“Accept, adapt, endure. That’s the circle.”
Stefanos Tsitsipas, July 2023
He is a social-media purveyor of wisdom and whimsy, both original and borrowed, but Stefanos Tsitsipas is above all a heck of a tennis player, as he reminded his peers and public at the Monte Carlo Open.
Pouncing on short balls. Defending acrobatically and serving big under duress. Ripping forehands and one-handed backhands with conviction and precision and then abruptly changing pace with the drop shot.
The Greek did it again and again on the French Riviera that he calls a second home, shaking himself out of the doldrums and winning his third Monte Carlo title.
That puts him in elite company. The only other men to win the Open three or more times are Ilie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, Thomas Muster and, of course, Rafael Nadal, who prevailed a record 11 times, as is his double-digit way on clay.
All were ranked No. 1 and went on to win at least one Grand Slam singles title, including the French Open. Tsitsipas, who will be 26 in August, has checked none of those boxes, and the odds are still not in his corner no matter how brilliantly he played last week to knock out the likes of Alexander Zverev, Karen Khachanov, Jannik Sinner and, in Sunday’s final, Casper Ruud.
It was a surprising, stirring run: particularly the victories over Zverev, who is back on the rise, and Sinner, who has been locked in and close to unbeatable for the last six months.
Tsitsipas sealed both difficult deals despite headwinds. Against Zverev, he lost a 5-0 second-set lead before recovering to close out the match by winning a tiebreaker. Against Sinner, Tsitsipas had to rally from a break down in the third set and would have had to rally from two breaks down if the umpiring crew had not blown a call, permitting Tsitsipas to avoid a double fault on break point at 1-3. Such human error will be out of the question in 2025 when electronic line calling is set to become mandatory on the ATP Tour on all surfaces. But to focus too heavily on the gaffe would be to do an injustice to Tsitsipas’s overall quality of play (and also to neglect another questionable umpiring decision that cost him a key point when Sinner broke his serve).
“I did need a week like this a lot, especially with the rough months that I have been through the last half of 2023 until now,” Tsitsipas said. “It hasn't been the best of times in terms of where I wanted to be, so getting back here and winning the title is something that I was definitely not aiming for and it came naturally.”
Tsitsipas generated more buzz in the last year for dating Spanish tennis star Paula Badosa than for his tennis results.
Until defeating Sinner, he had not beaten a top three player since 2022 and seemed to have many more questions than answers about his game. But his big week put him back where he belongs: in the top 10.
Nonetheless, he remains a member of the ATP’s heavily populated sandwich generation: squeezed between the enduring, record-smashing excellence of elders like Djokovic and Nadal and the incandescent brilliance of younger prodigies like Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, who already have won major titles at the Big Three’s expense.
Tsitsipas is very good, even great on occasion, but for now he also seems a cut below those two groups of superstars at their best. His backhand, first serve and big-match nerves have sometimes been found wanting, but it is still too early to write Tsitsipas off as a major factor. He was, lest we forget, one set away from winning the French Open in 2021 before Djokovic took over the final. Tsitsipas was also an Australian Open finalist just last year when Djokovic played the spoiler again.
Clay remains the Greek’s best surface. His career winning percentage on it is 77 percent compared to 65 percent on hardcourts and 55 percent on grass. The higher bounce and slightly slower conditions on clay give him just a bit more time to get organized, and his forehand is a special shot that can penetrate and devastate on any surface.
But the backhand was also a reliable weapon in Monte Carlo or to be more geographically precise Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which is the French commune just outside Monaco where the Monte Carlo Country Club is located despite its name.
“I think we both prefer our forehand sides over the backhands,” Ruud said after his 6-1, 6-4 defeat on Sunday. “But today, Stefanos also played heavy and good from his backhand side. It wasn’t like I found any big holes.”
Clearly it is a little too early to bury the single-handed drive backhand. In February, when Tsitsipas dropped out of the ATP top 10 for the first time since 2019, there were, for the first time, no players left in that elite group with a one-handed backhand.
But after Grigor Dimitrov reached the final of the Miami Open and Tsitsipas reclaimed his Monte Carlo title, there are now two sandwich-generation members with single-handers back in the top 10.
Amen to that. Tennis thrives on variety, not uniformity. It also thrives on visibility, and it would be welcome for those of us watching from afar instead of in person to devise a way to make the ball easier to see on red clay. It was sometimes all but invisible on my computer and television screen during the bright light of the day matches from Monte Carlo. There must be a better way: either changing the color of the balls during tournaments on red clay, altering camera angles, improving broadcast quality and picture density, or even allowing some events to make another attempt at using blue clay, which failed as an experiment at the Madrid Open in 2012 because of the suspect footing and Nadal’s firm resistance (but not because of the optics, which were excellent).
Pro tennis, in a Darwinian global entertainment market, can ill afford to make it a struggle for fans to follow the action. And there will be much to track in the weeks ahead. Nadal, the greatest claycourt player in history, is planning to relaunch his comeback (or farewell tour) in Barcelona this week at another tournament he long dominated.
Though Nadal did face Alcaraz in a lucrative one-day exhibition in Las Vegas last month, he has not competed on tour since playing - and playing very well - in Brisbane, Australia in early January. He withdrew from the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells in March with an abdominal muscle injury that made it particularly difficult to serve and then withdrew again from Monte Carlo.
But as he returns in Barcelona, he will have our full attention (and would have had mine even if I were not deep into writing a Nadal biography).
“We all know what Rafa is capable of and how quickly he can adjust,” Tsitsipas said. ‘I would not be surprised if we saw Rafa be in the finals of Barcelona, because that is something that he has done over and over again for years and years and years.”
For Tsitsipas and so many others, Nadal is still “the ultimate challenge on clay”. But there can be little doubt that Nadal has seen better and quicker days, and there can be no doubt that Djokovic, who has yet to win a tournament (or reach a final) in 2024, is struggling to find top form. And with Sinner seemingly more formidable on hard courts, and with Alcaraz banged up again, this time with an arm injury, there is perhaps a window of opportunity for a certain hirsute Greek with a philosophical bent to seize a few more days on clay.
Bring on Barcelona. Bring on Rome. And why not bring on Paris?
CC
“Life in your 20s is like driving a car with a broken GPS: you have no idea where you're going, but you're convinced you'll figure it out eventually.”
Stefanos Tsitsipas, July 2023
Rafael Nadal is an interesting enough guy to write a book about, but I don't consider him a tennis player. An Olympic wrestler, weight-lifter, acrobat and trapeze artist, maybe, but a tennis player, no. I mean, look, the way he hits the ball is nothing like anything ever seen before: Tilde, Vines, Budge, Kramer, Gonzales, Hoad and Laver looked NOTHING like this guy hitting a ball. Physically, the guy is a freak, his energy level is so far off the charts that it has wrecked his body. Psychologically, as Simon Barnes once pointed out, Rafa is two drastically different people: on the court he is Conan the Barbarian, Attila the Hun, a ruthless savage; but off it he is the most courtly gentleman, the most gracious caballero you could ever meet, more than don Quijote. I hope you can tell us what makes him tick. Put him in a bottle and send him to the lab at Harvard so we can find out.
Great article, and I believe a true summary of both his career and potential. He has a nice game, but has not evolved the way he needs to in order to be a consistent factor.