The Benoit Couple Lose But Wins By Just Playing


A year ago, French tennis player Benoît Paire spent the US Open in solitary confinement after testing positive for Covid-19 in his Long Island hotel room, unable to secure his place in the draw and subsequently unable to find his happy place.

Lacking a pillar of consistency in regular times, Paire struggled in new ways in extraordinary times, missing fans and shooting on shots, sometimes with little effort as opening lap losses piled up.

“I was there without really being there,” he said.

However, when the ticket holders managed to get past the unbearably long security lines and truly enter the tournament, the crowd turned back as the first day of the US Open came out loud and clear on Monday.

Paire left his Manhattan hotel room in the morning and went to Court 13, one of those open-air courts that still feels like an open-air court, even after all the new stadium construction in Flushing Meadows.

The fans are close to the action here, and the action on the sidecourt is also close. The fans gathered at Court 13 soon made their allegiance clear, chanting “Benoit” more often than chanting the name of esteemed Serbian rival Dusan Lajovic.

“I was happy to see the crowds again, to share a moment with people,” Paire said. “It’s true that when people applaud a great point or a well-recorded breaking point, it makes you feel good. And it pushes you, or at least me. That’s why I play tennis. That’s why I enjoy it more and that’s why I’m back to my good level.”

Newly delivered tennis clothes from Paire’s new sponsor read “should be normal”, but that doesn’t seem like the message Paire was actually trying to convey.

With the long hipster beard befitting a 19th-century French painter, he’s unlike any other tennis player: Think Édouard Manet. It also has a creative side: it summons half-volley winners from places on the court where most tour players wouldn’t mind hitting the half-volley winner. His two-handed backhand is smooth, versatile and often deadly. His forehand is unique, with a weird and tight kickback, and it’s not always in a good way.

But like Nick Kyrgios, another extraordinarily talented tennis player who declined the tour without fans, 49th-placed Paire is hard to take your eyes off of with a racket in hand.

He left the 40th-place Lajovic nodding and giggling after some of his best shots, but although Paire clearly cared, which was certainly an improvement, he couldn’t support his genius strokes with a solid enough play under pressure.

There were double mistakes at inopportune moments, mistakes that seemed inadequate but also not necessarily caused by fatigue from heat and humidity.

Although Lajovic’s shirt was soaked with sweat early on, Paire looked the most tired, leaning forward and resting her hand on each knee as she slowly settled down to meet the serves.

But he still found the energy to release some stress towards the end of the second set, losing his temper after stopping the game due to the crowd shouting and losing points.

The tennis rules are clear on this one: the point stands. Paire was enraged, however, and eventually took the umbrella over Lajovic’s chair, hitting him hard enough with his racket to break the umbrella and frighten the chair referee and the front few fans.

Paire took the second infraction of the match – it was for unsportsmanlike conduct – and was awarded one point. They lost the set and the match 6-3, 7-5, 2-6, 6-4.

It was a bad result after his jolly run to the quarterfinals at the Western & Southern Open in the suburbs of Cincinnati earlier this month. But Paire seemed like an unusually happy man for someone who lost in the first round.

A different French player is missing the US Open this year due to quarantine: Gilles Simon, who was not vaccinated and locked in a New York hotel room after his coach tested positive for Covid. Simon was considered “close contact”.

But Paire is free to move around the teeming court as he left the not-so-lucky Court 13 on Monday and returned to the locker room with the intervention of two security guards.

Not that he wanted to stay inside the Paire bubble. Fans kept running towards him with cell phones in hand to take selfies, and although most of the first-round losers would have kept their chins down and took the necessary steps to seek shelter, Paire slowed down and gave each one a place.



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