For our sixth annual Heroes Issue, we’ve selected passages from the last 50 years of Tennis Magazine and TENNIS.com—starting in 1969 and ending in 2018—to highlight 50 worthy heroes. Each passage acknowledges the person as they were then; each subsequent story catches up with the person, or highlights their impact, as they are now. It is best summed up with a quote from the great Arthur Ashe, that was featured on the cover of the November/December issue of this magazine in 2015: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”
Q: How are you spending your time these days?
A: Sailing and lots of hiking. I’m also involved with charity work and inner-city activities. Raising my children is also important to me. If I want to raise my children to be good human beings, I have to be a good human being. - Tennis Magazine Interview / November 1996
“The arc of history bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King said. So, in its way, has Yannick Noah’s own personal arc.
In 1971, Arthur Ashe discovered an 11-year-old Noah on a court in an unlikely place, the former French colony of Cameroon. Seven years later, the two played doubles together at Wimbledon, winning their first-round match 14–12 in the fifth set. Five years after that, Noah became the last Frenchman to win a Grand Slam singles title, at Roland Garros.
But Noah didn’t just follow Ashe’s lead on court; like the American, he has made his life about much more than tennis.
Noah famously became a pop singer after his retirement; less well known is his commitment to charity work. In 1996, he began Fête le Mur, a foundation that introduces underprivileged children to tennis and helps them find jobs in sports. He has also supported Enfants de la Terre, a charity started by his mother in 1988, as well as AIDS and environmental charities.
Yet Noah’s greatest heroics are still associated with tennis. His emotional victory in Paris was the big bang for the French game. Amelie Mauresmo, the last Frenchwoman to reach No. 1, picked up a racquet after watching Noah’s win, and a generation of Frenchmen, led by Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gael Monfils and Richard Gasquet, tried and failed to match his achievement.
What they needed, it seemed, was the charismatic presence of Noah himself. In 2016, he returned to captain France to its first Fed Cup final in 11 years; in 2017, he led its Davis Cup team—which included Tsonga and Gasquet—to its first title in 16 years. Noah’s ark had rescued the French game again.