Nadal has played tennis left-handed since he was 11, but he uses his right hand to sign autographs, wave, play golf, turn on video games and react fast to most things that require a hand. “Watch,” he said to me in Spanish one afternoon this spring, nodding toward his publicity man, Benito Perez-Barbadillo, who was lounging around nearby. “Benito! Throw something at me.” Perez-Barbadillo tossed his cellphone. Nadal’s right arm jerked up and grabbed the phone out of the air, and he smiled and shrugged. “Whatever involves feeling, I do with the right.” The word he used was sensibilidad, which means many kinds of feeling, literal and perceptual and emotional, and the assertion that Nadal does everything of sensibilidad right-handed seemed sort of preposterous, given what tennis requires of the hand that is holding the racket. Hitting a tennis ball in elite competition is like a cross between boxing and pitching a baseball, situationally complicated like either but executed at much faster speed and requiring split-second calculations about many more variables: how hard; how high; angle of racket head; wind speed; court surface; how much ball spin; what kind of ball spin (top, side or back?); where exactly to aim within an area 39 feet long by 27 feet wide; opponent’s weaknesses, state of mind, footing stance and location not at this exact instant but in the time it will take for the ball to cross the net, etc. Sensibilidad of the left hand, I wondered — surely Nadal possesses that when he holds a tennis racket? “That’s the only thing with the left,” he said. “Well, I’m ambidextrous when I eat. But playing tennis right-handed — I can’t do it."