Rafael Nadal: The 'tough love' that shaped a 21-time Grand Slam champion

From the first ball Toni Nadal threw towards his three-year-old nephew, he could see there was something different about the kid lining up a shot on the other side of the court.

Once a top Spanish amateur player who competed in the national championships, the coach had hundreds of children come under his watchful eye at Manacor Tennis Club on his home island of Mallorca.

«When I hit the ball to Rafael, he went towards it. He didn't wait for the ball to arrive to him,» Toni tells BBC Sport.

«Normally, when I sent a ball to a small kid, he stood and waited until the ball arrived at him. But my nephew, he went looking for it. For me, this was special.»

That assessment proved to be right. Rafael Nadal was a special talent and, with Toni shaping him as a player and a person, the 35-year-old has gone on to prove it.

No player in history has won more Grand Slam men's singles titles than Nadal.

The Spaniard equalled Roger Federer's all-time record of 20 major victories at last year's French Open, with Serbia's Novak Djokovic joining them on the same number after winning Wimbledon.

On Sunday, perhaps in the most unlikely major win of his career, Nadal lifted his second Australian Open title to surpass Federer and Djokovic.

Yet, as Nadal has so often acknowledged, it is doubtful he would have achieved the same scale of success without the man known throughout the tennis world as 'Uncle Toni'.

There are many tales of Toni's tough-love tutelage. Without them, a youngster described by his sister Maribel as «a scaredy-cat» may never have transformed into the 'raging bull' we know on court as one of the most ferociously competitive athletes of his generation.

Other than the terracotta courts, you would be hard pressed to find many