Rafael Nadal as Primal Experience

Because Rafael Nadal has been a beloved and respected icon of tennis for so many years now, part of the pantheon of the sport, it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t universally embraced at first. When he burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, tennis traditionalists — especially fans of the Swiss champion Roger Federer, who was then at the apex of his powers — were aghast at the sight of the young Nadal with his sleeveless shirts and capri pants or “clamdiggers.” The Spanish term “piratas” (pirate pants) drives the point home: Nadal looked quite the opposite of the gentlemen playing “tennis in an English garden,” as the Wimbledon motto has it. The sport’s gatekeepers regarded him as a serpent in that garden, a leopard in the temple of tennis.