The man, the myth, Monfils

As is so often the case with Monfils, Monday night's spectacle was about so much more than tennis. With a crowd of 15,000 chanting his name as the clock struck midnight, Monfils took the mic and paid tribute to his wife Elina Svitolina, reducing her to tears as he emptied his heart for her. 

“We've been together eight beautiful years, you have supported me, raised me up, loved me, and you gave me the greatest gift in our daughter,” he said. “I love you.”

That selfless gesture sums up the kind of person Monfils has always been. 

Novak Djokovic said as much in his pre-tournament press conference, interrupting his own train of thought to pay impromptu tribute to his friend. 

“He truly deserves [to be celebrated], not only as a tennis player but as a human being,” he said. “He is somebody that has touched so many people's hearts, has respect from everyone in the men's and women's locker room across all the generations he has competed with.” 

Two decades ago, when a ball of energy known simply as 'Lamonf' took his first steps on the Grand Slam stage, it was already evident: here was a tennis superhero the likes of which we’d never seen before. 

A modern sliderman with spiderman skills, when Monfils first appeared as a blur on the terre battue of Paris, the game was instantly changed. A sprinter. A contortionist. An acrobat. 

“I think he’s going to be remembered for a long time,” his good friend Frances Tiafoe said on Monday in Paris. “We’ve never seen a guy like him, with his athletic ability and how fun he was to watch.”

He was all of the above, out of this world, over the top and more. Monfils’ matches were filled with Cirque du Soleil moments, the flying Frenchman twisting his body into a pretzel one moment, lifting it high into the sky the next, a widening smile spreading like wildfire from his face to the stands packed with his admirers. 

Did he win? Did he lose? He did both, and curiously, it didn’t always matter. If you were in the house when Monfils brought it down with his gravity-defying feats of athleticism, if you had switched on your telly at the moment when he shot himself out of a canon to turn a routine point into yet another point-of-the-year nominee, you often didn’t remember what the scoreboard said at the end of the contest. 

A showman. The showman

His wife summed it up so eloquently in a letter to the couple’s daughter, published in the Player’s Tribune last week. 

“In just one shot, one moment, he could achieve what I think few athletes ever achieve,” she wrote. “He could make people feel something. Almost like at a concert and there’s a perfect song, or at the movies and there’s a perfect line, and you have this feeling like, Oh my god. WOW.” 

Wow, indeed. 

There will never be another Monfils, and as the curtain closes on his last Roland-Garros appearance we can pay homage to the fact that he stands tied with 1983 champion Yannick Noah for the most Roland-Garros wins by a Frenchman in the Open era. We can marvel at his record 17 five-set matches played on the Parisian clay, 13 career ATP titles or his 586 career wins.

Or we can simply watch one point and let the joy wash over us. 

Over the years, many players have won more than Monfils, but none have put on a better show. 

Courage pour la suite, Lamonf!