Les Mousquetaires – the French tennis greats who dominated the game
Yannik Noah was the last French winner of the Men’s Singles at Roland Garros. It was as long ago as 1983 when he lifted the Coupe des Mousquetaires, a long time ago though not quite as long as the gap between Fred Perry and Andy Murray. Roger Federer wasn’t yet two years old then and Rafa Nadal wouldn’t be born for another three years.
The Cup is named in honour of the players whose exploits compared with Dumas’ Musketeers – d’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis and Porthos – and who dominated the game almost as completely as Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have done in our time. You might say that Henri Cochet, Rene Lacoste and Jean Borotra were more dominant – they won the Men’s Singles in Paris every year from 1924 to 1932, winning also at Wimbledon and Forest Hills. They won numerous Doubles titles too usually depending on which of them partnered the fourth Musketeer and Doubles specialist, Jean Brugnon.
They won the Davis Cup in 1927 and held it till 1933 when they lost to Great Britain. One might add that, just as with Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray, when a Musketeer won one of the Slams, he had usually beaten another Musketeer in the final.
My father-in-law, born 1910, was a great tennis fan who, in conversation about modern players, would often turn the talk to the Musketeers. The athletic and unorthodox Borotra, a Basque who had grown up playing pelota and always wore a beret on court, was his especial favourite. Borotra would be a junior Minister for Sport in the first eighteen months of the Vichy Government, was later arrested by the Gestapo and spent the last eighteen months of the war in a concentration camp.
France continues to produce good tennis players, far more than we do – it’s been quite usual for the last thirty years to see three or four Frenchmen in the top twenty of official rankings – but there have been no champions. French women have done better, Amelie Mauresmo and Marion Bartoli both winning the Ladies Singles at Wimbledon. There have been quite a few who as young players seemed to be likely champions, Henri Leconte, Guy Forget, Richard Gasquet and Gael Monfils for instance. Yet none of them made it, and, though Monfils and Gasquet are still playing, exhilaratingly in Monfils’s case, beautifully in Gasquet’s, it now seems improbable that either will win at Roland Garros or Wimbledon. I suppose if Monfils found his best form and could maintain it over a fortnight, and Federer, Nadal and Djokovic fell by the wayside, he might just do it. It would be wonderful if he did, for there is no more engaging player on the tour, a real virtuoso.
It’s generally rash to make predictions in the first week of a tournament, but you would have to be more than rash to bet on there being a new champion – that is, one who hasn’t already won one of the four major titles. Actually, even at the time of writing perforce while the second round is still underway, it’s difficult to see past Rafa Nadal. There are three others who have won at Roland Garros – Federer, Wawrinka and Djokovic, but Nadal is going for his twelfth title there. It’s really quite extraordinary – he has won the Men’s Singles there more often than the Musketeers put together. His first title came in 2005. To jog your memory, Jacques Chirac was President of France, Tony Blair Prime Minister and Michael Howard Leader of the Conservative party. When it comes to the red clay of Roland Garros, the judgement on the greatest of 18th century racehorses seems appropriate: “Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere”.
There are those who dislike the red clay. The obstreperous young Australia Nick Kyrgios withdrew this year declaring that “Roland Garros sucks”. Well, dislike of the surface is reasonable if you can’t play well on it, and there have been French Open champions who expressed a similar dislike of Wimbledon. “Grass is for cows”, said one, Carlos Moya as I recall. Fair enough, but tennis would be much duller if it was all played on standard-paced hard courts. There was indeed a time when it seemed as if the French Open was won most often by players who didn’t win, or even come close to winning, at Wimbledon or in New York or Melbourne. But, even setting aside the fact that Bjorn Borg won six titles at Roland Garros and five at Wimbledon, Nadal has a full house of victories in the slams as of course have Federer and Djokovic, while Stan Wawrinka has also won the Australian title.
“The old Order changeth, yielding place to new”, declared Lord Tennyson. “Not much sign of that happening,” a tennis fan today might reply. The top platform is small and hard to scale. You don’t need your thumbs to count the number of still active players who have won the Men’s Singles at one of the four major tournaments. Apart from those already mentioned, there’s the too often injured Juan Martin Del Potro and Marin Cilic, and I think that’s it. They belong to the same generation as Nadal & Co, as indeed do Monfils and Gasquet. Over the years several have been hailed as the Next Big Thing, the coming champion, only to fall back into the ranks, Grigor Dimitrov and Milos Raonic being two examples. One day you’re the heir in waiting, the next you are still waiting but further down the line.
Now we have the Austrian Dominic Thiem, beaten by Nadal in last year’s final, the Germany Alexander Zverov, the young Greek Stefanos Tsitispas who was last year’s breakthrough boy, and perhaps the Croatian Borna Coric who has the ability to beat the best and the habit of losing to mediocre players. Thiem has come closer than the others, but he is now twenty-five, and time’s chariot is at his heels, even if Federer, Nadal & Co have shown that careers in tennis can be prolonged successfully for years after your thirtieth birthday, even in Federer’s case till you are within sight of forty.
Some day of course Tennyson may be proved right, but not yet, I guess. Meanwhile in France the wait for a successor to the Musketeers goes on and on – even as we, on this side of the Channel, are already wondering when, if ever, we shall find one for Andy Murray. Still we have memories to console us, though there can’t be many, I fancy, French centenarians who remember the Musketeers in their pomp. Still, Borotra and Cochet went on playing quite good, if occasional, tournament tennis till they were in their fifties – I’ve a notion that Cochet knocked the British number two, Geoff Paish out of a tournament in Bournemouth or Eastbourne in 1951 or 52. So there may be a number of elderly French folk who can stare into their Pernod or Pastic and mutter that these moderns may be all right, but you should have seen the Musketeers. “Now that really was tennis… with wooden racquets and long trousers and Borotra wearing a Basque beret, not a vulgar American baseball cap…”