Gael Monfils Can Make The Crowd Dance To A Swan Song

FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn’t he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-wattage farewell to New York.

Somehow, all these decades later, I was still judging a Gael Monfils match by its opening set. My own unforced error. He got loose. As he reported after the match, Monfils started to move his legs better, stopped playing so upright, and remembered how well he’d been striking the ball all week. He styled on the 22-year-old Vallejo to win 2-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0, to the vast delight of those present, who got what they came for in the end: play that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment.