Not many Americans can claim to have united a French crowd, but that’s exactly what Taylor Fritz did at Roland Garros – as they jeered him off the court.
After beating Arthur Rinderknech in a frenzied second-round French Open match three weeks ago, Fritz held his fingers to his lips to shush the partisan patrons, which naturally had the opposite effect. A well-oiled and sunned evening crowd on the venue’s second-largest court lifted their boos to deafening levels.
Fritz could not even complete his on-court interview because he was drowned out by the noise, but he made sure he had the last laugh.
“I basically just said ‘Yeah, whatever, there’s a lot of people booing me,’ but then there’s all the kids and stuff with the balls [waiting for autographs],” Fritz tells i.
“I could very easily just walk off the court because everyone’s booing me but let me stop and I’ll sign all the autographs and take all the pictures. And if they still want to boo me, they’re just going to look really stupid.”
The beaten Rinderknech had been the last Frenchman left in the tournament, which probably drove up the fractious nature of the atmosphere that he described as “like an old Davis Cup match”, reflecting the tribal nature of a sport where crowds are often more restrained.
In that respect, it was not Fritz’s first experience of Parisian “hospitality”.
“I played [former French No 1 Gilles] Simon in Bercy, indoors, when he was retiring, and I didn’t think that it could possibly get worse than that,” Fritz says. “So that’s what I was expecting going into the match and it was so much worse.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for like, root for your guy, cheer for him. I don’t expect to go out there and have people cheering for me [in Paris].
“But I would appreciate just the decency of letting me serve a second serve after I miss my first serve. Literally throwing a party every time I miss a first serve is pretty crazy.
“Every time I tossed the ball to serve, a lot of the time I didn’t feel like I could like go after the serve because I just expected to have to catch because someone was going to scream.
“I didn’t want to do anything during the match because then it’s just going to make it worse and it was already just insane. I felt like I was respectful because I didn’t want to make it worse the whole time.
“So then when it was over, I said, ‘Whatever, if I’m going to take this s**t for three hours, I’m allowed to do this, it’s fine’. I feel like the fans should understand if they’re going to give it to me for three hours, then I’m totally within my boundaries to do that.
“It’s definitely not going to be the same at Wimbledon.”
The American No 1 has far happier memories of Centre Court, where he reached his first grand slam quarter-final last year before losing a five-set epic in a deciding tie-break against Rafael Nadal.
“I still look back at it as an overall positive experience,” Fritz says.
“I think it definitely hurt a lot more after the loss the days following, but I said back then it was going to be a positive experience.
“It’s my best result at a grand slam thus far and I really needed that. If I didn’t have at least that one quarter-final I wouldn’t be feeling so good about my grand slam results.”
Slowly, Fritz is figuring out grand-slam tennis, the pinnacle of a sport with an exhausting and almost ceaseless calendar.
“For a while everyone told me that it’s best to take that week off before and get ready but I’m learning that I feel better at the slams if I’m playing a lot of matches and going in with some confidence,” Fritz adds.
“When I’m at a place practising for like a week straight by the time it comes around to the tournament, I feel like I’ve just been there a while and [I’m] maybe not like as excited to be there as I was.
“After two or three days, I feel dialled in, ready to go, and I just want to kind of get into it and play. So that’s been something that I’ve been learning a bit about myself.”
Fritz is only 25 but is comes across as an old soul. He was only 18 when he made his top-100 debut after reaching the quarter-final of Acapulco. He got married a few months later and his son was born a year after that, but he split up with Jordan’s mother Rachel in 2019.
Now ranked No 9 in the world, desire to impress Jordan by becoming the best player on the planet is one of the more compelling storylines in Netflix’s Break Point documentary series, in which Fritz and his new partner Morgan Riddle feature prominently.
And Fritz is keen for Netflix, who are currently filming a second series, to press on with a project that has garnered a lukewarm reception thus far.
“They can do a lot more and they can do better and I think they think that too,” Fritz says.
“They can make it even more exciting for fans and bringing even more people.
“I have people coming up to me saying they saw me on the show and those are people that aren’t tennis fans.
“So however much or little it did help, there’s definitely people that I’m sure it attracted to the sport which is always a good thing.”
