Stan Wawrinka and Gaël Monfils left Paris on the same day, or almost in the same breath, as happens with certain characters whom fate never quite brings together, only to summon them at the end, when there is no longer any need to explain anything. One had the gait of a man who comes from the earth, the other of someone who always seems to have another half-metre of air beneath his feet. One carried tennis in the weight of the shot, the other in the invention of the body. For twenty years they watched each other from a distance, friends, contemporaries of an impossible era, survivors of everything tennis had decided to become.
Wawrinka came from French-speaking Switzerland, from a geography without noise, from a family that worked on an organic farm where people with disabilities were welcomed and supported. It is not a biographical detail, if one looks closely. There was always something agricultural in him, something slow, something non-negotiable: the time of sowing before the harvest, labour before beauty, matter before form. His tennis seemed made that way too. It did not have the social grace of the predestined. It had an almost mineral stubbornness, a way of inhabiting the rally as though every ball had to be dug up, cleaned, struck until it told the truth.
As a child, he said, he would come home from school and switch on France Télévisions to watch Roland Garros until late. That is perhaps his true image of origin: a boy from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, sitting in front of the screen as Paris entered the house like a promise of May. Then, many years later, that same tournament would become the place where his tennis found its fullest voice: the red clay under his shoes, the backhand above his shoulder, the French crowd able to recognise in him something that did not belong only to victory.
Monfils, by contrast, before he was Monfils, was already speed. Not in the generic sense of the fast athlete, but literally: as a boy he won the French under-13 and under-14 100 metres. That explains more than many technical comments. His slides and recoveries came from a memory that preceded tennis. The racket came later. First there was the body, and the body already knew one elementary thing: a trajectory does not end when it appears to be over; it ends when you have stopped chasing it.
That is why Monfils has so often been described badly. It was too easy to make him the juggler, the tightrope walker, the smiling showman. Too convenient to turn him into a spectacular parenthesis inside the great novel of winners. But beneath the cheerfulness there was a harder story. Elina Svitolina wrote that Gaël had told her about tournaments he played as a child, before the age of ten, in clubs where they did not want to let him in because of the colour of his skin. Then certain laughs of his change sound. They do not become sad; they become deeper. In Monfils, lightness was a choice: a refusal to let others define him.
Svitolina also told another scene, smaller and beautiful: as a girl in Ukraine, she knew Monfils as the face printed on the card of a Prince racket in the shop at her tennis centre. Before love, before family, before sharing the tour, Gaël was a photograph attached to an object. An image on a shelf. There is something tender in that prehistory: the future husband as a commercial figure, the magician reduced to packaging, destiny hiding where no one yet recognises it.
Wawrinka and Monfils crossed the same era without ever fully belonging to it. Around them, tennis was building empires. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray: the centre was occupied, the roads were watched, the finals seemed like rooms already booked. Stan and Gaël arrived from the side. The first with the closed face of a man who asks no permission, the second with that electric mobility that made the court look like a square, a stage, a yard. Wawrinka broke the order. Monfils distorted it. Neither of them administered it.
Stan had the rare gift of definitive days. There are very strong players who grow old inside a sum of good tournaments. He, instead, had days that looked like columns. When he entered that light, everything became simpler and more ferocious: serve, weight, backhand, movement forward. His one-handed backhand was not an aesthetic nostalgia. It was a severe machine, an ancient thing made brutal by modernity. He prepared it as one prepares an axe-blow, but at impact there came out a clean, full, almost moral line.
Gaël had a gift less suited to the archive. He could lose, disappear, give the crowd ten minutes of vertigo and then slip back into the less glorious part of the match. But in those ten minutes something happened that professional tennis often tends to erase: the game became childlike again. Not childish, childlike. Capable of wonder, disobedience, waste. Monfils could throw away a point with the same naturalness with which he could save an impossible one. And in that waste lay part of his fascination, because art, in sport, always lives close to the danger of having no practical use.
In Melbourne, after beating Taylor Fritz, he was asked whether the dream might finally be to win a Slam. Monfils answered from a place that seemed far away from the press room and very close to his truth:
“That’s your dream, I guess, to win a Slam. I’ll tell you my dream. 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.”
There was no contempt for victory in those words. There was something more unsettling: the refusal to be lived through other people’s desires. We too, as fans, would have wanted a Monfils Slam to put order into our own astonishment, to be able to say that all that talent had received its final certification. He, instead, reminded us that perhaps that need was ours.
Paris said goodbye to them with two different forms of melancholy. Wawrinka brought his final Roland Garros to a close against Jesper de Jong; Monfils did so against Hugo Gaston after a five-set match that seemed to want to hold the crowd there a little longer. The Frenchman said he loved the tournament and owed it everything. Stan spoke of the pain of leaving something one loves. Two simple sentences, almost bare, and for that very reason right. At a certain point, even great characters must stop performing themselves and become men again before the place that contained them.
Their value, then, does not lie in resemblance. It would be a mistake to look for it. Wawrinka remains in memory as a full sound: the ball leaving the strings and seeming to carry more mass than the others. Monfils remains in a less official archive: a slide, a chase, a smile after the chaos. Stan gave tennis gravity. Gaël gave it escape.
And perhaps that is why they should be told together now. Because the tennis that loses them becomes a little more orderly, a little more legible, a little poorer in apparitions.
Wawrinka reminded us that even in the most closed systems someone can arrive with enough weight to open a crack.
Monfils reminded us that people do not go to a stadium only to find out who is right on the scoreboard.
They also go there to carry away a gesture, a run, a moment with no apparent utility that years later returns to mind on its own.
Stan and Gaël were this: two different forms of permanence. The boy who watched Paris on television after school and the one who ran the 100 metres before turning the court into a surface wider than habit. They did not need to stand in the same roll of honour to belong to the same farewell.
In their own way, they did something rarer: they left tennis not only results or regrets, but matter for memory.
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