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Roger Federer has just finished pumping plenty of air into his deflated tennis season with a rush on the indoor circuit. Now, with Federer heading off on a family vacation, it is Rafael Nadal’s turn to try to end 2011 on a high.

Nadal has not won a tournament since the French Open in June. His psyche has taken a pounding at the hands of Novak Djokovic, who has beaten him six times in six official matches this season. As he labored some more in London at the ATP World Tour Finals last week, Nadal, the game’s most relentless competitor, even volunteered that he had lost some of his passion for the game for a stretch this autumn.

But Nadal still hopped on a plane to Spain shortly after his elimination in London and resumed chasing after balls in the dirt for his country, joining his captain, Albert Costa, and his teammates on the Spanish Davis Cup team to prepare for the final against Argentina this week in Seville. Once he arrived, Nadal made it clear that he was not dragging his feet.

“I’ve had some losses that have affected me and I’m feeling the fatigue of many years of playing week in and week out,” Nadal told reporters. “Every career has higher and lower moments, mentally and physically, but I’m motivated for this final.”

Nadal has been here before in December. It was in Seville in this same converted stadium that he came of age in earnest. Nadal was just 18 during the 2004 Davis Cup final against the United States and considered the game’s brightest young talent by many an insider, but the Spanish team’s brain trust gave him the opportunity to hammer home the point to a wider audience by choosing him to play the opening match against Andy Roddick.

Nadal won in four difficult-to-forget sets, generating acute angles and enthusiasm from all sectors of the slow clay court in the Estadio Olimpico. The record crowd of more than 27,000 was hardly shy about showing its appreciation, and neither was Roddick in defeat.

“He showed a lot out there today,” Roddick said. “I tried everything, and he played very well, so it’s no secret that he has a very, very bright future.”

So it has turned out. Seven years later, he is an all-time great with 10 Grand Slam singles titles, an Olympic gold medal, three Davis Cup titles and a well-deserved reputation as a solid citizen as well as a rock-solid baseliner.

“Rafa is the most humble star I have come across in my life,” said David Ferrer, his fellow Spaniard and longtime teammate.

There have been signs of increased activism of late, however, with Nadal lobbying — thus far inconclusively — for Richard Krajicek, the former Wimbledon champion from the Netherlands, to replace Adam Helfant, the outgoing chief executive of the men’s tour. Nadal is also pushing behind the scenes for the tour to consider changing the rankings from a one-year system to a two-year system (Federer prefers the status quo to preserve tradition and upward mobility for emerging stars). Nadal has also been increasingly vocal about the need for the Davis Cup to change in order to lighten the load on the game’s top players.

Ferrer, a semifinalist in London this year, agrees with him. “Playing the Davis Cup every year wears you out, especially when the season ends in December,” Ferrer said. “I’d like to see it every two years or get rid of one round or play best-of-three-sets instead of best-of-five.”

The International Tennis Federation, which owns the Davis Cup and depends on it for revenue, has shown no inclination to conduct an overhaul.

For now, here are Ferrer and Nadal again at the end of another draining season. Some tour officials, who share Nadal’s desire for a Davis Cup format adjustment, find his continued loyalty to the event counterproductive.

But Nadal, whom the Spanish consider a national treasure, is clearly not yet prepared to pass on a home final. He has won two, in 2004 and in 2009. As a 14-year-old, he also carried the flag in Barcelona for the Spanish team during the opening ceremony at the 2000 final, when Spain won its first Davis Cup by defeating Australia.

“I think Rafa is very concentrated with lots of desire,” Costa said in a telephone interview. “He knows that this is a final that is truly complicated, and he has to give it all for it to go our way. I truly think he’ll be 100 percent and mentally on top of his game.”

Spain has not lost at home in the Davis Cup since 1999, when Gustavo Kuerten, then at the peak of his elastic powers, led Brazil to victory on Spanish clay. Nadal has never lost a Davis Cup match on clay and is 17-1 overall, with his only loss coming in his debut against the Czech Jiri Novak in 2004.

As Sevillans remember, Nadal finished that year on a much more positive note, and despite all the Djokovic-generated downbeats in 2011, the odds are still in favor of a repeat this weekend.

The International Herald Tribune