Wawrinka and Monfils, one last time in Paris

A generation, when it takes its leave, never does so all at once. It says goodbye one player at a time, in different months, with different press conferences, while the calendar keeps turning and nobody seems to really notice. Then, every now and then, a week comes along in which the calendar itself makes the effort that we do not make: it takes two names, places them side by side, and says here, look at them now, before they are gone.

Stan Wawrinka and Gaël Monfils have received the wild card for Roland Garros 2026. For both, it will, in all likelihood, be their last home Slam. Both have announced they will retire at the end of the season. The French Federation invited them to Paris not for what they can still do on court, but for what they have done in twenty years of careers. They are two gifts. Two very different gifts.

Wawrinka, the outsider who hurt the very best

Wawrinka is forty-one and ranked 125. He has won three Slams: Melbourne 2014, Paris 2015, New York 2016. He is one of the few players of the modern era to have won all three by defeating, in the final, a member of the Big Three. Nadal in Australia, Djokovic in Paris, Djokovic again in New York. Federer too came out on the wrong side of that one-handed backhand, in the quarterfinals of Roland Garros 2015, in what remains the most solemn of the Swiss wounds Wawrinka ever inflicted on his historic compatriot.

Wawrinka was never a generational phenomenon. He never had number one within reach, he never won the ATP Finals, he never won Wimbledon. He stopped trying around thirty, when top-level tennis should already begin saying goodbye to you, and precisely at that moment he did the thing nobody expected: he started winning Slams.

Wawrinka was a nuisance. A historic nuisance. For fifteen years the Big Three wrote the history of men's tennis, and in those fifteen years a Swiss gentleman with a one-handed backhand and a checkered shirt walked into the family reunions three times and sat at the head of the table. He won when he wasn't supposed to. He hit the ball like nobody hit the ball in 2015, flat forehand at two hundred kilometers per hour, backhand unloaded from the middle of the court, and that right arm that seemed built specifically for those three specific moments of his life.

On Paris, in particular, Wawrinka left something that endures. The 2015 semifinal against Tsonga, won in four sets in front of a crowd that until that moment had been all for the Frenchman. The final against Djokovic won in four, with those patterned shorts that went around the world, and with a Djokovic who, for the only time in his career, truly seemed to surrender halfway through the fourth set. The 2017 Roland Garros, lost in the final to Nadal, but played at a level few left-handers have ever had to contain on that clay. Paris was, for Wawrinka, the geographical place of his difference.

Now he returns to Paris with his hand already a little lighter. He has said many times that continuing to play, at his age, is a choice you make in the morning, not at the start of the season. The French Federation's wild card sounds like a thank you. But it is also an acknowledgment. Wawrinka is not in the draw because he is the world number 125. He is in the draw because Paris knows what it owes to the man who, one June evening eleven years ago, gave it one of the strangest and most quintessentially Paris finals of all time.

Monfils, spectacle as a profession

Monfils is thirty-nine and ranked 222. He has never won a Slam. He has never played a Slam final. His ATP biography, from this point of view, is almost embarrassing for someone who was world number six, who held the top 20 for the better part of a decade, who won thirteen tournaments. Two Slam semifinals, Paris 2008 and New York 2016. A handful of quarterfinals. And then an infinity of matches lost in ways that only he knew how to lose.

Monfils is living proof that tennis is not only about rankings. If it were, we would not remember him. We would remember him the way we remember Davydenko, Robredo, the many honest professionals who had better careers than his and who move no one.

Of Monfils, instead, everyone has a memory. The slide to the back of the court with the forehand caught centimeters above the concrete. The smash hit on a crossed jump like a volleyball player. The topspin forehand finishing with a Lasso even Sampras never tried. The returns laid out in a dive. The matches in which he seemed to be playing a different sport, closer to artistic gymnastics than tennis, and from that other sport he then re-entered ours, usually losing.

For years we told him he was a waste. That with that body, that hand, that court coverage, he should have done more. We accused him of not taking himself seriously, of lacking hunger, of settling for number 6. We told him so many times that it almost no longer feels right to keep telling him now, at the end.

Because Monfils, in truth, has always told us one fairly clear thing: tennis is not a machine for producing Slams. It is a craft you can also practice for the sake of practicing it. For the pleasure of seeing how the crowd reacts when you play a drop shot with a twirled racquet. For the pleasure of chasing down a ball that anyone else would have let go. For the pleasure, simply, of showing that the human body, at least his, can do things that the rulebook does not forbid but that athletic common sense advises against.

Paris is preparing for him, in addition to the wild card, an evening on Philippe Chatrier, on May 21. It is called Gaël & Friends. Players and singers will come, it will be a charity event, and it will above all be a way of closing a circle: the only Slam where Monfils, a Parisian boy, ever truly felt at home, from when he was a junior until today.

What a generation leaves behind

Wawrinka and Monfils were born about a year and a half apart. They traveled the same circuit for almost twenty years. They shared locker rooms, trains, joint press conferences at the Davis Cup. And yet they played two almost opposite kinds of tennis.

Wawrinka is the one who won despite everything. Despite the era, despite his age, despite never being considered part of that class. Monfils is the one who did not win despite everything. Despite the talent, despite an era that, from afar, granted him at least a window, despite a body that at twenty made tennis look easy.

They represented, within the same generation, two different ideas of what it means to play top-level tennis. One is the idea of the result, achieved even when it seemed no longer possible. The other is the idea of presence, of gesture, of relationship with those watching. They are not ideas in conflict. They are two sides of the same thing, because without one the other loses meaning. An era in which everyone played like Wawrinka would be an era without spectators. An era in which everyone played like Monfils would be an era without a roll of honor.

A generation leaves exactly this behind. It does not leave only numbers, and it does not leave only images. It leaves a balance between the two. It leaves the way in which the two things, for a certain number of years, knew how to coexist on adjacent courts, inside contemporary tournaments, in front of the same fans.

Now this balance is shifting. Sinner plays a kind of tennis that closely resembles the Wawrinka of 2014, but with the volume of talent turned up ten notches and the unforced error silenced. Alcaraz does things that not even Monfils dreamed of, but he does them while winning Slams, one after the other. The new generation seems to want to hold on to everything: the result and the spectacle, the rigor and the celebration. Maybe they will succeed. Maybe not. But they are trying, and that is what every new generation always tries to do with the previous one: integrate its separate pieces into a single figure.

For us, in the meantime, only one thing remains to be done. Go to Paris, even from home, even just on television. Watch Wawrinka step onto the court for what will probably be the last Slam match of his life. Watch Monfils step onto the court already knowing he will make the Chatrier laugh at least once, even if he loses. And remember, while we still have time, that we had them at the same time. That men's tennis, for twenty years, was also these two things. A Swiss gentleman who hit the ball better than anyone for three weeks a year, and a French boy who, on his home clay, reminded us each time that sport is also a place where people have fun.

When they are gone, no one will replace them. Not because better players will not come. But because certain ways of being in tennis simply cannot be passed down. They are lived while they are here, and then they end there.