Rafael Nadal

Lead:

It would have been entirely logical if Rafael Nadal had grown up to be a precocious soccer star. As a child, he was a promising striker, and soccer remains the sport of the masses in Spain and on Nadal's home island of Majorca.

He also had an excellent role model in the family, his uncle Miguel Angel Nadal, a fine defender with an imposing physique; he was a fixture on the Spanish national soccer team and had a long, successful club career before retiring this year.

But at age 12, Rafael Nadal chose a different game, and tennis will never be the same because of it.


This lead is obviously multi-paragraph. I don't know if it fits into the categories discussed in class because I wasn't in class. But I do think that it was written very well. It really conveys a point across to the reader that Nadal had a different path in life, so maybe he chose the sport for a reason. It intrigues the reader and makes, me at least, want to read more.

The main point of the story is talking about how Nadal is a budding tennis star and prospects for what he will be doing in the world of mens tennis in the future.

Nut graph:

He has yet to match the early work of prodigies like Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander, Boris Becker, Michael Chang or Pete Sampras, who all won Grand Slam singles titles as teenagers. But at 18, Nadal is already making a habit of winning tournaments, and when the French Open begins May 23 at Roland Garros stadium in Paris, he will be on the very short list of favorites - if he can stay healthy this time.

The writer does a very good use of describing scenes:

Example taken directly from the article

But watching him whip bold shots and track down the best efforts of others is, for the moment, one of the better spectacles in sports. During a week of mourning the death of Prince Rainier III, Nadal's vitality in Monaco was an upbeat counterpoint on the red clay that best suits his slashing topspin forehand and great footwork.

This proves that obviously the writer researched his subject well, and indeed knows a thing or two about tennis.

Dialogue:
The dialogue in this story was awesome! I think the reason why it worked so well is because he made it flow with the article very nicely.

Anecdotes:
The use of little facts really relays what the write was trying to get across. This is a young tennis who has potentially a great future ahead of him.

Some anecdotes I found interesting:

(taken directly from the article)

In 2002, Nadal was just 15 when he beat the Paraguayan veteran Ramon Delgado in the opening round of the ATP event in Majorca. A year later, he was ranked in the top 50 in the world, and by 2004, he and Moya were the leaders of the Spanish Davis Cup team that defeated the United States in the final in front of record crowds in Seville.

Here is another interesting use of an anecdote and dialogue.

The only storm clouds have been injuries. The most serious was a stress fracture in his left ankle last year that kept him off the Tour for nearly three months. It also forced him to miss nearly all of the 2004 clay-court season, including the French Open.
"Of course that's been hard for me, because I had high hopes of doing well there," Nadal said. "Those are tough moments, but you have to keep working and staying positive, so when your time does come, you're prepared."

I don't know if the article really tells the reader how this person appear physically. Besides the anecdote about Nadal's injuries, the reader doesn't know much about how he is built or how he plays (just that he wins a lot). He does seem like a very humble person though.