The pros are gathering in Paris as we speak. For a U.S. tennis fan, the city represents a mirror universe—kind of like that Star Trek where Kirk and Scotty travel through the looking glass and meet a version of Spock who has a goatee. My first experience in this alternate world came in 1998, during a fourth-round classic match between a clean-cut rookie named Marat Safin and the local favorite, Cedric Pioline.
It was my first trip to Paris, as well as Roland Garros. I thought of the city as the flip side of the same scuzzy coin as New York. The cabbies were from different parts of the Third World and they listened to Thelonious Monk rather than talk radio, but they still drove like maniacs. Instead of buses and SUVs barreling down four-lane avenues, Paris was clogged with itty-bitty green things on wheels that snaked through narrow streets. Manhattan’s sound was—and is—a roar; Paris’ center city seemed to grind.
The differences were more obvious—more concentrated—in a tennis stadium. There was the clay, of course. Not only was it a color you almost never saw in the U.S., it seemed to extend the game well beyond the lines. Court Centrale (now called Chatrier) is an ocean of orange. The players not only have more time to track balls down, they have much more room to do it than you or me. In that stadium, the game expands. Even now when I play on courts at my home club, I can’t believe they’re the same size as the one in Chatrier. If Centre Court at Wimbledon is tennis’ most historic site, and Ashe Stadium at night its glitziest, Chatrier is its grandest arena.
When a French player steps on this court, it also becomes the sport’s tensest setting as well. Doom seems to hang in the air. As Pioline warmed up with Safin, the seats behind the Frenchman filled with dark suits and gray-haired eminences. As far as I can tell, no other Slam features its own federation members as prominently as Roland Garros. The French Tennis Federation has until very recently controlled the development of virtually all of the country’s best juniors; seeing them arrayed behind a French player at Chatrier, you don’t get the feeling they’re rooting for the young person in front of them. You get the feeling they’re judging him. No wonder there’s been just one homegrown champion at Roland Garros in the Open era.
On the other side of the net—and the federation bigwigs—was an 18-year-old I quickly came to think of as the Future of Tennis. Marat Safin had already upset the defending champion, Gustavo Kuerten, and tuned Andre Agassi 3, 3, and 3 to get here. I had yet to see the Russian play, but he even in the warm-up he looked like something new—a huge guy who also had sparkling-clean strokes. I didn’t think there had ever been a taller pure baseliner. Safin looked like the game’s next logical progression.
That still didn’t prepare me for the way he hit the ball. I was sitting fairly close to the court and felt knocked back by his strokes—I was almost frightened for Pioline. I know this sounds hard to believe now; it’s a measure of how the game has continued to evolve that Safin’s strokes are not out of the ordinary anymore. It also helps that he doesn’t hit them with anywhere near the same abandon and desire.
Pioline, first-class athlete that he was, adjusted more quickly than I thought possible. He was reacting rather than dictating; in many rallies he seemed to be hanging on by a thread. But Pioline had a talent and athleticism equal to Safin’s. He was bigger than most French players, but he had their creativity. My friend Kamakshi Tandon says that Roger Federer has always reminded her of Pioline, and he’s at the top of most people’s lists among greatest players never to win a major. Buoyed by the crowd on this day, he weathered the opening Safin storm and won the first set 7-5.
The Russian wasn’t going anywhere, though. While Safin’s deep negative streak and penchant for drama were already well-developed—I can remember him pleading, futilely, with the clouds and the sky even then—he was not yet the lumbering zombie of squandered potential and self-loathing you see before you today. The most obvious new element of his game was his backhand. There had been two-handed weapons before, but Safin’s went beyond most of those. It was every bit the equal of his forehand, something almost never seen on the men’s side up to that point.
One of the more important and somewhat unheralded ways in which the game has changed in the last 20 years has been on the backhand side. Ivan Lendl and Jim Courier were able to dominate for a time with their inside-out forehands, but the days of winning with that shot alone ended when other players learned to knock off the backhand down the line. You can see the effects in the decline of Courier and the way that Agassi stopped relying on his slashing forehand and learned to grind from both sides with relentless ball movement.
Today most pros use their backhands as weapons. Gasquet, Ljubicic, Djokovic, Davydenko, Nalbandian, the list goes on. The ones who don’t—Moya and Roddick, say—suffer mightily from that weakness. Even at 18, Safin could rifle the down-the-line backhand well enough to neutralize an inside-out forehand. Against Pioline, he did it well enough to win the second set and take the third to a tiebreaker. By this point, the match had become a spectacular display of shotmaking, as well as a seesaw battle.
It was also my first live exposure to the phenomenon of the French tennis audience. I had heard about how fickle they were, but as far as I could tell they were different from U.S. fans in two major ways: (1) The French were united in everything they did, and (2) They did not tolerate what they considered unsporting behavior. At all.
A decade later, I can still hear the chants of “Ced-REEK! (clap-clap-clap), Ced-REEK! (clap-clap-clap), Ced-REEK! (clap-clap-clap).” There was a marching cadence to these words that made them infinitely more powerful and catchy than the half-hearted “Let’s go Pete” chant you might have heard at Flushing Meadows around the same time. Chatrier was rocking.
