Gaël Monfils appeared for the first time in the French Open Speaking twenty years ago. He was eighteen years old, and one of the most promising players in his generation. In the previous year, he had won three out of four Junior Grand championships. (Andy Murray won the fourth.) His speed was amazing, as was his attractiveness. He had a pre -nature relationship with the crowd, mobilizing and making people happy wherever he went. In the first six months as a professional, he won two titles in the Challenger tour and made the fourth round of Miami Open, at the bottom of the four championships. He went to the French Open after losing in Monte Carlo to another phenomenon, Rafael NadalBut by the end of the year, he won his first title, in a championship 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 in ATP.
He received eleven titles between these two, and achieved nearly twenty -four million dollars in the prize money. He is one of the most popular players on a tour, and among his peers as well. But none of his titles were the four major championships, and this, in the eyes of some people, made it a bit of disappointment. “It is very honored that people saw me much better than I was,” he told me on the phone, on the eve of Miami open in March, at one time he was upset and is clearly upset a little. “I can guarantee that, if I can win the championship, I would like.”
No one can make a crowd pant as he can, or laugh in complete harmony, or sometimes. It is more than one winner than the winner, although he has often won. The suggestion that he could do more to win is not crazy. I saw him in the sky, highly impossible for public expenditures, then glow it. I saw him sliding in a division to dig a deep snapshot, and then I had unnecessarily spent on the network. During a change in the 2014 match in the US Open, I saw him wearing coke. “Sometimes, as you know, I feel that I want coke, as you know, drink coke, as you know,” explained after the match. The quarter -finals of that tournament, took the first two groups of Roger Federer, and had matches points in the fourth group, and from there it was wrapped.
The suggestions he did not care about enough, that he was uncontrolled, and that he did not increase his talent that Montifel opposes. “No one does not work. Not senior athletes,” he said. “Please write it. For children, it is very important. Everyone is working hard to be the best.”
When we talked, he had made the third round of BNP Paribas open in Indian Wales, where he ended his narrow loss against Gregor Dimitrov, in one of the most exciting matches this year. He went to Miami and made the fourth round. There, Sebastian Corda, one of the best American youth, has a revenge for him in Indian Wales, in three groups. Monfils plays some of the best forgetting this season, and less depends on its ability to recover any ball, perhaps, but this may be good. Despite all his ability to make bullets, Monfils sometimes left a defensive approach, waiting for his opponent to make a mistake instead of forcing him. Sometimes, it might seem to have been the only one on the field unaware that he was able to hit a hundred and twenty-four miles per hour-one of the fastest registered ever in the ATP-and he did so without a lot. At other times, it may seem to have forgotten that hitting a pleasant shot was not the point.
But why not? Mondels’s father migrated to France from Guadloop to play professional football before getting a job in communications. His mother, from Martinic, worked as a nurse. He grew up in the migrant neighborhood largely in the northeastern part of Paris. He loved tennis, as he said, because it is an individual sport, providing many opportunities for creativity. He told me that his parents taught him that tennis was a “gift”, “a way to give up emotion, run a lot,”. Nobody played in tennis. He said he made him feel “lucky.” Even when his job became, he remained a place in which he could be happy, and where he could have it.
His wife, Elena Svetolina, met in tennis, on a tour. In 2019, they started an Instagram account, @GMSLIFE. They seem to be, at first, an extraordinary seizure: svitolina, Ukrainian with a meaningless position in court and a mill reputation; Monfils, with the outline of Martinique and Guodlop tattoo on his arms and a flash reputation. However, when I saw them together, the puzzle was logical. In August, during the week that the United States had previously opened, I sat in the front row from the empty runway at the Billy Jean Tennis Center, and watched them playing training points. The air filled with Ferson as the ball went back and forth.
They had a daughter, Skai, in 2022, both of whom have suffered from the functional renaissance since then. Mondels said that Svetolina kept him in tennis, especially through the epidemic, when he might resign in another way, and that being a father had changed his point of view. I am sure that this is true – but forever, above all, is what Monfils always seems to be, compared to other players. In Australia this year, after defeating the fourth seed, Taylor Fritz, who was the final in the 2024 US Open, at an amazing and clean tennis show that Fritz could only praise him, was asked whether his dream of winning the championship was. “This is your dream, I think, to win the championship. I will tell you a dream.” “My dream is to have an incredible family. Tennis is great. Of course, you want to have goals, dreams, whatever. But my dream is.” Svetolina, as it is happening, was playing in Margaret Court Arena, the same court that Montifes just played. When his press obligations were completed, Monvils rushed to watch her, waited for her after she gathered to win and went out.
There will be no more moments like this, or like those that will come when the court takes Monday in Roland Garros, where the French Championship is shown. If he is able to overcome Hugo Deline in the first round, he may face the fifth seed, Jack Darbar, in the second. The crowd will be in the corner of the Mondels. There is intimacy there, on red clay, where each shot leaves its mark. It is a special place for him. He said: “My parents were separated early in my life.” Roland Garros is “a place where all members of my family gather together, the full family has reunited.” Sometimes people wonder what tennis might be if he won that championship, if he ascended before to the first rank – how many fans who had attracted them, the amount of excitement he would have shared and the attention he would have received. But he does not think this way. “Of course, my thinking about twenty and thinking about thirty -eight is different,” he said. And if he does not test what he suffered from, he has continued, he will not be the man he is now. ♦
