PARIS — It’s that time again at Roland Garros.
“Every five years it’s the same,” Mats Wilander told me once, laughing at his destiny.
Wilander won the 1988 French Open, which means that this year is the 35th anniversary of his third and final victory at the world’s premier clay-court tennis tournament.
But once again that will not be the focus of the nostalgia in Paris. Above all, this is the 40th anniversary of Yannick Noah’s lone victory at the French Open, and though the dreadlocks long ago went grey, the image of Noah in the full force of youth in 1983 is indelible for many of his French compatriots (and quite a few of us foreigners, too).
Noah won just won Grand Slam title and never even reached another final, but what a one-Slam wonder it was as he peaked at just the right tournament: rushing the net like a vintage Aussie and beating Ivan Lendl in the quarterfinals and Wilander in the final and then -- in the part that surely everyone remembers best – leaping wide-eyed into the arms of his father Zacharie, who had jumped out of the stands and on to the red clay to make a beeline for his son.
It was spontaneous. It was beautiful.
Noah surely would have been a superstar in France anyway. No Frenchman had won the singles title since Marcel Bernard in 1946. But that embrace, in Noah’s mind, transported it all into another dimension.
“Certain players of my generation and the generations that followed won many more titles than I did, but very few of them got the same level of love and support that I received,” Noah once said in an interview with the French magazine Sport. “Why? The victory in itself only explains about 10 percent of why the French took me to their hearts. The rest, which is the essential thing, is that moment of union between a father and his son. Normally, you don’t cry for joy in your father’s arms in public. For me, it happened in front of thousands of spectators and millions of viewers. The image of a tough athlete got submerged, and humanity took over.”
That comment is from 2008 and the 25th anniversary of his victory. At that stage, he was still searching for a successor and 15 years later, the search continues.
Though Rafael Nadal has won Roland Garros 14 times (yes, 14), no Frenchman has been able to follow Noah as singles champion or, crazier still considering the importance of tennis in France, follow him as a Grand Slam singles champ anywhere. Not his peers: Henri Leconte and Guy Forget. Not the next wave led by Cedric Pioline. Not the talented quartet of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gaël Monfils, Richard Gasquet and Gilles Simon who, to be fair, happened to coincide with the Big Three.
Noah did inspire one Frenchwoman to win majors. Amélie Mauresmo started playing the game after watching Noah win in 1983 and went on to become No. 1, something Noah never managed, and to win the Australian Open and Wimbledon.
She is now the tournament director at Roland Garros and will preside over plenty of Noah-infused festivities this year. There will be a permanent mural in his honor near the entrance to the presidential tribune, adjacent to a pavilion run by Fête le Mur, the tennis charity he founded in 1996 to help underprivileged children.
Noah is expected to give a concert as well: something he is better prepared than any former tennis champion to handle because he became a professional musician in the 1990s as his career was winding down. He did it successfully enough to release several platinum records in France and pack the Stade de France, drawing a crowd of about 80,000 in 2010, which might have made some of his fellow tennis stars more jealous than watching him win Roland Garros (there have been a fair number of wannabe crossover stars on the pro tour, including John McEnroe and Wilander).
The first time I saw Noah the singer perform live was actually on a tennis court. It was in Lyon, France in December 1991 and Noah had found the perfect fit for his charisma and tennis savoir-faire: ending another long drought by captaining France to its first Davis Cup title in 59 years and a stirring victory over the United States and its two young stars: Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.
Noah did not hit a ball but his presence and positivity clearly helped Forget and Leconte summon something transcendent. When it was over, Noah took the microphone with the crowd still on its feet and led his team in a conga line as he sang his new hit “Saga Africa” (with a lot of amateur backup singers) as they did the lap of their lives around the court.
There were Champagne and tears all around and a sense of fulfillment that might be a little hard to understand considering the luster the Davis Cup has since lost. But the joy in a great sporting breakthrough was real, and La Bande à Noah sparked a new era, providing a reference point to other French teams, including Zinedine Zidane, Didier Deschamps and Les Bleus who won the World Cup in 1998 in the Stade de France over Brazil.
With Noah as captain, France won the Davis Cup again in 1996 and in 2017. Despite plenty of personal struggles and setbacks, he has been talismanic at home for 40 years. Though some knew him better later as the father of now-retired NBA player Joakim Noah, and the smartphone generation surely will look elsewhere for inspiration, Frenchman Lucas Pouille, the 29-year-old who was part of the Cup-winning team in 2017, took to the Roland Garros clay this week for the qualifying tournament in a yellow and white shirt similar to the one Noah wore in 1983.
“His initials are on the back,” Pouille said after winning his opening round. “I don’t know if it helps but if it can make me win Roland, that would be fantastic.”
Noah, now 63, has been generous with his counsel but he has been unable to pass on the special sauce at Roland Garros. He could not even help Mauresmo, a fine clay-courter, shake free of her nerves and go deep in Paris.
His 1983 chef d’oeuvre remains a one-off in France, and it transcended sport in part because he was a symbol: the biracial son of a black father from Cameroon and a white mother from France.
There was a price to pay to succeed: he left Cameroon to board and train in France with a one-way ticket at age 12 after being noticed and encouraged by Arthur Ashe, the African-American tennis star who happened to be visiting Yaoundé.
There was a price to pay for success, as well: Shortly after the father-son embrace, he was engulfed by fans and reporters – on-court security was not quite so secure in those days – and shouted that he needed space, just for a moment. That was foreshadowing, and though he did party like a future rock star that night – the festivities lasted quite a bit longer than the straight-set final – Noah, just 23, struggled to cope in the aftermath of his victory and fled France for New York for a time.
But 40 years later, he surely would not hand his trophy or the experiences back.
“Today for me the reason why it’s beautiful is because it resonated in the hearts of lots and lots of people and still does today, and that’s magical,” he said in the L’Équipe documentary “1983, l’oeuvre d’une vie” released this week.
Perhaps all the more magical because it all came together for Noah on the Paris clay just once.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I tell myself that of course I couldn’t win another one,” Noah said. “What else could I have dreamed of that would have been better? It’s not that I didn’t’ have the strength to try to win again. It’s that I didn’t have the dream, and if I don’t have that, it’s not going to work. So, I started dreaming about other things.”
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Side note: Watching Taylor Townsend win with A. Parks in their first-time pairing was a wonderful moment for them and US tennis. I was so impressed with Taylor's character - when Alycia got down after some bad mis hits Taylor was always right there encouraging her. Assuming she'll play with Laila in New York?
I did not know this story until today even though I have been a player and avid watcher of Wimbledon. It was written beautifully and held my interest throughout. Thanks and kudos to you!