Retired athletes often leave a void - some never get filled

On the ASAP Sports website there are roughly 900 transcripts of Rafael Nadal interviews dating back to April 2003.

- Rohit Brijnath

And yet an Andy Roddick interview with the Spaniard has drawn over 350,000 views on YouTube since it was posted on March 11. It lasted an entire hour but people listened. Because this is all that's left of Nadal. Words. The shots are over.

People watch out of curiosity but also to fill something everyone in sport feels. This awkward void when a beloved athlete leaves the stage. Fans feel stranded, even abandoned, and will clutch onto anything. It happens frequently in a lifetime — Michael Schumacher, Monica Seles, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sachin Tendulkar — and every retirement is like the closure of some profound, one-sided friendship.

A friend mocked Novak Djokovic's hesitant play at Indian Wells but I cautioned him. When the 24-Grand Slam Serb, whose control Nadal described as the greatest he'd seen, finally leaves, the game will feel hollower. Some things, you intuitively comprehend, you will never see again.

This sporting abyss is a strange kind of emptiness. Once on Sundays, a stern figure in red triggered a planetary anticipation. For Tiger Woods my brother stayed awake all night, but that promise of an exceptional ride no one has offered since in golf. It has been a long wait.