Dear La Monf,
Gael Monfils at the French Open is over. After 21 years, after 40 wins on the Paris clay, after a semifinal in 2008 that made an entire generation believe, after so many five-setters that left crowds breathless and schedules shattered, it ended just before midnight on a Monday, against a fellow Frenchman named Hugo Gaston, in a scoreline that read 6-2 6-3 3-6 2-6 6-0. He beat you. Of course he did. And of course you made it beautiful and devastating in equal measure. Two sets down, you came back. You made us believe again, one last time, before the scoreboard told the truth that our hearts already knew. It was over. You were done. And we were not ready.
We are still not ready.
Au Revoir, Gael Monfils
Au revoir, Gael Monfils, for the semifinal run in 2008 that announced to the whole world what some of us already felt in our bones–that you were something different, that did not fit neatly into a category or a ranking or a pundit’s forecast. You were a force of nature dressed in tennis whites, moving like no one before you had ever moved on a clay court.
Au revoir, Monfils, for every quarterfinal that should have been a semifinal, for 2009 and 2011 and 2014, for every time you walked onto Philippe-Chatrier and made 15,000 people feel like the lucky ones just for being in the building. Gael Monfils at the French Open was always an event. It was theater. And its curtains are now closed.
Au revoir, Monfils, for the injuries, and there were so many injuries. The ankles. The knees. The tendons. The mystery illnesses that came at the worst possible times. You were built for the sport in every visible way, the wingspan, the speed, the reflexes, the instinct, and yet your body spent 21 years conspiring against your greatness. Every time you came back from something that should have ended another career, you came back smiling. And the sport badly needed it.
Au revoir, Monfils, for Washington in August 2011, for a match that finished at 1:15 in the morning. Some of us were watching from European time zones, sitting at our computers at five in the morning, half-delirious with exhaustion and completely unable to close the stream. You beat John Isner in the semifinal, rain-delayed, stretched, a third-set tiebreaker in which you saved a match point and clawed your way through on sheer will.
Au revoir, Monfils, for the final the next day against Radek Stepanek, for dragging yourself out onto that court having had almost no sleep, for warming up with a football because that was just who you were, even then, even running on fumes, you found a way to be joyful about it. You lost 6-4 6-4. He never faced a break point. You had saved a match point less than nine hours earlier. We were devastated. You probably danced it off.
Au revoir, Monfils, for the 13 titles, each one of them felt personal to those of us watching. The Auckland title that made you the oldest player in history to win an ATP event. Screams and cries and texting people who do not even follow tennis. Because that is what you did to people.
Au revoir, Monfils, for the 22 finals you lost. Twenty-two. Let that number sit for a moment. Every single one of them hurt, and we absorbed that hurt with you, because that is the contract a fan signs with a player they love. You lost three Masters 1000 finals. Paris in 2009, Paris again in 2010, Monte Carlo in 2016. You had the crowd and the moment and the expectation and something always slipped away. We grieved each one. We came back for the next one. We always came back.
Au revoir, Monfils, for the US Open semifinal in 2016, for reaching the last four of a Grand Slam with a history of injuries and heartbreak, for reminding everyone who had written the career-high ceiling speech that you were not interested in ceilings. Monfils at the French Open may be what history remembers most loudly, but 2016 in New York was proof that you had so much more to give than any single court could hold.
Au revoir, Monfils, for what you said when you announced your retirement–“I’ve had no regrets.” Nothing but a truth. You played during the era of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic, three of the greatest players the sport has ever produced, and you did so with joy. You competed in their shadow with your chin up and your arms open. You never turned bitter. You never turned resentful. You just kept dancing.
Au revoir, Monfils, for being the reason some of us fell in love with this sport in the first place. For the forehand that came from angles that should not exist. For the between-the-legs shots at full sprint that made the commentators lose their minds. For the way you could be losing 0-5 in a third set and still make the crowd rise to its feet on a single point.
Au revoir, Monfils, for Monday night on Philippe-Chatrier, for coming back from 0-2 down against Hugo Gaston, for making us believe one last time that there might be another chapter. There was not. There never was going to be. And yet the fact that you tried, the fact that you came back from two sets to level it, was the most Monfils thing you could possibly have done. Of course it ended that way. How else was it going to end?
Never Forgotten
Gael Monfils at the French Open will live as one of the great love stories between a player and a home crowd. Richard Gasquet, Gilles Simon, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga joined you on the court afterwards, your three musketeers, as you called them. and the crowd stayed. They did not leave. Because leaving would have meant it was real, and nobody wanted it to be real yet.
You never won a Grand Slam. You said so yourself. You never let it poison the way you spoke about your career, and you should not have. You might not have won as much as the talent suggested was possible, you might not have been the best version of yourself as often as the world wanted, but you were the happiest version of yourself, consistently, defiantly and most of all joyfully, and what more can a person ask of a life? You are leaving this sport at peace with what you did in it. And those of us who watched you play are sending you off at peace with having watched it.
It was a blast, La Monf. An absolute, genuine, once-in-a-generation blast.
With everything,
La Fan
Main Photo Credit: Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports
