Frances Tiafoe impresses during French Open first-round win
PARIS — Way up here just below the 49th parallel, with the sun still way up there through the early-evening hours, Frances Tiafoe played on Court 7 around dinnertime Monday as Carlos Alcaraz played on Court Suzanne Lenglen.
Court 7 is among the cozy French Open courts wee enough that a player can hear people chattering or whispering or maybe even texting. It has about a dozen rows of seats on two sides, two rows at one end and zero rows and one fence at the other. Suzanne Lenglen, a 10,000-seat stadium with a court, ranks among the giants here, befitting the name of the brilliant diva it honors. It doesn’t cast a shadow over Court 7 — Courts 8 and 9 stand amid the two — but it does tend to hover.
To watch the 12th-seeded Tiafoe, 25, win on Court 7 was to hear the roars coming from Lenglen and to wonder what latest wonder No. 1 Alcaraz, 20, might have concocted with his racket and his reflexes and his rapid legs. At one point late in Tiafoe’s commanding 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 push through Filip Krajinovic of Serbia, Alcaraz’s face appeared through some trees on the big screen on the Lenglen facade, as he did his post-victory on-court interview. His giant smile might have looked haunting if it weren’t so endearing.
Advertisement
Tiafoe, the Marylander ranked No. 12, and Alcaraz, the Spaniard ranked No. 1, are just eight months removed from their trip together through a thundering U.S. Open semifinal in New York, where they roamed into a fifth set with a whole stack of things jittering in the balance. Alcaraz won that set, 6-3, which just went to reiterate a truth.
The margins in top-realm tennis always seem to be headed from minuscule to more minuscule. There’s no place for the slightest complacency.
Tiafoe gave reporters a tutorial on complacency at the 2023 Australian Open, the year’s first Grand Slam, after he arrived at the same juncture he had reached in 2019: the moment after a breakthrough that calls for the hard, hard art of sustaining it. Just as he had reached the 2019 Australian Open quarterfinals, now he had reached the 2022 U.S. Open semifinals.
Advertisement
Alcaraz might not have had enough time on Earth to experience complacency if ever he would anyway. He said the following after his 6-0, 6-2, 7-5 win over 159th-ranked Flavio Cobolli of Italy:
“Well, I was 10 years old, something like that . . .”
(Note: That’s only 10 years ago.)
“. . . when I started, you know, to think about being a professional player, you know, about my dreams.”
(Note: Occasionally, there’s somebody out there whose dreams do seem to be in a hurry.)
“It was that age, and, yeah, it’s a great feeling to feel that, you know, 10 years after. So it’s something crazy for me. Yeah, I do think it’s the best feeling in the world to be number one, to know that I reached my dream really, really quick. Yeah, that’s all.”
He beamed.
Tiafoe, barely beneath Alcaraz that day in New York, if a little more so since then as Alcaraz has won four titles in 2023, belongs to the more populous group. While his biography is rare — son of Sierra Leonean immigrants, childhood spent in College Park as his father worked as head of maintenance at a tennis training center — his trajectory isn’t.
Advertisement
For one thing, he has scuffled on the clay of the French, as many Americans have. As he played Krajinovic, ranked No. 93, their meeting contained symmetry because Krajinovic had bounced Tiafoe in the first round at the 2019 French Open — in five sets, 6-0 in the fifth — during Tiafoe’s first try at a Grand Slam after his heady trip to Australia that year. Tiafoe came in 1-7 after seven trips to this most grueling of the biggies.
Between late May 2019 and late May 2023, Tiafoe did what normal world-class players often do: He wavered in a sport brimming with people only too elated to steamroll your wavering. From No. 29 not long after that 2019 Australian Open, he found No. 84 by February 2020. Restored and then some to No. 17 by this past January in Australia, where he ultimately fell in the third round, he gave about as edifying a talk on complacency as any athlete ever has. A young man unafraid to share himself shared himself.
“It’s not even comparable,” he said of the two arrivals. “I was young [in 2019], man. I turned 21 during the [Australian Open]. All these things were so new. ... I was kind of happy to be there. It was super unexpected. I caught on fire. And I got really complacent. My career was only going this way. Since I was young, I was only going this way. Then I was just like: ‘All right, cool, I did it. I’m 21 years old. I’m 29 in the world. I’m just going to keep going.’
“Got complacent, not doing the work, being lax on a lot of different things, on the details, and it hurt me. It really hurt me. The game caught up to me. You lose confidence, and then by the time you know it, [opponents] start figuring it out. It doesn’t take much, man. Then by the time you know, you’re playing Challengers and you are like, ‘God damn, where did it all go?’ And then you have to get yourself out of a hole. So, yeah, I’m so much more focused and just really want it.”
In that vein, Tiafoe’s second-ever win at the French Open looked notable for its arrant lack of complacency. It lasted 2 hours 8 minutes. It featured wobbles followed with cures for the wobbles. A dip to 15-30 while serving for the match led to two aces down the middle. He next has a first meeting with Aslan Karatsev, a 29-year-old Russian ranked No. 62. Karatsev has been to No. 14 and to No. 129 in recent years, as that’s what normal brilliant players do.
Advertisement
Tiafoe knows progress here will show further victory over complacency, so he beamed over this win even as he declined a question afterward. He signed autographs and took selfies and crossed the court to hug people who included spectators (and basketball stars) Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose.
Minutes later, Alcaraz began his news conference with, “Well, I think I played great,” and it sounded charming from the youngest U.S. Open champion since Pete Sampras in 1990, because now and then some lives do go like that.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGeAcHyUaGlyZ5anrq%2BvxKxkraGRm7ymecWrnKebmGK8sbHNaA%3D%3D