FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn’t he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-wattage farewell to New York.
Somehow, all these decades later, I was still judging a Gael Monfils match by its opening set. My own unforced error. He got loose. As he reported after the match, Monfils started to move his legs better, stopped playing so upright, and remembered how well he’d been striking the ball all week. He styled on the 22-year-old Vallejo to win 2-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0, to the vast delight of those present, who got what they came for in the end: play that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment.
Monfils, who announced his retirement before the start of the 2026 season, has been saying goodbye to each stop on tour. Even in his dotage he’s remained a tough out, testing seeded players, and he won a tournament as recently as January 2025, which made him the oldest singles titleholder in tour history. It was as though his career, like his match play, was built for the interminable long haul. His fondness for the scenic route might have been frustrating at his peak, but as he winds down, fans will take as much of this as we can get, all of his physical comedy and emotional transparency.
Monfils entered this U.S. Open as a wild card, exactly 10 years after he made the semifinals here, an unforgettably odd match where he deployed avant-garde moon- and junkball against Novak Djokovic, the man who would ultimately compile a 20-0 record against him. That number sums up Monfils’s status as an elite player who ultimately couldn’t threaten the handful of generational talents in his cohort. He won no Slam, but won many hearts. Monfils captivates with his charm and invention, and I’ve returned to him many times as a subject over the years, though in surveying the work, my feelings have held steady. Eight years ago at Indian Wells, I wrote about the pleasure of watching him practice and the pain of watching him play his actual match. For all the thrills of the highlights package, watching a Monfils match front-to-back can leave one mystified or misled.
Tuesday night, before Monfils turned up the heat, I was left pondering many of the same questions as ever. He has compact and gorgeous groundstrokes on both wings, a big serve, the wingspan and athleticism to shut down the net. But he never wanted to sum up those skills to an aggressive style of tennis, at least not consistently. As Djokovic himself diagnosed after the aforementioned bizarre U.S. Open semifinal: “But that’s Gael. He loves defense, impossible shots, long rallies.” Monfils prefers to linger behind the baseline and stretch the rally like taffy, relying on his all-world court coverage, scrambling around from corner to corner, as if slowly ramping up to a spectacular punchline—the drop shot, the tweener, the leaping smash. What good is a punchline without its artful buildup, anyway? Maybe that’s the showman’s logic.
Two years ago I asked Monfils, an inveterate card gamer, to analogize his tennis to a Magic: The Gathering deck. He mentioned Esper Control, an archetype that negates whatever the opponent is trying to do before prevailing in the late game. That clarified a lot in my head.
In many memorable matches, though, Monfils seemed to lack the Djokovician endurance to win in the late game. If he did win, the toiling left him depleted enough to endanger his overall run in the tournament. Injuries often caught up with him before his opponents did. Last night, in two consecutive points, I watched Monfils park pristine winners on opposite sidelines, truly holy ball-striking, and I couldn’t help but wonder: What if he took his existing cards and built a different deck? What if he hugged the baseline, moved forward, took the first opening for a winner instead of the 12th, cut down the runtime of his matches? To the best of my knowledge, he was not lacking any of the required elements to play that way. Would this first-strike Gael Monfils have won a Slam? Maybe the answer would still be no, but maybe some of his worst matchups would have been less lopsided, and maybe he would have captured the Masters title that somehow eluded him his whole career.
Monfils himself kept chasing the top prizes. As recently as 2022, after losing a five-set Australian Open quarterfinal to Matteo Berrettini, he slipped an emotional shiv into the side of the entire tennis fandom. “It’s still tough for me, but somehow I’m not losing the faith. I need one time,” he said. “I won’t win 20, but one time, just one time I need. You know, I’m working for this. I still believe I can do it. It’s hard. You know, it’s been 20 years that I’m not doing the good thing, but who knows? This year it might click.”
Even on the cusp of retirement, it was hard not to hope, in the face of hard unfeeling reality, that it would still click for Gael Monfils. I could see the facets of his game that so many strivers lack. His backhand lets him to attack off both wings unlike his more forehand-dominant peers. He intuitively mixes up the spin and trajectory of his shots. His touch is evidenced by several lifetimes of trick shots. He never struggled with power at the end of his range. Sliding on all court surfaces, a skill perfected by the savviest students at the school of Djokovic, came to Monfils easily. He was one of the early innovators, too, right alongside Novak; some of my early memories of the Open are of a sleeveless young Gael grinning and skidding into some impossible shot.
It’s tempting to want more. Then you get out of your head and actually witness Monfils taking a bow mid-match in Queens, and wonder how one could want anything else for him. Tuesday’s match was glorious. I don’t think he would trade his career for those of his similarly gifted contemporaries who reached the Slam promised land. He hasn’t broken down his body, like Juan Martin del Potro, who secured the 2009 U.S. Open title. His imprint on the world will outlast that of Marin Cilic, who won in 2014. Spry and smiley as he was on day one, 40-year-old Gael Monfils gets to go to work and rile up crowds the world over. What is the ask, here, after all?
After the match, Monfils was asked about the outrageous jumping forehand winner he struck, and even though everyone who knows him knew the answer, he got one more opportunity to encapsulate his tennis philosophy:
Two sets to one, a break up, happy; why not? I won’t hit many more, to be honest. Why not? Yes, it’s harder, but somehow, it produce more happiness, more joy for me. You know, I tried it. Lucky I put it in, but somehow, you know, I’m here to also enjoy myself. There’s not many time, and it was the right moment, so why not to try?
Why not to try? An ethos two decades strong, soon to sunset.