Courting Disaster

Caroline Garcia threw her arm high in the air and brought it down hard in frustration. On the one hand, the reaction was understandable: She had just missed a return of serve and allowed her opponent, Donna Vekic, to hold serve. On the other hand, it was a little weird: Garcia’s mistake made the score 1-1 in the first set. The 21-year-old Frenchwoman had played two games at Roland Garros, and already she was slapping herself on the thigh.

It was that kind of day for the 31st seed, who, despite going up a set and a break, would eventually lose to 165th-ranked Donna Vekic of Croatia, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2. Garcia double faulted seven times, two of them at the most inopportune of moments: To give back her service break in the second set, and to go down a break in the third. She rushed on her backhand, overhit her forehand, and played with a good deal more anxiety than patience.

Vekic, as Garcia herself said, played well, and at just 18 years old she's still a serious prospect. There was nothing the Frenchwoman could do about her 13 aces today. But as soon as Garcia, France’s second-ranked woman, coughed up the lead in the second set, she seemed to guess that bad things were about to happen for her again in Paris. And she was right.

Those bad things didn't stop when she left the court. This was the first "question" that Garcia heard from a reporter in her press conference afterward:

“It’s a bitter disappointment, total disappointment. Why is this the case?”

Garcia begged to differ about how “bitter” the disappointment was, but she didn't disagree with the "total" part. Mostly, she sounded desperate for an answer to her problems in Paris. In her four trips to Roland Garros, she has lost in the second round, first round, second round, first round, and first round again. Court Philippe Chatrier was the place where she announced herself to the world as a teenager in 2011, when she nearly upset Maria Sharapova and inspired Andy Murray to say that she would be No. 1 in the world someday. Now it has become the court that she dreads most.

“I’m disillusioned,” said Garcia, who went out in a hurry, 6-1, 6-3, to Ana Ivanovic in Paris last year. “Every French Open I can’t play tennis, whether I’m playing a Top 10 player or Vekic, who is a good player. I can’t make it here. It doesn’t depend on the opponent. It just depends on myself, and I can’t play here at the French Open, and hope that will change in the future.”

Garcia asked to be put on another court, but was denied.

“I made that request,” Garcia said. “I wanted to play on a smaller court. But that’s the way it is. They decided to organize the match on center court, and I practiced for the whole week. But it’s very different to practice.”

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Garcia isn't the first player to say that Chatrier is different from all other courts, even all other stadium courts. In a word, it’s bigger. The area surrounding the rectangular lines is immense, more so than it appears on TV. When you look down on it from one side of the arena, it’s hard to believe that the lines on the clay below aren’t twice the size of the lines on the court that you play on at home. Roger Federer used to say that he found it hard to find his bearings in the middle of all that space. As for Rafael Nadal, one of the reasons he has been so successful there is that he has so much room to run around.

“It’s a big court,” Garcia said today. “It does encapsulate what Roland Garros is. For me, it’s too much to play on this court, and next year I will ask to play on Court No. 9, a sort of hidden court where there is nobody.”

It has been said in the past that the French men thrive in front of the home fans, while the women, well, don’t. Over the last 10 years, the only woman from France to reach the semifinals was Marion Bartoli in 2010. The best Frenchwoman of recent vintage, Amelie Mauresmo, was just 25-15 at Roland Garros, her lowest winning percentage at any of the majors.

Still, the French men aren't that much better at Roland Garros. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils have played and won their share of thrillers in Chatrier, but neither has reached a final there. The fact that they’re both trying to become the first male Grand Slam champion from France since Yannick Noah in 1983 only intensifies the pressure as they get closer to that goal.

How much help does a Grand Slam owe its home players? It’s understood that some scheduling preferences will be given. At tea time during Wimbledon, Andy Murray can usually be found comfortably ensconced inside Centre Court and safely out of the rain; no one would expect it to be any other way. The situation is different, though, when a country’s second-ranked woman player wants to be kept out of the main stadium, and to play in front of fewer of the fans who want to watch her.

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Either way, it seems, a smaller court would only do Garcia so much good—she’d still be at Roland Garros.

“It’s very tough for me to play in Paris,” she said, “far more difficult than in other tournaments. I’m quite emotional at times. ... So far being emotional hasn’t helped me [here], so I will continue to work and to make strides.”

Garcia probably would have benefited from a different court assignment; even the second stadium, Lenglen, is significantly smaller than Chatrier. But at some point, if you want to have a shot at winning your home Slam, you’re going to have to learn to play on the court where they hand out the trophy. By the end of her press conference on Sunday, Garcia seemed to understand that only she, without any help from the fans or officials, could make that happen.

Asked if she had talked over her Chatrier qualms with Mauresmo, Garcia said, “Never."

“It could be a good idea to talk about it,” she continued, “but we all have our own problems, our own solutions. Haven’t yet found the right solution to play good tennis here. We’ll see what happens next year.”