindness to let him go before the hour is up - as if by keeping him awya from a tennis court I'm robbing him of the pleasures not just of his personal playground, but of what has been his second home since the age of four.

His real home remains his mum's place in Manacor, an unremarkable small town in the island of Mallorca. "I live as I have done my whole life. Nothing has changed," he explains, "For me, it is important to live surrounded by my family. It makes me happy." This is where he scurries back to between tournaments. "Every time I lose, or if there is a tournament that I don't play, that is where I go," he says.I tell him  that this might cause surprise in Britain - that a 24 year old who has earned nearly 30 million might be expected to find his own home. Nor, I, add, would people expect someone like that to speak to their mom, dad and sister by phone every day. "Really?"
He asks, surprised that anyone would consider wealth or age to be reasons for abandoning the warmth of a family.

Even his coach, his family's brother Toni, comes from the intimate family circle that tennis stardom cannot breach. "he is a special person in my life," he says. "Without him there is no way I would be where I am today,"
When Rafa was younger, he believed, Toni possessed magic powers. His uncle promised that if a match went badly, he would make it rain and end the game. Rafa believed him, and even begged him to do the opposite, by stopping the rain that threatened to spoil a match he was winning.

Nadal, then, likes to win - but, most of all he likes to play. What he hates is having to walk off the court limping with an injury, as be was forced to do earlier this year at the Australian Open during his quarter-final match against Andy Murray. Losing is just a natural consequence of competing. Being injured, however, is being cheated from playing. The narrow line between winning tournaments and not winning them, he said, has as much to do with the head and heart as with the body. Victories this season in ROme, MonteCarlo, Madrid and Paris have proved that Rafa's head is back in place. "Now I've won some important titles again my confidence has grown," he says.

Beating Federer in Madrid, and then going on to snatch back the number one spot, has revived the defining rivalry of modern tennis - with Wimbledon 2010 billed as the next great showdown. "To have a player as complete as Roger always in front of you, is a stimulus to keep on improving day after day," says Rafa. "We both give it all on the court, but once you are off the court it is all over. It is a game, and that is all. There are things in life that ar more important. We are both normal people and I have always got on brilliantly with Roger."

Still, life at the top does  throw up some interesting experiences. He recently starred in a music video with Hips Don't Lie singer Shakira, in which she plays a gypsy intent on seducing a bare-chested Rafa.
The video is, depending on how you look at it, either sexy, excruciatingly embaressing or rather sweet. Close examination reveals them both trying hard to control giggles. "There were a few scenes that were difficult, especially for me, as I am not used to that sort of thing." he admits. "It was good though - a way to get to know another world, apart from being with a fantastic girl like Shakira. All I can do is thank her,"

Now I know why the world almost everyone I spoke to on the circuit used to describe Rafa was "gentlemen". Even in Spain, where a dozen scurrilous television program's and half-a-dozen gossip magazines vie with oen another to speculate on the love lives of the rich, famous and almost famous, Nadal's normality gives them no room for manoeuvre. He even goes out with one of his sister's friends.

The trouble with winning tournaments, however, is that often there's no time between the one you've won and the next one to go home, True form, after Nadal won at Roland Garros earlier this month, he appeared on a training court in Queen's, in London less than 24 hours later. And then of course, after Queen's it's Wimbledon.

Centre Court is, he says, the most special place in the world and the omnly place, during that epic 2008 match, where he truly lost his nerve. "It was during the tie-break in the fourth set," he says. "It just seemed to run out of air." He went on to win the match, nonetheless.
Rafa is five years younger than Federer and, if the knees hold out, may eventually become even more of a legend that the Swiss player.
By then he might even had moved away from his mum. He would never go far, however. Rafa Nadal will always be the Baleares homeboy first, and the tennis superstar second.