Welcome to Court Suzanne-Lenglen, the French Open amphitheater of heaven and hell at Roland Garros

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PARIS — At the 2025 French Open, the tournament discovered a new cure for back pain: 10,000 people chanting your name in song, before delivering a perfect rendition of the La Marseillaise. For it to work, it needs to be administered in the fifth set of a five-hour tennis match, on one specific court.

Welcome to Court Suzanne-Lenglen at Roland Garros. If you’re a French tennis player, it is heaven. If you’re any other tennis player, like Jaume Munar of Spain, whose brain that chorus of 10,000 finally fileted to get a limping Arthur Fils and his ailing back over the finish line, it is hell, a maelstrom of anxiety. Every medicine has a side effect.

“Ici Paris?” Fils asked the French faithful, when former player Marion Bartoli put a microphone to his lips at the center of the court in the afterglow of a resurrection, measured by a 7-6(3), 7-6(4), 2-6, 0-6, 6-4 scoreline.

One year later, Fils had to miss the tournament due to injury, but the Lenglen faithful were not denied the opportunity to put another rival to La France through the wringer. It was Adolfo Daniel Vallejo of Paraguay who felt their full force, as the fans propelled 17-year-old Moïse Kouame to another thrilling five-set win.

“Of course, the public gave me a lot of energy to keep going physically and mentally. So, yeah, probably without them, it would maybe be another story,” Kouame said in a news conference after his 6-3, 7-5, 3-6, 2-6, 7-6(10-8) win.

Like Munar before him, Vallejo did not take the barracking well.

“It’s quite an intense crowd and that’s why I was prepared. I already knew it would be like that and, to be honest, it didn’t harm me, but rather strengthened him,” Vallejo said during an interview with clay.

Scour the globe, and it’s impossible to find hometown fans quite like the French on a court like Suzanne-Lenglen. It may not have the wide-open majesty of Court Philippe-Chatrier, with that “La Victoire Appartient Au Plus Opiniâtre” quote emblazoned on the rim of the upper deck. But, as that axiom goes, if victory belongs to the most tenacious, at the French Open the vibes belong to Court Suzanne-Lenglen.

Judging by the daily schedule, it’s clear that organizers recognize the surge a partisan crowd can provide their players, and the damage that it can do to an opponent. The tournament did not respond to a message seeking comment on whether or not this is a strategy.

Fils was the project last year. He’s the rising star of French men’s tennis, a 21-year-old dynamo with movie-star charisma who is learning how to manage his body. Until last year, he had yet to win a match at the French Open. Twice he had played his first-round match on the third court, Court Simonne-Mathieu, a jewel box of an arena in the middle of a garden and lined by a greenhouse, and come away defeated. Fils owns up to the fact that his mind can drift during a match, occasionally losing his focus and his grit when matches begin to slip away.

Simonne-Mathieu has elegance to burn. It’s just not a cauldron, as Fils has quickly learned. He opened on Lenglen on the first Monday in 2024, then got another gig the following Thursday afternoon at the place where the seats hug the court, where the fans know they can scramble an opponent’s brain like a chef scrambles an egg.

Did they ever have to cook for Fils against Munar.

After winning the first two sets in tiebreaks, Fils fell off a cliff, struggling with his balky back and cramps. In his news conference, he said that the back pain has been with him since childhood. Figuring out how to manage it is a work in progress.

He received treatment off the court during a medical timeout, then tried to survive as slowly as possible until the painkillers kicked in. All the tension of the first two sets and all those chants of “Arrrrthur, Arrrthur…” vanished into air as he lost 12 of the next 14 games.

But then he trotted out for the fifth set, won the first point with his trademark power, and Lenglen exploded. Then he won three more, and that was a game, and the cauldron was once again on the fire and Munar was the frog in a cold pot brought to heat.

Fils struck back after Munar broke him to get a lead that this crowd wouldn’t let stick, then played an extraordinary game at 4-4 in which he missed two cut-and-paste routine overheads but hit a cavalcade of forehand winners to hold serve. All their efforts, Fils and the fans morphing into one, culminated with that Marseillaise that held up play as Munar served to stay in the match at 4-5.

Imagine that moment of French defiance at Humphrey Bogart’s Rick’s American Cafe in “Casablanca,” but a thousand times louder. The chair umpire didn’t bother trying to quiet them. Then, the Lenglen crowd played its joker.

A Munar double fault at 0-30 brought a burst of cheers. But instead of roaring on and drawing a “s’il vous plaît” from the umpire, the crowd started a hissing “shhhhhhh” that rolled and rolled and rolled. Munar pleaded with the chair umpire. Munar pleaded with Fils. Fils shrugged.

Three points later, Fils put Munar’s desperate lunge for a drop shot that had rolled off a net cord into the open court. He and his throng of 10,000 had done their work. The celebration was on. Fils gave Munar a calm, appreciative handshake and then ripped off his shirt and tossed it into the crowd.

“Unbelievable,” Fils said of the atmosphere, after three hours of cold and hot baths, massages, fluids and food. He called Lenglen “one of the best courts of the world, if it’s not the best one.”

Had he been playing anywhere else, he doubted he would have been able to finish the match, let alone win it. But not everyone felt so indebted to the citizens of Suzanne-Lenglen, especially the Spaniard whose brain had gone to goo.

“I don’t want to bite my tongue,” he said in his own, when asked about what had gone down.

“I think it’s a lack of respect to sing and to interrupt and here it happens a lot. The fans are here for a show, but sometimes it turns into a circus or theater.”

12 months later, Vallejo got his own experience. Kouame was down 5-3 in the fifth set of their match, and lost six straight points in the deciding tiebreak. But the support never erred, staying with him through the first two sets, in which Kouame flashed his way to a lead, and then the last three, in which his energy ebbed and Vallejo reeled him in — until he didn’t, right at the end.

“I think that the French public is one of the best, if not the best,” Fils said last year. “And that’s just the way it is.”

So it was again.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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