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Madrid - The great difference between Rafael Nadal and other Spanish tennis players lies in his mentality, in the fact that he did not settle for French Open wins and always wanted more, according to Spanish tennis legend Manolo Santana.
"This is a gentleman who will not take playing badly," said Santana.
Until three years ago, Santana was the best Spanish tennis player in history with his four Grand Slam tournament wins in the 1960s. But history changed in Wimbledon 2008, when Nadal took that position. The veteran, now aged 73, says he is not sorry about that.
"Without a doubt Rafa is the best Spanish player of all time! And I feel most proud of having been a pioneer for everything that tennis is in Spain now," he said.
Santana highlights the differences between Nadal's ambition and that of all his compatriots who won the French Open before the Majorcan. Nadal, in 2008 became the first Spaniard to win Wimbledon since Santana did in 1966, and he won it again in 2010.
"My satisfaction was huge when I saw (Sergi) Bruguera, (Juan Carlos) Ferrero, (Carlos) Moya, Albert Costa win... And (Andres) Gimeno, earlier," he said.
"And then you get a huge champion like Rafa!" Santana noted.
Nadal "could have settled for winning the French Open like his predecessors did," always contemplating defeat as they headed to Wimbledon. But he was different.
"Rafa said, 'Sooner or later I'm going to win Wimbledon.' And I told him, 'You definitely will win it'," Santana recalls.
"That year when he lost the first final to Roger (Federer) I told myself, 'He'll win it, he'll win everything'," Santana said with reference to 2006.
"He has an incredible personality and mental strength. This is a gentleman who will not take playing badly," the veteran noted.
With his win Sunday in the French Open final, Nadal got his sixth trophy in the Paris event, and the 10th Grand Slam tournament of his career. Federer currently holds the record with 16 Grand Slam titles, but Nadal is 25 and hopes to equal and surpass that mark.
Besides six French Open titles and two Wimbledon titles, Nadal has won one Australian Open and one US Open. But his defeat to Novak Djokovic this season in Miami showed that he "is human," in Santana's words.
"It was the first time I've seen him in recent years like he couldn't take it," the veteran recalled. "He was out of air, he could not take it anymore."
Santana, who watched the Paris final at the Philippe Chatrier stadium, thinks tennis has changed a lot since his time.
"It is impossible to play that way with a wooden racket. Our tennis was completely different, balls were heavier," he says.
The likes of Nadal and Federer would have a tough time adapting to the old rackets, Santana notes. When he showed Nadal his old racket, Nadal wondered how anyone could possibly have played with such a thing.
"I used a wooden Slazenger, with a much smaller frame and a huge grip. They weighed 540 grams. Now rackets weigh at most 300 grams, and that would be heavy," Santana recalls.
Adapting to the heavier rackets is too difficult for anyone who has played with their modern equivalents.
"If you have a Fiat you can adapt to a Mercedes or a Lexus. It is completely different the other way around," Santana noted.
For him, technology has taken away some of the game's charm.
"The current balls and rackets make tennis spectacular, but it no longer has the finesse it used to have," he says.
