Surprises and upsets are the normal fare at sporting events, but do they determine outcomes? Usually not: this year’s French Open, which concluded yesterday, pitted the no.’s 1 and 2 seeds against each other in both the women’s and men’s singles draws, and the most successful Italian in the sport ever, Sara Errani, won in the doubles, with Jasmine Paolini and the mixed, with Andrea Vavassori.
Miss Gauff’s laser focus and discipline did it, say what Miss Sabalenka will about this being the worst final she ever played.
Stronger, better players tend to win. This is not a judgmental statement, but a factual one. You may see in the underdog the more inspiring story line and the more likeable character, but the hard power is real. Miss Errani and Jasmine Paolini are charming and tenacious, and five-five and five-four, respectively, so there.
You can argue about hard power, sure. How many divisions does the Pope have, Stalin famously — or infamously — asked toward the end of World War II. No one warned him a seminarian named Karol Wojtyla heard it, and also heard a higher power telling him faith was stronger than a hundred divisions. Then again, the cost of all those decades.
However, this is tennis, not Western civilization. The beauty of the men’s draw at Rolland Garros this year was that you could not help but like both finalists and recognize that we cannot say yet who is going to prove better, stronger, more durable, and improvable over the next years during which their rivalry promises to be central to the sport. The streaming film shows Carlos Alcaraz, fresh off his win over Jannik Sinner at the Italian Open in Rome, saving three match points in the fourth set, having lost the first two and won the third! Epic match, going into four hours!
It has been quite a show. Three American men got as far as the quarters, best in a quarter century in this tournament, where the last American winner was Andre Agassi in 1999. Well, the French have not done better on their home court, last of theirs was Yannik Noah in 1983. Happily this year, they had a Cinderella with a wild card named Lois Boisson, ranked in the mid-300’s yet able to beat Buffalo’s own Jessica Pegula (world no.3) to make it all the way to the semis, where she ran into Coco Gaff.
Who went on to win the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen, first American since Serena Williams in 2015. She came back from a set down to beat world no. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, who had got to the final by beating the defending champion, Iga Swiatek. Miss Gauff’s laser focus and discipline did it, say what Miss Sabalenka will about this being the worst final she ever played. What I say is if you play awful, it is surely in large part because your opponent is beating you, disrupting your game, as the mighty Bill Tilden used to say. However, sour grapes or whatever, they surely will meet again, and Miss Gauff as usual was generous in victory (her second Slam, having beaten the same Miss Sabalenka at the U.S. Open in 2023), and thanked her parents and the Lord.
It usually ends this way, the best against the best. Carlos Alcaraz, as we were noting on the basis of watching from a great distance thanks to marvelous technology, we were saying — yes, with a fantastic effort, using every shot in his book, survives what seemed like a Sinner clinch and takes the match to a deciding fifth set.
The rest is history. Or sports stats. Or it just got to where I figured to let it be, I can watch the reruns and meanwhile I can go and hit a few in between an intermittent drizzle. But before that I owe my readers a serious correction.
An error in the previous column on this tournament stated that James Gordon Bennett, Jr., fled to Paris to escape his father’s wrath following some scandalous behavior that wrecked his engagement to a high society lass. No, the elder Bennett was gone by then. Also, his great paper, The New York Herald, did indeed report the fracas. This was in the late 1870s. James Jr., who in the previous decade served with distinction in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, did well in France, launching a Paris edition of the Herald (eventually to become the Paris Herald Tribune), and promoting sporting events. He was in Paris during the Great War and was taken away by the flu as the Allies, led by Americans including the 369th New York, the Harlem Hellfighters, were on their way to the Rhine.
Sports were mainly amateur affairs back then, but you could place bets: Bennett Jr won one of these in the first transatlantic yacht race. In tennis today, the money is pretty reasonable, you get almost $3 million if you win the French Open (women and men the same). However, you get under 90 thousand if you lose in the first round. So clearly there is an incentive to keep getting more better.
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