Comrade falls as Rafter wins a battle of nerves 
FRENCH OPEN
Wednesday, June 4, 1997

By GERARD WRIGHT

Paris: It is the second week of May, in the chill of early morning Rome at the Foro Italico, the site of the Italian Open.

At 8am, Pat Rafter is a lone figure at the baseline of one of the claycourts with a bucket of tennis balls alongside him. He serves left and right, for speed, for bounce, for accuracy, perfecting the motion he had grown up with, then discarded as his professional career began to take off.

The change was suggested by his father, Jim, after the Davis Cup tie in Adelaide against the Czech Republic in April. The change has a subtle effect on the racquet speed, which has a more pronounced effect on ball speed, which becomes profound by the time it arrives at the other end of the court.

Mark Woodforde, Rafter's beaten fourth-round opponent at the French Open, believes it is the Queenslander's biggest asset in his unexpected and exhilarating charge through the Roland Garros draw.

"His placement is exceptional," Woodforde said after the match, and, more forcefully during it, after a 15-30 point late in the second set was stymied by a deep serve: "That's unbelievable. Another friggin' line."

A further example in miniature was provided after their return to centre court on Monday night after a 70-minute rain delay. Serving for the match, Rafter double-faulted on match point, then faced a break point.

The first serve curved and jumped at Woodforde's face. It was jabbed desperately and unavailingly away. The next was an ace down the middle to give Rafter his third match point, which he took to win 6-2 5-7 6-1 6-2 to reach his first grand slam quarter-final - the first Australian to do so here since Peter McNamara in 1982.

As a contest, it was high in tension and low in aggression. The pair are comrades in arms as well as teammates. Neither liked the idea of playing the other.

"I didn't really know how I was going to handle it today because I've never been to the quarter-finals of a major," Rafter said. "I really wanted to do it, desperately. I knew this was my chance."

With so much at stake, the one member of the Australian contingent who had to remain detached was Davis Cup coach Tony Roche. He watched the match away from the Rafter and Woodforde camps and studiously avoided talking to Rafter, whose serve he had devoted so much time to during separate visits to Sydney before the two Davis Cup ties.

The relationship between the pair, Davis Cup singles partners for the tie against France at White City in February, meant the usual pre-match rules of engagement had to be suspended.

"Coming into the match, an hour or two before, yeah, you don't try to make too much eye contact," Rafter said. "You have your head down, sort of paw around, get by each other."

Rafter tried to keep overt emotions in check immediately after the match but was only partially successful. There was a relieved, almost pained look on his face after the third and final match point.

He walked back to his chair and bent over his racquet bag, his face obscured by a long, dark lock of hair, and shook his head once, then buried it in a towel.

"It was hard for me to control myself," he admitted. "I was a little bit shaky. Even now, it hasn't settled in. For me to be in the quarter-finals of a grand slam, who would have ... I mean, never, never would have said that."

Hot Woodforde, Rafter turn clock back to Rocket and Co
FRENCH OPEN
Monday, June 2, 1997

By GERARD WRIGHT

"Open" tennis was not an era in the game's history the last time this happened, but an episode.

Mark Woodforde was a four-year-old growing up in the Adelaide beachside suburb of Marion. Jim and Jocelyn Rafter hadn't yet considered that nine was a nice round number for the size of the brood they would like, or, as the seventh child put it, "Mum and Dad were still thinking of me then". This was 1970, the last time anything approaching this scale of Australian tennis achievement had happened at the French Open.

This was the last time three Australians had reached the fourth round at Roland Garros. They were Dick Crealy, Marty Mulligan and the late Lew Hoad.

That wasn't a milestone then, but standard procedure. The year before, with Rod Laver on the way to his second grand slam, there were six into the fourth round.

Twenty seven years is plenty of time to become humble, to accept that the game has changed to the extent that it wasn't necessarily that anything was wrong with Australian tennis as much as the rest of the world had caught up.

It has taken that long for the combination of talent, opposition and elements to coincide as they did, simultaneously, on two of the Roland Garros show courts, as Woodforde and Pat Rafter closed the door on two of the French Open's warm favourites, 11th seed Albert Costa and sixth seed Richard Krajicek, and joined fellow Australian Mark Philippoussis in the round of 16.

Woodforde and Rafter will play each other in the fourth round, which means at least one Australian will be in a quarter-final here for the first time since 1982, when Peter McNamara lost in straight sets to Jose-Luis Clerk.

Davis Cup singles representatives on grass against France at White City in February, Rafter and Woodforde joked with each other after their wins about their match being a battle of claycourters.

It has less to do with that than the seizing of chances by players who have been through the doldrums, and realise that opportunities like this present themselves only two or three times in a career.

It is three years since Rafter beat Thomas Muster on centre court to reach the fourth round of the French Open.

Recurring injuries to his right wrist, which required two separate operations, and fraying self-belief left him anchored in no-man's-land and prepared to accept that fate.

Apart from that difficulty, he has a recurring sinus problem which causes a blockage in his left ear. Occasionally during his match on the Suzanne Lenglen show court he would blow his nose to clear the blockage. In would flood a wall of sound.

Given the choice between an immobile, listless star and an athletic challenger chasing down every drop volley, and hurling himself at every passing shot, the Parisian crowd chose the latter.

They cheered for what they were seeing. Rafter responded to what he could hear.

This was showbiz of a level he had wondered if he would ever experience again.

"There was a stage when I thought that things would stay around 50 in the rankings," he said. "When you're around that sort of ranking, not a hell of a lot happens. You don't have the big wins like that.

"There were times when I thought, yeah, I was going to make a comfortable living being 50 in the world. Now it's so exciting to get back out there and play again and to be in that situation."

Krajicek's take on all this was unavailable. He left the venue straight after his match, earning the mandatory $2,400 fine.

His national coaching director, Stan Frankl, offered the view that Krajicek had shown surprising apathy during the latter stages of the match.

Despite his status as Wimbledon champion, Krajicek, he said, prefers to be the underdog. That was never going to be the case this time - he had beaten Rafter in each of their previous five meetings, dropping only one of 11 sets.

Like Rafter, Woodforde's game plan against Costa was a secret to nobody, least of all his opponent.

"He's Woodforde, the No1 doubles player," Costa said. "He has to go to the net all the time."

Knowing is one thing, countering quite another. While Rafter's reflexes and athleticism are the hallmark of his volleying, Woodforde's is built on pure efficiency. He rarely misses a volley, nor gets many second shots coming back at him - his placement borne of years of pinpointing those shots through a crowded doubles court.

After a week of unseasonal warmth, with temperatures in the low to mid-20s, the Roland Garros courts are as fast as they've ever been, adding extra sting to serves and allowing the true baseliners, like Costa, less time to set up a passing shot at targets such as Woodforde.

A swirling wind and dust-laden air made playing conditions less comfortable. Costa, whose second-round match against Romanian Andrei Pavel had gone to five sets, never seemed able to establish the rhythm he needed to dominate his preferred war of attrition.

"Maybe he might have beaten another baseliner who stayed on the baseline and just sort of throws the ball up in the air," Woodforde said.

"Mentally, he wasn't quite there today, and that was it."

Under the French alphabet, Woodforde and Rafter have adjoining lockers in the Roland Garros dressing-rooms. They have trained together for two Davis Cup ties this year, in Sydney and Adelaide, but it would be accurate to say they are much more teammates than friends.

Rafter has won their previous few encounters, though none of those matches would have had as much at stake as this one: a chance to play for an extremely winnable grand slam quarter-final against either 30th-ranked Petr Korda, a finalist here in 1992, or Spaniard Galo Blanco, the second-lowest ranked player left in the field at 111.

Our new men by Janine Burke 31 October 1998

When Pat Rafter appears at the Australian Open in Melbourne in January he will have completed a journey among men, writes Janine Burke.

Remember Pat Rafter’s match with Alberto Berasetegui at the last Australian Open? The gruelling sets that went to even more gruelling tie-breaks? Then it was written across Rafter’s face in blood, sweat and tears - he was losing and we knew it. With his features drawn tight and his face flushed crimson, Rafter sweated buckets, his shirt clinging to his body like a wet sheet, so we registered every exertion, every gulp of air he took. By the end of the match, the audience was nearly as exhausted as he.

But Rafter has an arresting personal style, and not just as a player. It’s how he talks about himself both when he wins and when he mucks up; how he delivers, not just a dud serve or a great volley, but an image of himself. This image is not heroic - and it’s not anti-heroic, either. It is fluid and vulnerable, ambivalent and intense. Perhaps it’s why the American media have come to adore him. He provides a model of success that is unsure, than constantly queries itself and which is unlike celebrated American models of stardom.

Rafter is neither tight-lipped in defeat nor complacent in victory. He remains cautious, circumspect and self-aware. During a match, the prospect of him losing and the recognition of his bad form can plunge him into misery. His odd, sharp face with its high geometric cheekbones and slightly irregular right eye, worthy of a Cubist collage, becomes a mask of anguish, his eyes dark with misery. In the post-match press conference where players are interrogated about their performance, Rafter replies to questions with an artless, painful honesty. There are no stock answers, no standard explanations.


When he was asked about his hopes for this year’s Us Open after winning last year’s he countered by saying, "I don’t think you’re expected to win it twice". After the 1997 US Open victory, he reflected, "I always felt like I could lose. I did. I did. I think the best way to take the stress of it is just let fate take hold." Playing the 1997 Grand Slam semi-final, Rafter’s mood was bleak. "I haven’t got much time left.... My whole game revolves around my physical ability, I guess. And once that’s gone, you know, my game is gone. I just feel my body is hurting already, so I want to try and enjoy it as long as I can."

How did Rafter feel only a short while after winning the US Open again? "It doesn’t seem like a fluke this time," he said thoughtfully.

David Tacey said in The Age recently that young boys were rejecting society’s models of manhood "for very good reason as they instinctively realised they will not make good Anzac warriors, laconic bushmen, achieving sportsmen, smart-alec larrikins or beer swilling ockers."

Yet Dr Tacey’s concern that male laconism can be a recipe for "self-imposed alienation" is rebutted, to some degree, by Rafter’s fine disregard for the rules of conventional masculine behaviour, particularly as a sportsman. While others minutely analyse his game, Rafter himself enjoys "looking like a dork" out on the court and "getting away with it". It’s not the studied nonchalance of the Australian larrikin. Rafter publicly agonises too much about his performance for that. Perhaps because Rafter has refused what he describes as "the textbook way" to be a top player, he has allowed himself a certain degree of freedom, a flexibility in how he reveals and presents himself.

Rafter grew up in the silver and lead-mining town of Mt Isa. A desert town with a tough climate and an even tougher history of industrial relations, Mount Isa is not for wimps. This is the outback - red, hot and isolated. It is the kind of outback that, as recent statistics have shown, is not kind to its young men.

Suicides by young men in country Australia have risen alarmingly this decade. In a town like Mount Isa - in Australian society in general - there are not so many choices to make about what kind of man to be. Endurance and stoicism are regarded as prime masculine virtues. When times are easy, this lack of inner latitude is not such an issue. But when the bad times arrive and create stress, friction and fear, the constricting narrowness of these roles impels men to bear their burdens in a self-imposed abyss of silence.

Yet some younger sportsmen, such as Rafter, are breaking that silence. When golfer Stuart Appleby’s wife Renay was killed in a car accident outside London’s Waterloo Station in July, Appleby chose to speak publicly about his loss a month after the event.

Watching Appleby choke back his tears on the evening news, I remember thinking that here was a danger to which grieving people were suspect: foolishly displaying their hurt and confused feelings in front of the media. Then I began to listen to what Appleby was saying.

"Option one was to dig myself into a hole and really begin to feel how deprived and unlucky and ripped off angry and how-could-it-happen-to-me-scenario. But I can’t let this consume me.....I was very, very lucky to have known her. This is stage whatever of infinity."

I found his words an astute and moving way of presenting the start of grief’s profound ordeal. I also felt grateful that Appleby had had the courage to discuss his feelings so openly.

From a childhood in an outback town and a young manhood in the hugely competitive area of international tennis, Rafter has managed to construct a self that is unguarded, emotional and responsive. Whether it is the public suffering that he undergoes on court or the disarming frankness of his interviews, Rafter indicates that defences are unnecessary. He speaks, admits and shares as willingly in the fiascos as the wins. Rafter displays a particular kind of confidence, a confidence of the heart.

When Kieren Perkins did badly in the qualifying heats of the Atlanta Olympics, the Australian media (and the Australian public) sent up some undignified howls. "Kieren Sinks!" proclaimed one newspaper headline. Another dubbed Perkins "The Titanic of the Australian Swim Team". Perkins, despondent, revealed his private perspective. "Throughout my swimming career, I’ve always wished I had a fast-forward button so I could just hit that button and get to the end of it. I wish it was all over". Of course, all was forgiven when Perkins won gold and the hype that surrounds him spluttered into life again. Our sporting heroes are not supposed to show dark and discomforting self-doubt. It doesn’t make good copy.

Perkins’s sense of himself, of who he is and how he chooses to represent himself, can be unorthodox. In a recent television commercial for milk, the camera slowly traces its way up a smooth, sinuous and presumably female body: first the long, fine hairless legs, then the slim hips. It comes as a surprise when, instead of a female breast, a male nipple is revealed and, finally, the face - Kieren Perkins. It’s an amusing play on our expectations of what a male and female body should look like. Perkins reverses these conventions by resembling, for most of the commercial, a desirable young woman. In doing so, he combines virility with humour and strength with grace.

The third youngest of nine children, Rafter began playing tennis with his father and three older brothers. It was a big, loving family where the emotions were valued. But the support he received from his family was tempered by a need for solitude, creating a model for independence and self-reliance. When he was 14, Rafter left the Sunshine Coast property his parents had moved to and took himself to tennis school in Brisbane. Two years later, his mother and youngest siblings followed.

"Being from a large family, you have lots of brothers and sisters, you (have to) find out if they’re ok. You don’t think for yourself." It means that, when he’s on tour, Rafter chooses not to be "doing things for other people. I just want to be by myself" But his introspection doesn’t mean he is reserved when it comes to responding to his fears about upcoming matches. In fact, Rafter tends to think aloud in public, perhaps as a means of deflecting his anxieties. It makes him seem, at times, engrossed with a bracing form of self-scrutiny that comes close to flagellation. In a world of superstars and superegos, Rafter is singularly without illusions. Of Pete Sampras, Rafter said last year, "He’s just too good. I don’t know what I have to do to beat him. Hit him on the head when we change sides of the court. I guess". Rating his chances at Wimbledon earlier this year, Rafter mused, "If I were a betting man, I would put money on Pete Sampras".

Rafter’s dismal eyes, when play goes badly, reveal a man who is familiar with the black swamps of self doubt. He does not attempt to hide his wounds and by doing so, he suggests that failure is not such a shameful and unmanly condition. It is an attitude that punctures the glossy, worshipful prose written about Rafter with a frank and salty reality. There is a dark side to Rafter that is curiously engaging, that makes him more complex, human and real. I’m not suggesting that other sportsmen lack this dimension but that Rafter is adept at exposing it in himself.

Discussing his failures implies that he takes on the responsibility of losing and equally, articulates just what that means. He doesn’t hide how awful he feels. He talks about it. Before his match with Berasetegui in Melboure, Rafter, instead of resting, attended a hyped-up media event at a department store where he met fans and signed autographs. "It was a mistake," Rafter admitted miserably, the day after his loss. "I shouldn’t have done it".

It isn’t hard to be a winner. You only have to stand there and smile. The Australian tradition of the brave loser is one we are quite familiar with from our ill-starred explorers to the idealistic soldiers at Gallipoli. Our self-depreciating humour is designed to take the mickey out of the windbag, the pompous proselytiser, the hidebound official. But what if a man is grieving, bewildered and sad? What is the language for that? Anger can supply only self-defeating gestures as Appleby pointed out.

I wonder if these young men provide strategies for a new alignment between "failure" and "success" where revealing their feelings about loss becomes a profit in spirit, an advance in emotion, a triumph of the heart and where a traditionally masculine method of dealing with loss is renewed by an openness that is fluid, responsive and traditionally "feminine".

 

DAVIS CUP
Rafter will be what keeps Aussies afloat

by Bob Duffy, Globe Staff, 07/09/99

He'd told them so. A month ago, when some nobody named Albert Costa had dumped him out of the first round of the 1997 Australian Open - his national championship, for goodness' sake - Patrick Rafter had dolefully sought out his Davis Cup coach, Tony Roche, and captain, John Newcombe, to inform them he was through as a viable tennis force.

His ranking had nosedived 41 places, from 21st to 62d, in the past two years, and now had come the ultimate ignominy. ''I don't have the ability to be a top 20 player,'' he'd moaned to Roche and Newcombe.

This had been news to them. They'd looked at him as if he were bloody crazy. ''You're [expletive] kidding me,'' Newcombe had said.

Well, what did they think now? Here he was in a real mess, two sets down to France's Cedric Pioline in their opening Davis Cup singles match, disgracing himself in his homeland yet again, just as he knew he would.

But what was this? Suddenly, his serves started clicking. His relentless rushes to the net began yielding points. He grabbed a set, then two, and before he realized it, he'd somehow won the match, 6-4 in the fifth.

On the sidelines, Newcombe and Roche looked at one another and smiled wryly.

They'd told him so.

A charitable sort

He couldn't wait to tell him. Newcombe was standing at center court in Flushing Meadow, preparing to interview the 1997 US Open champion for Australian television on this September evening, and as they cut away to a commercial before the first question, the champion relayed a breathless bulletin to Newcombe.

''I want to give all my prize money to charity,'' Rafter said, the first words out of his mouth since he'd beaten Greg Rusedski for the title. ''The whole $650,000 to the Starlight Foundation.''

Newcombe, a board member of the organization that grants wishes to chronically ill children, again looked at Rafter as if he'd gone bonkers.

''That's a little much,'' he said.

Oh, all right. Rafter reluctantly agreed to compromise. By the time they came back on the air, he and Newcombe had settled on a $300,000 donation.

A regular guy

Through it all, through the wrenching self-doubts and the rapturous triumphs, including a second straight US crown last September and the No. 2 world ranking, one thing about Rafter has remained constant.

His samurai hairdo notwithstanding, he just wants to be a regular bloke.

He is a delightful anachronism, spiritual descendant of those swashbuckling Aussies in the glory days of the '50s through the early '70s - Newcombe and Roche and Rod Laver and Fred Stolle and Roy Emerson - who'd try to kill you on the court, then insist that you join them for a Foster's, mate.

''We've had some pretty good celebration parties,'' laughs Newcombe, who will call upon Rafter in singles when Australia faces the United States in a Davis Cup quarterfinal at Longwood July 16-18. ''Pat isn't like some of the elite players. He hangs out with guys ranked 200th, 250th, because they're his pals. He doesn't care if they're top players.''

It's no accident. Newcombe realizes that it's not natural for tennis stars to remain natural, and he applauds Rafter's efforts along those lines.

''He keeps a laid-back attitude,'' says Newcombe. ''He's really trying hard to make sure it all doesn't change him as a person, that he's going to come out of this in the end not changed in character or personality.''

Rafter, 26, is humbled by the mere mention of his name in any context with the vintage Aussies.

''Having the role models and a tradition like the Aussies had, you know, it's such a great thing to look up to,'' he says. ''They were big icons back in Australia. They went out there and they tried their best, but at the end of the day, they are regular people and they realized that all we're doing is playing a sport and we shouldn't be looked at any differently than just that.''

Playing for his country is one way Rafter expresses his camaraderie. It's a given on his personal calendar. Each October, when he maps out the next year's activities, he has two priorities: the Grand Slam events and the Davis Cup.

''The Cup has been good for Pat,'' says Newcombe, ''and Pat has been good for the Cup.''

That's not surprising. He's always been a team player. He really didn't have a choice.

Family of influence

Jim Rafter owns a string of fish shops, a fortuitous enterprise, because he needed much of the inventory just to feed his family. He and his wife, Jocelyn, raised six boys and three girls in Mount Isa, Queensland, the Australian outback. Solidarity and cooperation were essential for survival to Patrick, the fourth-youngest son and third-youngest child.

''Think about it,'' says Newcombe. ''A family that size, you've got to learn how to get along.''

As a matter of fact, it's the largest brood to produce an ATP player, and its influence on Patrick is still evident.

He acquired his charitable inclination from watching Jim, by no means a rich man, put money in the poor box at church each Sunday and hearing his father's gospel that one should feel obligated to help those less fortunate.

Jim also taught him to play tennis at the age of 5, bringing him along to the courts with the three older boys.

Pat was something of a late bloomer by tennis standards, beating the bushes of the Challenger circuit through his teens and not making an impact among the big boys until age 22, when he won his first ATP singles and doubles titles.

When he got a bit full of himself, his family put a quick end to it.

''I started becoming a little bit affected by it,'' he says, ''and they pulled me back very quickly. It's a bit difficult when people always want attention and things to put things in perspective, because all you want to be is just a normal person, so [they've helped].''

There wasn't much to swell his head, just his ranking, in the next two years until the turnaround match against Pioline. Its lasting significance was that it illustrated Roche and Newcombe's staunch belief in him.

''It's probably nice having Tony and me around,'' says Newcombe, ''because he knows we're not there to be seen, we're there for the right reasons.''

Never was that more evident than in the tie against France.

''It wasn't just coming back and winning that match,'' says Rafter, ''it was also these guys having the faith in me to go out and do the job, which made me feel really good within myself. I hadn't that much confidence and we went into a big tie, and that felt really good, to be one of the guys on the court playing.''

He lost his final match in that series to Arnaud Boetsch, but by then, Australia had clinched a 4-1 victory and Rafter had been galvanized.

''He found that something down there,'' says Newcombe, clutching his stomach. ''That fire in his belly.''

Now there's only one thing he's looking for.

Looking out for No. 1

As much as Rafter desires to blend in, there's an area in which he wants to stand out from the crowd. His goal is the No. 1 world ranking, which would have seemed a delusion two years ago but now is well within his grasp.

In fact, he's come close several times. A victory in the Italian Open in May would have done the trick. But he lost a four-set final to Gustavo Kuerten. At Halle, Germany, less than two weeks before Wimbledon, all he needed to do was beat No. 33 Jan Siemerink in the second round to supplant Pete Sampras atop the ATP computer list.

He lost a third-set tiebreaker, 19-17. All that effort for naught.

Thus, he arrived at Wimbledon still ranked second, which may have been a blessing in disguise since he didn't come to London as the main target. But it was clear he would have welcomed the burden.

''[The desire] is always going to be there,'' he said after his second-round victory over Jonas Bjorkman. ''You're going to go on the court with a thought that `If I win this next match, I could be No. 1' or `I will be No. 1.' I mean, that's going to be there. So I think you've got to face the fact that it is going to be there and you've got to deal with it the best way you can. I'd like to be No. 1, no doubt about it.''

Yet he willingly jeopardized that quest by continuing to play doubles with Bjorkman even after rain forced the schedule to be compressed in the second week. ''I made a commitment,'' he said simply, though he finally withdrew from the doubles - with Bjorkman's blessing - on the eve of his semifinal against Andre Agassi, with No. 1 going to the winner. An exhausted Rafter lost in straight sets.

Newcombe believes that for a while, Rafter wanted the No. 1 distinction entirely too much, that it preoccupied him as he struggled through the early part of the season for the second straight year.

He points to some other mitigating factors as well. Rafter surprised the world, especially his country, by winning the '97 Open, and when he returned to Australia - suddenly a big icon like his revered predecessors - he was smothered in demands and requests for his time, his presence at this charity dinner or that TV interview. Typically, he satisfied all of them, and as a result, Newcombe believes he was ill prepared for the start of the 1998 tour.

''Everyone wanted a piece of him,'' says Newcombe. ''I think it drained him.''

After his second Open triumph, Rafter developed a knee problem and wasn't in competitive shape when 1999 began. Once again, Davis Cup was the elixir.

''He didn't start firing until Zimbabwe in April,'' says Newcombe. ''We had 10 days to prepare, and after four days, you could see he was back.''

Still, the captain believed Rafter's mind-set was stuck on No. 1. And as always, he was eager to impart advice.

''I tell him not to get caught up in the hullabaloo about No. 1,'' says Newcombe. ''I told him just to play, `Do your best, win some Grand Slams, and stop worrying about the big picture.' I think he was much better off being seeded No. 2 [at Wimbledon] because he didn't need the added pressure.''

Then Newcombe proceeds to supply some. He's already projected the career track for Rafter.

''I think he'll win a Wimbledon, an Australian, maybe another US Open,'' says Newcombe. ''I think that's his maximum - five Grand Slams - because remember, he didn't win his first until relatively late [age 25]. I think he'll peak at the end of the year, be in and out of No. 1 for the next two years.''

Advised that Newcombe expects him to reach the top before the millennium, Rafter rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and says with mock exasperation, ''My God.''

He ought to pay attention. Newcombe has been right about him before, much to Rafter's relief.