Benoit Paire suffers 37-minute ATP Challenger loss, LOLs in response

Mercurial Frenchman Benoit Paire made an otherwise routine ATP Challenger match on Wednesday anything but.

The 35-year-old former Top 20 player was trounced by eighth-seeded Scot Jacob Fearnley, a Texas Christian University alumnus who led the school to its first NCAA National Championship this year, in the first round of the Open de Rennes in France, a relatively innocuous result between a young player on the rise and a veteran scuffling for form.

But the way in which it played out certainly wasn't: Despite seving at just 43%, Fearnley won the match 6-1, 6-0 in 37 minutes, winning the last 10 games. He broke serve six times, and in all, Paire won just 21 points in the match.

After doubling faulting on match point, the Frenchman was jeered by the crowd, and sarcastically blew kisses towards them as he sauntered to the net for the handshake.

The match wasn't the shortest in ATP history, but it did harken back to another infamous performance: In 2014, Finland's Jarkko Nieminen defeated the equally-mercurial Bernard Tomic in 28 minutes in the first round of the Miami Open. The first set of that affair lasted just 13 minutes in what was Tomic's first match action after double hip surgery.

(Both of the sets between Fearnley and Paire neared the 20-minute mark.)

While Paire doesn't have a lengthy injury layoff to blame for this one (he did retire, though, from his last match action, two weeks ago at a different Challenger in Como, Italy), he nonetheless shrugged off the result on X, formerly Twitter, with a emoji-laden post.

The result is the latest in a line of maladies for the former Top 20 player, who is now 35 years old and has won just eight matches in 24 events this season. Ranked just south of No. 100 to start the year, Paire has plummeted in the ATP rankings to outside the Top 250, and has contested just one Grand Slam main draw (courtesy of a wild card to Roland Garros in 2023) in the last two years.