Nadal carries momentum into next test at Wimbledon

• Rafael Nadal captured his eighth French Open crown on Sunday
• Now he carries momentum into the next major%2C Wimbledon
• Pat Cash pegs Nadal as the favorite%2C as long as he stays healthy

PARIS — With his eighth French Open title Sunday, Rafael Nadal snuffed the debate — if there was any left — about the sport's greatest player on clay.

"It's completely 100 percent settled now," said Mats Wilander when asked to compare Nadal to his compatriot Bjorn Borg, once considered the pre-eminent clay-courter in history. Borg won six French Open titles.

"He's more perfect than Borg," Wilander said.

Nadal, 27, was not perfect Sunday, but he was plenty good, whipping forehand winners — 35 to be exact — digging balls out of the corners, and thwarting opponent David Ferrer's efforts to solve the biggest conundrum in tennis.

In drizzly conditions, Nadal overwhelmed his fellow Spaniard, who hadn't lost a set in the tournament, 6-3, 6-2, 6-3.

"Rafael, I think he's the best mentality I ever seen in my career," said Ferrer, 31, who was contesting his first Grand Slam final. "He has everything, no?"

"Five months ago nobody of my team dreamed about one comeback like this because we thought that going to be impossible," said Nadal, who returned in February from a seven-month absence for a partially torn patella tendon and inflammation in his left knee. "But here we are today, and that's really fantastic and incredible."

"Very happy, very emotional, very important victory for me," he added.

With Wimbledon two weeks away and now back in the major hardware mix, Nadal already made the tough choice this weekend to withdraw from the grass-court tuneup in Halle, Germany, this week to rest his knee.

Doctors will check his condition while he uses the time to recover.

"That's not the ideal situation," Nadal said, because grass is more "unpredictable" and leaves him vulnerable to big hitters such as Lukas Rosol, who upset him in Wimbledon's second round last year.

"That doesn't mean I am not going to try, because I am going to try my 100% to be ready for there and to play good tennis there," he added.

Nadal has already tweaked his schedule in 2013.

After playing his only event on hardcourts at Indian Wells., Calif., which he won, Nadal skipped Miami, which is also on cement, to relax for the European clay swing.

But with hardcourts the bulk of the calendar for the remainder of the season, Nadal faces more calendar choices in the weeks and months ahead.

Nadal said the layoff had forced him to practice considerably less than when he started winning French Open titles as a 19-year-old in 2005.

He has had to play matches to get himself into championship condition. He described the fitness of his knee as a day-to-day situation. But he was pleased that it held up in his nearly 5-hour semifinal against Novak Djokovic and in tough back-to-back matches against Ernests Gulbis and Ferrer last month in Rome.

He doesn't like it, but he said, "I think mentally I accepted that situation."

The injury has perhaps provided a silver lining.

Nadal has been forced to compress his physical style. He goes for more on his serve and forehand; he tries to end points quicker; he takes more risk.

"It gave him a natural reason to improve his game," said Wilander, who comments for Eurosport. "I think he's a better player, I really do."

Can Nadal win Roland Garros and Wimbledon back-to-back for a third time?

Certainly Nadal is the momentum player after reaching nine consecutive finals, winning seven, since his return.

Roger Federer, the defending Wimbledon champion, has not won a title since August and put up little resistance in a quarterfinal loss to France's Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

Second-ranked Andy Murray, who lost to Federer at Wimbledon and beat the Swiss on the same grass to win gold at the Olympics, hasn't played since pulling out of Rome last month with disk trouble in his back.

No. 1 Djokovic almost toppled Nadal, who is 59-1 in Paris, losing 9-7 in the fifth set Friday. But the 2011 Wimbledon winner from Serbia had a strangely flat grass campaign in 2012, losing in the semifinals at the All England Club and then again at the Olympics.

Pat Cash, the 1987 Wimbledon champion from Australia, pegged Nadal as the favorite for London.

"With that sort of performance," he said of the last two weeks, "the only question mark is his knees, isn't it?"