Gaël Monfils made his first appearance at the French Open twenty years ago. He was eighteen years old, and one of the most promising players of his generation. The previous year, he had won three out of the four junior Grand Slams. (Andy Murray won the fourth.) His speed was astonishing, as was his charisma. He had a preternatural connection with the crowd, wowing and delighting people wherever he went. In his first six months as a pro, he bagged two titles on the Challenger tour and made the fourth round of the Miami Open, at the level just below the Slams. He went into the French Open having lost in Monte Carlo to another phenom, Rafael Nadal, but by the end of the year he had claimed his first title, at a tournament in Poland. Monfils won his most recent title in Auckland, at age thirty-eight, which made him the oldest player ever to win a title on the A.T.P. tour.
He took home eleven more titles in between those two, and has made nearly twenty-four million dollars in prize money. He is one of the most popular players on tour, and among his peers, too. But none of his titles were Grand Slams, and this has made him, in the eyes of some people, something of a disappointment. “I’m very honored that people saw me as much better than who I was,” he told me over the phone, on the eve of the Miami Open this March, at once bemused and clearly a little annoyed. “I could guarantee you that, if I could win a Slam, I would.”
No one can make a crowd gasp like he can, or laugh in unison, or sometimes groan. He is regarded as more of an entertainer than a winner, even though he often won. The suggestion that he could have done more to win is not crazy. I have seen him sky impossible high for an overhead, and then goof it. I have watched him slide into a split to dig out a deep shot, and then needlessly scissor-kick a backhand into the net. During a changeover in a 2014 U.S. Open match, I saw him sip a Coke. “Sometimes, you know, I just feel like I want a Coke, you know, and I drink a Coke, you know,” he explained after the match. He made the quarterfinals of that tournament, where he took the first two sets off Roger Federer, had match points in the fourth set, and from there got rolled.
It was the suggestions that he didn’t care enough, that he was undisciplined, that he didn’t maximize his talent that Monfils disputes. “No one is not working. Not top athletes,” he said. “Please write it. For kids, it is very important. Everybody is working hard to be the best.”
When we spoke, he had just made the third round of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, where he ended up narrowly losing to Grigor Dimitrov, in one of the most thrilling matches of the year. He went on to Miami and made the fourth round; there, Sebastian Korda, one of the top young Americans, avenged a loss to him at Indian Wells, in three sets. Monfils has been playing some of his best tennis this season, relying less on his ability to retrieve any ball, perhaps, but maybe that’s a good thing. For all his shotmaking ability, Monfils sometimes defaulted to a defensive-minded approach, waiting for his opponent to make a mistake instead of forcing it. At times, it could seem that he was the only one in the stadium unaware that he was capable of hitting a forehand a hundred and twenty-four miles an hour—one of the fastest ever recorded in an A.T.P. match—and of doing it without straining much. At other times, it could seem that he’d forgotten that hitting a fun shot wasn’t the point.
But why not? Monfils’s father had immigrated to France from Guadeloupe to play pro soccer before getting a job in telecoms. His mother, who is from Martinique, worked as a nurse. He grew up in a largely immigrant neighborhood in the northeastern part of Paris. He liked tennis, he has said, because it is an individual sport, one that offers so many opportunities for creativity. He told me that his parents taught him that tennis was a “gift,” a “way to let go of the emotion, run a lot, be disciplined.” No one in his neighborhood played tennis. It made him feel “lucky,” he said. Even when it became his job, 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 started an Instagram account, @g.e.m.s.life.—their initials, interlaced—and ended their captions with emojis of puzzle pieces. They seemed to be, at first, an unusual fit: Svitolina, a Ukrainian with a no-nonsense attitude on court and a reputation as a grinder; Monfils, with the outlines of Martinique and Guadeloupe tattooed to his arms and a reputation for flash. And yet, when you saw them together, the puzzle made sense. That August, during the week before the U.S. Open, I sat in the front row of the empty grandstand at the Billie Jean Tennis Center, and watched them play practice points. The air fizzed with frisson as the ball went back and forth.
They had a daughter, Skai, in 2022, and both have experienced career renaissances since then. Monfils has said that Svitolina kept him in tennis, particularly through the pandemic, when he might have otherwise quit, and that being a father has changed his perspective. And I’m sure that’s true—but perspective, above all, is what Monfils has always seemed to have, compared with other players. In Australia this year, after he’d beaten the fourth seed, Taylor Fritz, who was the finalist at the 2024 U.S. Open, in a display of tennis so dazzling and clean that Fritz could only commend him, he was asked whether it was his dream to win the tournament. “That’s your dream, I guess, to win a Slam. I’ll tell you my dream,” Monfils replied. “My dream is to have an unbelievable family. Tennis is cool. Of course, you want to have goals, dreams, whatever. But my dream is out there.” Svitolina, as it happens, was playing on Margaret Court Arena, the same court on which Monfils had just played. When his press obligations were done, Monfils hurried back to watch her, and waited for her after she rallied to win and walked off.
There won’t be many more moments like that, or like the one that will come when he takes the court on Monday at Roland Garros, where the French Open is held. If he can get past Hugo Dellien in the first round, he could face the fifth seed, Jack Draper, in the second. The crowd will be in Monfils’s corner. There is an intimacy there, on the red clay, where every shot leaves its mark. It is a special place for him. “My parents, they’d been separated super early in my life,” he said. Roland Garros is “a place where all my family gather together, the full family reunited.” People sometimes wonder what tennis might have become if he’d ever won that tournament, if he’d ever ascended to the top ranking—how many fans he would have drawn in, how much excitement he would have sparked and interest he would have drawn. But he doesn’t think that way. “Of course, my thinking at twenty and thinking at thirty-eight is different,” he said. And if he hadn’t experienced what he experienced then, he went on, he wouldn’t be the man he is now. ♦