RAFAEL Nadal and I don't have anything in common. I'd like to have his biceps (actually I'd like to have any biceps), his bullwhip forehand (mine sounds like a violin with a string broken), his speed (he's nearly as fast as my wife at a Marks & Spencer sale).
But what I took from Nadal, on Sunday evening, was some inspiration.
Ever had one of those sporting days when the body doesn't respond. The legs yawn when you give them a command, hand and eye have a sudden divorce, and the simplest tennis shots won't work. It's like a dizzying attack of exhausted uncoordination.
So there I was, down 2-4 to my neighbour, angry, frustrated, thinking "forget it, it's just a bad day". This was the amateur in me, the no-stomach-for-a-fight, 40-plus hopeless hacker.
The great player despises defeat and so he amputates all thought of quitting from his mind. This is what separates him from us, his will, his ability to continue. I partially understand this greatness only because I don't have it.
Nadal routinely hunts down balls I wouldn't even contemplate chasing. Of course, only when you chase balls can you sometimes get there. We see that every weekend in football. Ah, the kid's crazy, let the ball go, no way can he get to it, damn he did, jeez what a cross... GOAL.
Anyway, at 2-4 and wilting, for no reason, I wondered: What would Nadal do?
Of course, he would fight. He'd push through tiredness, past pain, over irritation into that beautiful place where effort takes us. A feeling of reward, of having tried.
So, through one deuce, two, four, six, I keep muttering to myself, "give effort", like a mantra I've just bought off an athletic holy man. I begin to feel better, more purposeful, as if I'm on a mission here, to see if I can be another person, a better competitor, just for a while. It's not perfect, some points I still serve underarm because of lethargy, but I keep feeding my brain with positivity.
Later, I tell a friend, Sharda Ugra, about this. She's India's finest sportswriter and a born-again jogger, and she understands. When her feet begin to complain on morning runs, she chides herself: "Hey, whiner, Gebrselassie won a gold medal at the Olympics running with bleeding blisters on his feet, so what the hell are you complaining about?"
Maybe we all sometimes call out for help from a distant champion in times of stress. Maybe for fleeting minutes, on a court, during a run, we can imitate them and become someone else, a better version of ourselves. Maybe it's when we understand there's a potential in us we don't explore sufficiently.
I pushed that evening, I also won, but really, at the risk of death by cliche, the victory lay in just the pushing. Sport is mental, I write that every week, but here was a demonstration of it.
Later that night, despite a hurting knee, Nadal still took Andy Murray to three sets in the Rotterdam final. He kept pushing. I wondered, when he's in pain, who does he think of?