Gaël Monfils wins in his own way

Gaël Monfils made his first appearance at the Open of France twenty years ago. He was eighteen years old and one of the most promising players of his generation. The previous year, he won three of the four Grand Slam junior. (Andy Murray won the fourth.) His speed was amazing, just like his charisma. He had a supernatural link with the crowd, impress and delight people wherever he went. During his first six months as a pro, he put two titles on the Challenger tour and made the fourth round of the Miami Open, at the level just below the Slams. He entered the French Open after losing in Monte Carlo in another phenomenon, Rafael Nadal, but at the end of the year, he won his first title, during a tournament in Poland. Monfils won his last title in Auckland, at the age of thirty-eight, which made him the oldest player to win a title on the ATP tour.

He won eleven additional titles between these two and won nearly twenty-four million dollars at prices. He is one of the most popular players on the tour, and among his peers. But none of his titles was the Grand Slam, and that did it, in the eyes of some people, a kind of disappointment. “I am very honored that people saw me as better than the one I was,” he said by phone, on the eve of the Miami Open in March, both perplexed and clearly a little bored. “I could guarantee that, if I could win a slam, I would.”

Nobody can make a crowd as he can, or laugh in unison, or sometimes moan. He is considered to be an artist than a winner, even if he often won. The suggestion he could have done more to win is not crazy. I saw it from the incredibly high sky for one above, then I do it. I watched him slide into a split to dig a deep shot, then a kick unnecessarily kicked the net. During a change in an open match in the United States in 2014, I saw him sipping a coke. “Sometimes you know, I just feel like you want a coke, you know, and I drink a coke, you know,” he said after the match. He made the quarter -finals of this tournament, where he removed the first two trips from Roger Federer, had match points in the fourth set, and from there, he was rolled.

These are the suggestions that he did not care enough, that he was not disciplined, that he did not maximize his talent that Monfils disputes. “No one is working. Not high-level athletes,” he said. “Please write. For children, this is very important. Everyone works hard to be the best. “

When we talked, he had just opened the third round of the BNP Paribas in Indian Wells, where he ended up narrowly lost against Grigor Dimitrov, in one of the most exciting matches of the year. He went to Miami and did the fourth round; There, Sebastian Korda, one of the best young Americans, avenged a loss for him to Indian Wells, in three sets. Monfils has played some of his best tennis this season, based less on his ability to recover any ball, perhaps, but it may be a good thing. Despite all his ability to tours, Monfils sometimes made a defensive approach to a defensive approach, waiting for his opponent to make a mistake instead of forcing him. Sometimes it might seem that he was the only one in the stadium ignorant that he was able to hit a central one hundred and twenty -four thousands an hour – one of the fastest ever recorded in an ATP match – and to do it without stretching a lot. At other times, it might seem that he had forgotten that hitting a funny blow was not the goal.

But why not? The father of Monfils had immigrated to France in Guadeloupe to play professional football before obtaining a job in telecommunications. His mother, from Martinique, worked as a nurse. He grew up in a largely immigrant district in the northeast part of Paris. He loved tennis, he said, because it is an individual sport, which offers many opportunities for creativity. He told me that his parents taught him that tennis was a “gift”, a “way of letting go of emotion, running a lot, being disciplined”. No one in his neighborhood has played tennis. It made him feel “lucky,” he said. Even when it became his work, it remained a place where he could be happy and where he could be himself.

He met his wife, Elina Svitolina, in tennis, on tour. In 2019, they launched an Instagram account, @ gemslife. – Their initials, intertwined – and ended their legends with Emojis of puzzle pieces. They seemed to be, at the beginning, an unusual adjustment: Svitolina, an Ukrainian with an attitude without frills in the court and a reputation as a crusher; Monfils, with the contours of Martinique and Guadeloupe tattooed on his arms and a reputation as a flash. And yet, when you saw them together, the puzzle made sense. In August, during the week before the United States Open, I sat in the front row of the empty gallery of Billie Jean Tennis Center, and I watched them play points of practice. The air sparkled with thrill while the ball went back and forth.

They had a daughter, Skai, in 2022, and the two have known career rebirths since then. Monfils said that Svitolina had kept him in tennis, especially through the pandemic, when he would have left otherwise, and being a father changed his perspective. And I’m sure it’s true – but the perspective, above all, is Monfils always seemed to have, compared to other players. In Australia this year, after having beaten the fourth seeded, Taylor Fritz, who was the finalist of the US Open 2024, in a tennis demonstration so dazzling and clean that Fritz could only congratulate him, he was asked if it was his dream of winning the tournament. “It’s your dream, I guess, to win a slam. I’m going to tell you my dream,” replied Monfils. “My dream is to have an incredible family. Tennis is cool. Of course, you want to have goals, dreams, whatever. But my dream is there.” Svitolina, in this case, played on Margaret Court Arena, the same courtyard on which Monfils had just played. When her press obligations were made, Monfils rushed to look at her and awaited her after she joined her to win and left.

There will not be much more moments like that, or like the one who will come when he takes the court Monday in Roland Garros, where the French Open is held. If he can exceed Hugo Dellien in the first round, he could face the fifth seeded, Jack Draper, in the second. The crowd will be in the corner of Monfils. There is an intimacy there, on the red clay, where each blow leaves its mark. It is a special place for him. “My parents, they had been separated very early in my life,” he said. Roland Garros is “a place where my whole family gathers, the complete family met”. People sometimes wonder what tennis could have become if he had ever won this tournament, if he had passed in the first ranking – how many fans he would have attracted, how much excitement he would have aroused and interested that he would have attracted. But he doesn’t think that way. “Of course, my thought at twenty and thought at thirty-eight is different,” he said. And if he had not experienced what he experienced then, he continued, he would not be the man he is now. ♦