Rafael Nadal hunt for a graceful and glorious exit after a change in...

After all these years, it’s clear there is one thing Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal are terrible at — quitting.

In a sport where the brain can drive success as much as the body, that quality has long helped carry Murray and Nadal to their lofty status as two of the best players to pick up a racket. Murray has come back from two sets down more than any other player. Nadal has won matches with cracked ribs and torn muscles. He endured pain-killing injections before his matches at the French Open in 2022 and left Paris on crutches after winning that tournament for a record 14th time.

As long as they have played tennis, they competed as long as they could stand upright – even sometimes when they could not. After something like a quarter of a century of so much positive reinforcement for that behavior, their brains are hard-wired to live and play only one way.

But as the 2023 season winds to a close and next year’s 11-month slog approaches, that instinct stands to lead them down a path no one wants to follow — chasing the mirage of a glorious, storybook ending that so few athletes get to experience, especially tennis players, who have to earn whatever glory they can on their own, without team-mates carrying them across the finish line. Pete Sampras got it, but only sort of.

With nothing left to prove and their legacies solidified long ago, Nadal, 37, and Murray, 36, have been giving essentially the same answer to a question they have confronted often during the past two years, as they battled ailing hips, sore feet and ankles and any number of other injuries just so they could start matches: Why?

Here is Nadal in January, after limping to a dais in excruciating pain from a hip injury he suffered during a second-round loss to Mackenzie McDonald at the Australian Open — the most recent competitive match he played.

“It’s a very simple thing: I like what I do. I like playing tennis,” the Spaniard said, his eyes glassy, his psyche shaken once more in an injury-riddled career. “It’s not that complicated to understand, no? When you like to do one thing, at the end, sacrifices always make sense because the ‘sacrifice’ word is not like this. When you do things that you like to do, at the end of the day, it’s not a sacrifice.”

And this was Murray in June at Surbiton, just outside London, when the eyes of the tennis world were on Paris but Murray was playing lower-tier events on grass, having skipped most of the clay court season to prepare for the grass of Wimbledon, where he believed he had the best chance for a deep run at a Grand Slam.

“I don’t feel it’s like I’m just trying to cling on until the end,” Murray told a scrum of journalists after his opening-round win. “I just want to play tennis because I do enjoy this as well. Like, I love it. It’s not like this is a massive chore for me. I love the training. I love competing. I love trying to improve at something and get better each day at it and get the most out of myself doing something that I love. So long as I do that for the next couple of years whilst I’m still able to, that’s really what I want.”