Monfils plays his last Grand Slam match, the end of a UTS legend

Gael Monfils played the last Grand Slam match of his career on Thursday night in New York, beaten by Learner Tien 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 two days after his 40th birthday.

La Monf’ leaves the majors with 131 wins from 201 matches, more than any French player has managed, and with a farewell that began on his birthday, when he beat Adolfo Daniel Vallejo and became the oldest man to win a US Open match since Jimmy Connors in 1992.

New York will not see Monfils play professionally again, and New York is where he won his only UTS title, at Forest Hills in 2024, the high point of a long association with a version of tennis that might have been built for him.

He gave the league two complete seasons, in 2023 and 2024. He finished fourth in the year-end rankings in 2023 and fifth in 2024, and won his only UTS title along the way. Nobody who watched him in that format needed convincing that the rules had been written with someone like him in mind.

The moment that will outlast the results came at Bastide UTS Nîmes in 2025, when he stood in the middle of the court alongside Ugo Humbert and sang the national anthem.

Monfils retires at the end of this season, and the job is already signed: wealth management, with a Swiss company. Anyone who watched All in the Table with Ugo Humbert and Jeremy Chardy in 2024 heard it coming: he mentioned there that he was already training for it.

“I’m just me, Gael Monfils,” he said. “Some people might like me, some not. Some people think I’m fun, some not. So I’m all right with everything.” We were not neutral about it. Thank you, Gael.