Loving Monfils, or on a Life That Doesn't Need Slams

There's a way of loving a tennis player that doesn't go through titles. It doesn't go through trophies lifted, weeks at number one, sentences carved into books. It goes, instead, through the way a person occupies space. Through the smile when the point is already lost. Through the leg that stretches a meter beyond reasonable, knowing it won't matter.

Gaël Monfils has announced that 2026 will be his final season. On the threshold of forty, after twenty-two years on tour, thirteen ATP titles, zero Slams, two semifinals, a career-high of number six and a collection of memorable defeats that few others can match. And yet when he said that life is too short and that he has no regrets, no one felt like arguing. Because Monfils has always forced us to confront an uncomfortable question: can you be loved in sport without having been the best? And if so, what does it really mean?

Talent as Missed Destiny

For years European tennis criticism had a small private cult devoted to mourning Gaël Monfils. He would be summoned in conversations the way you summon intelligent brothers who dropped out of university. "With that body." "With that hand." "With that court coverage." An unfinished sentence, a pause, a melancholy glance toward a Roland Garros that would never arrive.

It was a kind of critical laziness, really. It was easier to call him an underachiever than to admit a more radical possibility: that Monfils was playing a different sport alongside ours. A sport in which the score was a frame, not the painting. Where the slide a few centimeters from the concrete counted as much as a break, and the roar of the Suzanne Lenglen counted as much as a semifinal.

We called him a showman as if it were an extenuating circumstance. As if it served to justify, before the inflexible verdict of the rankings, a career that otherwise made no sense. In reality it was the opposite. It was the verdict of the rankings that failed to understand him.

The Body as Language

Look at the videos. All of you have at least one in mind. The scissor-kick smash like a volleyball player. One of his impossible slides on concrete, the ones that made people call a tennis player Sliderman. A return retrieved after the ball had already gone by, because his geography of the court wasn't the same as everyone else's.

Monfils always communicated with his body before his racket. That's why we called him an acrobat. But acrobat, in the end, is a reductive word. The acrobat performs a routine. Monfils, on court, didn't perform: he responded. He responded to a ball, to a sound, to a crowd, to a light. He was one of the few players who moved as if the match had another dimension, beyond the two white lines.

The problem is that professional tennis, the kind that produces Slams, doesn't reward this dimension. It rewards the machine. It rewards those who shorten their motion by half a centimeter to gain two tenths. It rewards those who never, ever, ever get distracted. And Monfils was always getting distracted. Luckily, you'd say today.

Elina, or the One Who Really Watches

There's a scene, from these last days, that tells you everything you needed to understand. Roland Garros, on the eve of his last Paris Slam. Monfils breaks down in the press conference talking about the letter his wife published on the Players' Tribune, "Your Dad, the Magician", written to their three-year-old daughter to tell her who her father is before he stops playing. A letter to Skaï's future, while he and Elina are both in Paris, both in the draw, husband and wife, two parallel careers, two completely different mental time zones.

Elina Svitolina has always watched him. She's watched him since they met at the end of 2018, she fresh off her WTA Finals victory, he answering her on Instagram after years of crossing paths at tournaments without ever really talking. She watches him in the wins disproportionate to the rankings and in the absurd defeats against nobodies. She watches him when he is reborn at thirty-eight winning Auckland and becoming the oldest winner of a title in the ATP Tour era. She watches him when he says he wants "lots of kids and to grow old in good health".

Svitolina has won more than he has, proportionally: world number three, four Slam semifinals, an Olympic bronze in Tokyo, a WTA Finals. She could have married a champion. She could have married a Slam. Instead she married Gaël. And here there's something worth saying quietly, because it's usually said badly: she married him not despite the fact that he was Monfils, but because he was Monfils. Because of that way of being in tennis. Because of that distraction, that generosity, that absence of regret.

They share an Instagram account called GEMS, the initials of their names put together. They have a daughter, Skaï, born in 2022. They have built a life where tennis is a profession, not an identity. And maybe this is the most subterranean lesson of Monfils' career: having shown, in a sport that demands the absolute, that you can also choose not to give it the absolute. That you can still be loved. That you can still be happy.

The Question About Him, Which Is About Everyone

When an athlete wins little and is loved a lot, historians usually say he was "iconic". It's a convenient word, and a dishonest one. It serves to avoid answering the real question. The real question is: why did we love this man who made us lose so many times?

Maybe because Monfils always respected us. Not as fans, but as spectators. He never asked us to suffer for him. He never sold us his suffering as proof of worth. Even when he lost, he did so by lifting us, not burdening us. He told us, with a gesture, that tennis could also be this: an afternoon well spent together, him on court, us in the stands, and then dinner for everyone, winners or losers.

In an era when professional athletes have learned to sell themselves as brands, to package every statement, to measure every emotion for social media, Monfils has remained one of the few who never sold himself. He didn't have a brand. He had a life. And that life, apparently, was enough for him.

What We Let Go When He Leaves

Twelve months from now we won't see him again. We won't see the slide. We won't see the racket spun on the drop shot to make the front row laugh. We won't see the ball retrieved that no one else would even have tried to chase.

We will see Sinner, who wins everything and barely smiles. We will see Alcaraz, who wins almost everything and happily hits the tweener, but does it because we asked for it, because tennis has now learned that acrobatics need to be monetized. They will inherit the audience, but they won't inherit the other way of being on court. The one where the match was a pretext, and the real match was the one between the player and his own joy of being there.

Monfils just lost in the first round of his last Roland Garros, to a fellow Frenchman, Hugo Gaston. It went the way it had to go. Elina watched him from the stands, as always. And we watched both of them, him playing and her watching, finally understanding what is really at stake in certain sporting couples: not a title to be shared, but a way of being together in the world.

Gaël Monfils has never won a Slam. He has won, however, the thing that Slams, on their own, guarantee no one. He was loved for who he was, not for what he won. It's rare. Maybe, in the end, it's also everything.