PARIS – That did not take long, and now let’s see how the remarkable Moïse Kouame, just 17 years old, handles being the new focus of French tennis at this French Open.
Late on Monday night, Gaël Monfils played his final match at Roland Garros at age 39, putting an end to two crowd-friendly decades of shot-making and showmanship at his home Grand Slam tournament.
Monfils, never a major champion (or finalist) but long a major attraction, is the last of the four Frenchman nicknamed “The New Musketeers” to wind down his career. Not long after midnight he posed among friends on the red clay of the Philippe Chatrier Court with the retired Richard Gasquet, Gilles Simon and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
It felt like the end of an era, and less than 12 hours later it felt like the start of something new as Kouame walked with precocious poise onto the clay of the Greenhouse Court for his first Grand Slam match and proceeded to coolly defeat former US Open champion Marin Cilic in the heat in straight sets 7-6 (4), 6-2, 6-1.
This was not vintage Cilic – far from it at age 37 and with the glaring errors piling up –- but it was, nonetheless, an attention-demanding performance from the teenager against a veteran player still ranked in the top 50.
Kouame, from Sarcelles just north of Paris, is the youngest man to win a round in singles at the French Open since Dinu Pescariu in 1991 and the youngest to win a round at any major since Bernard Tomic, then 16, managed it at the 2009 Australian Open.
That was a few weeks before Kouame was born and a time when the New Musketeers were already becoming established among the elite even if they would remain foils to the Big Three throughout their long careers. Despite the generation gap, Kouame’s connections with his predecessors are deep. Gasquet joined Kouame’s coaching team this year and was in the front row on Tuesday. One of French tennis’s great prodigies, Gasquet knows full and too well the pressures that go with that privilege. Simon also has coached Kouame, and Monfils’s younger brother Daryl is Kouame’s agent. Liam Smith, who once helped Monfils revive his career, has been brought in to help Gasquet on the coaching team.
“Moise is a special project,” Ivan Ljubicic told L’Équipe back in October 2024 when Kouame earned his first ATP ranking points at the advanced age of 15.
Ljubicic knows special. Now the head of high-performance tennis at the