The day after Andy Murray became the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, I have to believe that someone, somewhere in Bourges, Rennes, or Clermont-Ferrand, turned to a friend and asked, “When is it going to be our turn again?”
He would have been thinking, of course, of the 30 years that have passed since a Frenchman last won at Roland Garros—that Frenchman being Cameroon native Yannick Noah, who stunned and delighted all of France, and much of the rest of the world, when he upset defending champion Mats Wilander in the French Open final of 1983.
Noah at the time was seeded No. 6, and had never been beyond the quarterfinals at a major tournament. He would never be ranked higher on the ATP computer than No. 3. But he had already demonstrated a proclivity that very few of his French peers, or successors, have shown: A zest for the big occasion. Had Noah been a basketball player—like his son Joakim, currently a star with the Chicago Bulls of the NBA—he would have wanted the ball in his hands with his team trailing by one and time quickly running out.
But that’s not the French way in tennis. Not lately, at least.
Noah’s win at Roland Garros was seen by some as a fluke, one of those improbable, magic moments. But it was really no more mystifying than Murray’s triumph at Wimbledon. By the time Noah played that match, he’d accumulated an impressive 14-5 record in ATP finals. More to my point, Noah was a guy who liked the big moments, and one who was uncharacteristically—for a French tennis player—prepared to make the most of them.
Noah beat Wilander that sunny day in Paris by pursuing a bold, chip-and-charge strategy. Relying on a heavily sliced backhand (Noah is one of the few Grand Slam champions of the Open era who didn’t have a flat or topspin backhand to speak of), Noah attacked relentlessly and hurled himself all over the forecourt, spearing volleys that, among other dividends, forced Wilander to wilt under the pressure. The exceptional thing about all this is how utterly out-of-character it was for an Open-era French player to do such a thing.
Among all nations, France has succeeded in producing the most varied and appealing group of male players in the Open era. What they have not created since Noah ruled at Roland Garros, however, is a male Grand Slam champion. The closest they’ve come is runner-ups Cedric Pioline (Wimbledon, 1993; U.S. Open, 1997), Arnaud Clement (Australian Open, 2001), and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (Australian Open, 2008).
Want to know one big difference between Noah and those Frenchmen? Their embrace of the big ask. Noah was 23-13 in tour finals, but Pioline was just 5-12, and Clement 4-7. Tsonga is an encouraging 10-9, but before you start doing cartwheels on the lawns of Versailles, keep in mind that Tsonga hasn’t won a single one of his titles on clay. In fact, he’s never even played a clay-court final.
Perhaps, in developing such an impressive fleet of stylistic individualists (think Fabrice Santoro, Sebastian Grosjean, Nicolas Escude), the French out-foxed themselves. Or perhaps it’s that the French players are so obsessed with flair, with “beautiful tennis” (or something that travels under a similar name), that coaches as well as budding pros consider it beneath them to spend all that time and effort only to become boring “grinders,” or “clay-court specialists.”
That’s too bad, given that grinding an be so conducive to success at Roland Garros.
Currently, the French have 13 men in the Top 100, and two who were recently in the Top 10 but have now fallen just outside it (Richard Gasquet and Tsonga, ranked Nos. 13 and 14, respectively). But unless you believe in miracles, as in Mahut d. Nadal, 70-68 in the fifth set, only four of them even come close to claiming contender status: Gasquet, Tsonga, No. 24 Gael Monfils, and No. 30 Gilles Simon.
Let’s consider them in reverse order:
