Amid rousing cheers and tearful tributes, France's Jo-Wilfried Tsonga retires after nearly toppling eight-seeded Casper Ruud in his French Open finale.
Tsonga, the mightiest and most genial among the last great generation of French players, had previously announced that this year’s French Open would be his last. At 37, he was ready to retire, ranked No. 297 and eager to devote his attention to his wife and their two young children.
Blasting forehands with abandon, Tsonga claimed the opening set against Norway’s 23-year-old clay-court prodigy in a tiebreaker. The second set was just as much a tussle, with Ruud eking out a tiebreaker to level the proceedings.Tsonga’s fierce groundstrokes lost their bearings in the third set, but he battled on. Drawing strength from the crowd, he poured the full fury of his game into attempting to force a fifth set.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to stay on the court and finish off this match,’ ” Tsonga later said. “That’s how I wanted to finish — on the court, giving my best tennis.”Tsonga couldn’t mount a credible effort in the fourth-set tiebreaker. At one point, he switched the racket from his right hand to his left — mid-rally — just to keep the ball in play.
“I was a sad boy,” Ruud recalled. “But after, I learned he is such a great, nice person on and off the court.” This year, there isn’t a single French player, man or woman, among the French Open’s 64 seeds. And a Frenchman hasn’t won the tournament since 1983, when Yannick Noah did so.Tsonga, who reached a career-high No. 5 ranking in 2012, was regarded as the country’s best hope of snapping that drought, reaching the semifinals in 2013 and 2015.
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