Nadal’s postmatch press conferences always begin the same way: The door beside the lectern opens, he walks in loose-limbed and with his hair disheveled and he sits down and says politely into the microphone, “Hello.” He still grapples with English, being in his daily life a speaker of Spanish and Mallorquín, which is a variant of Catalan and even harder to understand, unless you grew up on the island of Majorca. So it comes out “HHAllo,” and he takes the English questions first. I’ve seen him do this with a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie in his hand, grinning and wiping crumbs from his mouth; but after he finished beating Nalbandian, he looked dark and irritated.

“I am not happy,” he said. “I am not happy about myself in the first two sets.” It was almost 3 a.m. Nadal won the second set 7-6 in a tiebreaker and the third 6-0, and by the time everything was over, Nalbandian looked as if somebody had been hitting him with a broom all night. “I was scared about his backhand,” Nadal said. “I think I didn’t go to the match with a clear idea of how to play.”

He needed a shave, though in truth he usually looks as if he needs a shave; it’s part of the allure. When he’s pleased, he has a way of smiling with half his mouth, too, as though he’s shyly just starting to realize how good he feels; the effect is of a young Harrison Ford, but with unbelievable biceps, and the combination of on-court savagery and off-court humility has disarmed people who have followed tennis closely for decades. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy acting as natural, as a champion, as Rafael Nadal,” the French writer Philippe Bouin told me recently. Bouin has been covering tennis for 30 years for the sports paper L’Équipe. He is regarded as a sage in the tournament newsrooms, and when I first met him, at a tournament in Miami, he mused aloud about the extraordinary relationship between Nadal and Federer, each of whom regards the other as the most admirable and dangerous competitor he has ever faced.

“You must remember,” Bouin said gently, in his lovely accented English, “that in tennis you have to kill the other.” Not just play better. Sometimes the one who plays better can lose. It’s a sport of splendid cruelty, for all its decorum and finicky trappings; every winning point comes when the other guy, in front of a whole stadium of people staring directly at him, is forced by his opponent into inadequacy. He lunges for the ball but whiffs, he whacks it long, he hits it into the net, he screws up. From the stands, you sometimes see players surrender not because they don’t know how to return the shots coming at them but because the specter of this impending inadequacy has suddenly just taken over their brains. It transpires right in front of your eyes: something sags, and they go sort of limp; you can see their faces and their posture start registering get me out of here.

When he’s on — which is most of the time but not always, thereby heightening the suspense — Nadal is better than anybody at making this happen to opponents. If he does play Wimbledon these next two weeks and wins, or if he holds off and recuperates and perhaps goes on to win the U.S. Open in September, he will have earned legitimate entry into the ranks of the all-time greats — not just the world No. 1’s, in other words, but the players whose names make up those best-ever lists that are constantly being debated and rearranged by fans. Federer floats around at the top of those lists, along with a dozen or so others (Agassi, Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, Sweden’s Bjorn Borg, Australia’s Rod Laver and so on). Two of the three reasons for preparing to consider Nadal for these ranks, contentious as such propositions tend to be, are straightforward:

1. He wins on all three court surfaces on which the world’s four most important tennis tournaments are now played: the grass of Wimbledon, which Nadal won for the first time last summer; the hard acrylic composition used at the Australian Open, which Nadal won in January, and the U.S. Open, which has so far eluded him; and the soft red clay of the French Open, on which Nadal and Borg share the record of four straight titles. (On clay, in fact, Nadal is the best player who has ever lived. Until losing to Federer two years ago in Hamburg, Nadal had a streak of 81 victories on clay, a record that took on such a life of its own that people around Nadal felt a certain relief when the streak ended.) Being a three-surface champion at this level of competition is almost impossibly difficult, requiring three kinds of pacing, strategy and ball attack; it’s as if an international track star won gold in the 100 meters, the mile and the steeplechase. There are undisputed great players — Sampras, McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, for example — who never in their careers mastered the French Open’s clay.

2. He spent three whole years second in the world only to Federer, who during those years could not only outplay everybody but, in many people’s opinions, could probably have outplayed anybody who ever lived and nonetheless could not get past Nadal in Paris. Nadal was a phenomenal No. 2. His No. 2-ness was heroic and inspirational, and he was known to mention it quite cheerfully in press conferences: “I’m not the best, but I am a very good No. 2 in the world.”

3. He thrills people. Federer thrills people, too, but the Nadal thrill is so different from the Federer thrill that studying the two of them is like a gorgeous immersion course in the varieties of athletic possibility. Federer is elegant and fluid and cerebral, so that his best tennis looks effortless even when he is making shots that ought to be physically impossible. Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will. His victories and his taped-up knees and his years as a very good No. 2 in the world all resonate together, as though the rewards and the wages of individual effort had been animated in a single human being: if you hurl yourself at a particular goal furiously enough and long enough you may tear your body up in the process, but maybe you can get there after all. People have loved watching Nadal create trouble inside Federer’s head. This is how they characterize it in tennis, that Nadal makes Federer crazy, that Nadal’s refusal over and over to be beaten by Federer in Paris was the one problem that Federer — who usually has uncanny on-court telepathy about what his opponent plans for three shots hence and exactly how to wreck it — was unable to figure out.