MELBOURNE, Australia — It’s possible that Arthur Fils became the player so many people think he could be as the rain pounded on the roof of Margaret Court Arena Sunday afternoon in Melbourne.
Fils found himself a few points away from a frightening two-set deficit against Otto Virtanen, a regular on the second-tier ATP Challenger Tour and the kind of Grand Slam first-round draw that can quickly get slippery.
He had just frittered away his serve with a couple of ugly errors to fall 4-5 down in the second set, and was in serious danger of becoming the first big casualty of the year’s first major. And then, with a blistering forehand on one point and a punishing backhand on the next, Fils seemed to say: ‘enough.’
An error and a double fault from Virtanen later, he was all square in the set at 5-5. Two games later, he surged through a tiebreak and never looked back, making good on his promise from the other day in a news conference.
“Everything can improve,” he said. His serve, his return his volleys. He does not want to rest on the success of a 2024 season that saw him steadily climb up the rankings and into the top 20.
Through his first seasons on the tour, he had learned nothing comes easy. At first, it had felt like it might. He made the semifinals of his first two tournaments and won one when he was just 18.
“You are going to get very high in the ranking quickly and then you know you start to play some tough matches, tough tournaments,” he said in Melbourne, a brief twinge of pain in his eyes at the memory. “You start to understand that you have to work a lot, a lot, a lot, and it’s not going to be easy at all.”
Plenty of players look at him and see someone destined for the top five before too long. Ben Shelton said beating Fils in the semifinals of Basel in October was among his most satisfying victories of the season. Fils had beaten him just weeks before in Tokyo, winning a match featuring two of the best athletes in the game 7-5, 6-7, 7-6.
Sometimes Fils’ mojo can get the best of him, as it nearly did against Virtanen Sunday. He was too tentative and then too tenacious, searching for the rhythm that allows him to run downhill through matches when he is clicking. And yet he figured out how to pull through, winning 3-6, 7-6, 6-4, 6-4. He said that never would have happened two years ago.
“I stayed very calm during the match,” he said.
“I had great feelings on the court. I was just missing sometimes. I said to myself, ‘Even if you are two sets down, maybe you’re going to have some occasion to win the serve and then we see.’ If I’m losing my mind, for sure I don’t have any more occasion. So the best thing is to stay very, very calm and to try the best and let’s see.”
This is what Fils is learning to do on the fly, even as someone at the very top of the sport he is playing.
“On a very, very good day I can be very good,” he had said one afternoon this spring, during an interview in a stairwell in Madrid earlier this year. “The most important thing is on bad days to play a good enough level that makes you win. That is what I am trying to find.”
As his agent, Philippe Weiss, dryly joked of Fils one afternoon last year in Indian Wells, Calif., “He’s going to be great. He just needs to learn how to play tennis.”
If you asked an AI chatbot to design a tennis champion and it didn’t spit out something that bore a striking physical resemblance to Fils, it’s entirely possible that you failed to input the proper prompts.
The 21-year-old Frenchman is 6-foot-1 with a running back’s shoulders and a middleweight boxer’s waistline. He has blink-and-you-missed-it quickness, a frozen-rope forehand and the ability to crack a serve that skids off the line and disappears.
Heat doesn’t bother him much. He rarely walks onto a tennis court thinking he didn’t have a very good chance to win, not since he was about 10.
He understands the riddle of professional tennis — that as great as a player might be, he may only play his best tennis a handful of times each year, if that.
People who have been around Fils have long seen his potential in tennis and have been blown away by his athleticism. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he did not begin to specialize in his ultimate profession until he was 13. Before then, he was too busy hopping from the football pitch, to the judo mat, to the swimming pool, to the running track, with some tennis mixed in.
If he’d had his way, he’d be starting up front for Paris-Saint Germain at the top of French football. Like 99.9 percent of the population, he wasn’t good enough, which has left him with the task that remains a work-in-progress as one of the 0.1 percent who is good enough.
He spent the first half of 2023 mostly playing events on the Challenger Tour, the sport’s second tier, before he got some good lessons in what it takes to reach the top when Rafael Nadal invited him to train together in Kuwait.
“He showed me that even in practice he’s going 100 percent every time,” Fils said of Nadal during an interview in Australia in January. “He is going full, full, full. Even in practice, he is fighting for every point.”
GO DEEPER
What’s it like to play Rafael Nadal on clay? We asked the players
Nadal retired in November after two decades at the top of the sport. Fils’ game doesn’t have much in common with the Spaniard’s, at first glance but his forehand is at the extremes of spin and speed for the entire ATP Tour, registering at 3300 RPM and 82 mph according to TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations’ analysis.
Serious topspin combined with serious speed equals serious weight, making a ball difficult to send back over the net, but tennis is not a hitting contest. Carlos Alcaraz’s forehand spins on average 3200 times per minute and flies at 79.5 mph. Jannik Sinner’s measures 3,000 on the RPM meter and hits 79 mph on the radar gun. They shared the year’s four Grand Slams. They are happy to cede top billing on the scatter graph to Fils and keep their trophies.
There’s plenty more that Fils can learn from his numbers, and plenty of room for improvement. Fils’s shot quality on his serve ranked 58th in 2024; his return was 35th. His backhand 19th. His conversion score, a measure of how often he wins points once he is in an attacking position, was 5th. His steal score — how often he wins points he should lose — was 38th.
But back to the forehand for a moment. The quality of that shot, which ranked 12th on the tour for the season, improved dramatically in the middle of the year. It ranked 63rd before Wimbledon and second after. He hit more balls closer to the sidelines, the realm from which tennis is now played.
Fils knows he can sometimes get carried away with creating highlights that will look great on YouTube rather than winning points and games.
Down a set and tied 4-4 in the second against Virtanen, Fils backpedaled and tried to crack an overhead as he lurched backward down 0-30 on his serve. That pretty much ensured a service break at a terrible time, forcing him to climb out of a dangerous hole. He’d momentarily forgotten the lesson he promised during an interview in Madrid that he had learned, to try “not to be too fancy.”
“Sometimes you just have to put the ball on the court and then you see if the guy is going to miss,” he said then.
Last season functioned as a bit of a learning experience. He had never been to Australia before; he played the clay-court swing in February in South America, where he learned that the red clay there is a whole lot different than in France. The air is thicker with moisture, which makes the clay heavier and slows down the ball. He said he often felt as though he had to hit the ball 10 times to win a point. He didn’t win any matches.
By the time he got to Wimbledon, he was talking about working harder to stay composed. He breaks the occasional racket and lets his anger linger longer than is helpful sometimes, though far less often than he used to. In London, he made the quarterfinals and then came into the Paris Olympics with high hopes after beating Alexander Zverev in Germany to win the 500-level Hamburg event. In Paris, he lost to Matteo Arnaldi in the first round, the disappointment lingering like his on-court anger can at times. It contributed to upset losses during the North American hard-court swing, he said. Then he won another title in Tokyo. The oscillations he is learning to understand.
Nearly a year ago, the goals he set for himself for the season had little to do with his ranking. He wanted to win some tournaments, qualify for the Olympics, and most of all, learn to focus better.
Check. Check. Check.
“The more you are playing it’s better and better,” he said. “Reset. That’s it. Even if it’s tough, you have to reset.”
Against Virtanen in Melbourne, that’s exactly what he did.
(Top photo: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake / Associated Press)
