Looking in from the outside, a farewell tour looks like a lot of work. Not that there could be any easy way to step away from a sport that has defined a person’s entire life, but tennis seems to make that ordeal especially gritty. There’s no option to ride the bench and hop in for some lighthearted, inconsequential minutes. It’s still a season full of plane rides and hotel stays, scrounging for wild cards, not expecting much on the court, maybe a feel-good win here or there, all to achieve a sense of closure. But if there were ever an ATP player deserving such a tour, it is Gael Monfils. That’s a player to whom tribute should be paid in person, with direct witness, because that seemed to be the whole point of him playing tennis—to be witnessed.

A crowd favorite the world over, the people’s champion, Monfils won them over with his impish acrobatics, his vertical leap, his trick-shot whims. If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to explain it to you, just go watch any of the dozens of compilations of his on-court magic. It’s tennis that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment. Of course, as any hardcore fan of his could tell you, the week-to-week experience of watching Monfils was considerably less euphoric. He never committed to a style of play that could have produced the results many thought he was capable of; despite his considerable offensive weapons, he preferred to play a more passive game interrupted by occasional blazes of creativity. Showmanship was inseparable from his match play, sometimes to his own detriment, often to our delight. But I think collective sporting memories are not defined by win-loss records but rather by sharp emotional spikes: marathon matches, indelible highlights, vulnerability with the crowd. And Monfils was the master of producing such moments. Anybody who has paid even glancing attention to the sport over the past two decades has cached away a Monfils moment or three.

Unsurprisingly, the man who approached tennis that way has been showered with adulation at every stop on tour, and I’ve enjoyed hearing a 39-year-old Monfils reflect on each of these tournaments, too, jotting down his thoughts on social media and talking directly to these crowds. The fans have gotten the opportunity to say goodbye throughout 2026, and I’ve equally enjoyed the fact that so many of his young colleagues seem so stoked to have gotten that same opportunity too. Before they were pros, they were also just fans of Gael Monfils, like everyone else. At the end of their Monte-Carlo match, Alexander Bublik—who is wired similarly to the Frenchman when it comes to entertainment value—gave Monfils a big hug and fondly remembered how, at that same tournament exactly 10 years ago, he’d been a teenage hitting partner for the veteran, and that Monfils had told him he’d make it. At Roland-Garros, Monfils lost his first-round match to his younger countryman Hugo Gaston in five sets, after midnight, and through it all he was regaled by all the singing and shouting one would expect from his home Slam. “It was quite a strange feeling when, at the end of the third set, everyone was shouting, ‘Gael, Gael.’ I wanted to shout with them,” said the 25-year-old Gaston afterward.

Monfils’ exit from Canada this week might have been the best such moment to date. In his second-round match he took on Learner Tien, who was born four months after Monfils won his first title on tour, in August 2005. Despite logging 53 unforced errors, Tien won, with a very Monfils-coded score line, 6–3, 0–6, 6–3. Afterward, the Frenchman had his back turned to the court as he signed autographs for fans in the crowd, only for Tien to nudge him and present him with his own tennis ball and Sharpie. In a world of grimly contrived viral videos, here was an unmistakable wholesome moment, another Monfils moment, this one without any racquets involved; the truth was in the enormous grins sported by both players. Before he left the court, Tien had to sign something too: the camera lens, on which he wrote “legend!” After the match, he posted a picture of the ball, along with a caption: “First time asking for an autograph.” I’m sure Gael would have liked to win a Slam, sure, but when it comes to the question of who endures in memories of actual people, he’ll leave a much rarer legacy.