As a sports writer, Christopher Clarey covered more than a hundred Grand Slam tennis tournaments (and 15 Olympics) for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, besides authoring the acclaimed 2021 book The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer.

His latest book, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay, is the definitive volume on the definitive clay court player of all time. (As Clarey is quick to point out, however, Nadal also won eight other Grand Slam tournaments on other surfaces, along with an Olympic gold medal and virtually every other accolade the sport of tennis has to offer.) We chatted with Clarey recently about his revelatory study—and asked him to spotlight a handful of players on both the men’s and women’s side to keep a close eye on as the French Open kicks off on Sunday.

Vogue: Early in your book, you offhandedly refer to your process of putting it together as “method writing”—it’s built from this series of 20 chapters, which are focused on everything from Nadal’s biography and development to, say, beautiful excursions into the history of clay courts in Europe and the earlier champions of the French Open. We also get a technical explanation of why Nadal’s strokes made him so formidable. It’s absolute catnip—but how did you decide to do the book like this?

Christopher Clarey: I wrote a book about Federer called The Master, which came out in 2021, and while that was not written exactly chronologically, it was very much his story, with his rivals and his personal biography. When I thought about writing about Nadal—like Federer, I had covered him from his early years on the tour—I didn’t want to plow the same field creatively. And somehow the number 14, once Nadal hit it [Nadal holds an almost unbelievable 14 French Open singles titles], I said to myself, That’s going to be a number that anybody who cares about tennis is going to hold within them for a long time.

I’ve often thought about writing a book about Roland-Garros. My wife is French, my kids are French-American; I lived there many years, still have a pied-à-terre there, and I just feel so connected to that tournament, and I wanted to find a way to tell that story. And I think putting the two together…they changed each other. Rafa changed Roland-Garros, both materially and symbolically—you have the statue of him right there by the entrance now—and he changed the perception of what’s possible there, and on clay. And Roland-Garros changed Rafa: It allowed him to maximize his potential in many ways. It was, in many ways, the perfect storm and the perfect fit.