The Last Generation of Artists

There are weeks when the tennis calendar seems to conspire to tell us something. Roland Garros 2026, first week, two different courts, two first-round losses. Stan Wawrinka leaves the Simonne-Mathieu, defeated by Jesper de Jong. Gaël Monfils leaves the Philippe Chatrier after five sets against Hugo Gaston. Neither of them will return to Paris as a player.

They look like two separate stories. They aren't. They are the same farewell written twice, in two different hands.

When tennis was also a style

Wawrinka is forty-one. Monfils is thirty-nine. Both made their Roland Garros debut in 2005, twenty-one springs ago, when Federer and Nadal were just beginning to split the world between them. They lived through the era of the Big Three as privileged spectators and occasional obstacles. Survivors, more than protagonists.

And yet calling them survivors is ungenerous. Because what they leave behind cannot be measured in trophies.

Wawrinka leaves with three Slams in his cabinet: Australian Open 2014, Roland Garros 2015, US Open 2016. Three finals, three wins, every time against the world number one. Once Nadal, twice Djokovic. Few players in history have had such a surgical record on the biggest stages. Career-high ranking of three, sixteen ATP titles. That is not a journeyman's career.

Monfils, on the other hand, never reached a Slam final. He made it to two semifinals, he was world number six in 2016, he has won thirteen ATP titles. Last year, in Auckland, he became the oldest tournament winner of the ATP era. Solid numbers, nothing legendary.

But the statistics never told the whole story of who these two really were.

The romantic and the acrobat

Wawrinka was the one-handed backhand. That backhand. The shot McEnroe called the most beautiful on tour while Federer was still playing. A motion that belonged to another era: the shoulder closing, the arm extending, the ball leaving the strings with a sound unlike any other. Down the line, cross-court, on the rise. Always the same gesture. Always the absolute risk.

There was something romantic about Wawrinka, and not only because of the shot. There was the story of the late bloomer, the player who at twenty-eight still hadn't won anything important and then, suddenly, began to beat the ones who couldn't be beaten. Nadal in Melbourne. Djokovic in Paris. Djokovic again in New York. Three times the world number one in a Slam final, three times he won. A terrifying efficiency for someone who, outside those weeks, looked like any other player.

Monfils was the opposite. He was pure talent that never quite turned into results. The legs, first of all. Those sprinter's legs that let him reach balls no one else would have even chased. The split on clay. The tweeners. Serves returned from a meter behind the fence. The arm stretching backwards for an impossible topspin lob, and then the smile, always the smile, even when he was losing.

Monfils treated the court as a stage. You could love him or hate him for it, but you couldn't ask him to be different. He was born that way.

What we are losing

Tennis in 2026 is far more uniform than it was in 2005. Bodies are more similar, tactics more interchangeable, rallies longer and more centered. The baseline has won against the one-handed backhand, and against unpredictability. The game is played at two hundred kilometers an hour from the right corner to the left, and whoever lifts the ball one meter past the opponent usually wins the point.

This is not a judgment. It is an evolution. Sport becomes more efficient, as all sports do. Coaches teach the two-handed backhand because it is safer. Academies select for physique. Data rewards consistency over creativity.

And yet something, in this passage, gets left behind.

The idea gets left behind that there can be different ways of being on a court. That a player can play to win and play to entertain at the same time. That the elegance of a gesture, even if it produces fewer points than efficiency, is still worth cultivating. That one can be a late, flawed, unstable champion, and yet capable of rising three times in the most important moments of one's life.

Wawrinka and Monfils were not the best of their generation. They were not even close. But they were necessary.

Four all

They played each other eight times in their careers. Four wins apiece. A kind of perfect symmetry, almost suspicious in how clean it is. Wawrinka ahead in the Slams, two to one. Monfils the only winner on grass. The last time at Wimbledon in 2024: Monfils in three sets, two tiebreaks, two old lions still granting themselves one more meeting.

Eight matches spread over almost twenty years. Never a Slam semifinal between them, never a title on the line. And yet every time they crossed paths it felt like a small celebration, because the two strangest backhands on tour met: the one-hander of Wawrinka, the purest; and the two-hander of Monfils, fired off with the coordination of someone who was born to do gymnastics and somehow ended up playing tennis.

Now that four-all stays there forever. No one will ever break the tie.

The double farewell

On May 25th, Wawrinka walked off the Simonne-Mathieu under an ovation that weighed more than the defeat. De Jong, the Dutch lucky loser brought in at the last minute after Fils' withdrawal, had done his job in four sets. The stands were applauding for the man who, eleven years earlier, had lifted the Coupe des Mousquetaires right there in Paris. "It is hard, I do not want to say goodbye here," Wawrinka said, in tears. He added that he had given everything for this sport, and that he knew it was the right choice.

A few hours later, on the same day, it was Monfils' turn. Evening session on the Chatrier, five sets against Gaston, another Frenchman, fourteen years younger, finished at midnight. Gasquet, Simon, and Tsonga walked onto the court. The four musketeers of the French generation that never won Roland Garros. On the big screen, the messages from Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Alcaraz, Sinner. They all said the same thing in different words: thank you.

They were almost identical ceremonies, one in the afternoon and one at night, on the same day. As if Paris had decided to close the same chapter twice, just to make sure we understood.

What remains

Ten years from now, no one will remember the score of Monfils against Gaston, nor the score of Wawrinka against de Jong. And that is fine. Farewell matches are never real matches. They are thresholds, rituals, photographs.

What will remain is something else. There will remain a one-handed backhand that struck the ball with a different sound. There will remain a player who made his sneakers fly as if the racquet were an extension of the entire body, not just of the arm. There will remain three Slam finals won against the world number one by a man who was not supposed to win them. There will remain the idea that one can stand on a court the way one stands on a stage: to move people, not only to defeat the next opponent.

Tennis is losing two players, certainly. But above all it is losing a way of being a player. A way that probably will not return, because the sport is heading in another direction, and that is fine.

Wawrinka and Monfils were not Federer, Nadal, Djokovic. They did not change tennis. They inhabited it. They made it richer without rewriting its rules. They were proof that one can leave a mark without being a protagonist, and that certain gestures — a backhand, a leap, a smile after a lost point — weigh more than certain trophies.

An era is closing. Not the era of champions, because champions will always be there. What is closing is the era of artists.