"NOW is the most difficult moment," said Gustavo Kuerten as, a little shyly, he grasped the microphone to make his champion's acceptance speech at Roland Garros yesterday afternoon. In truth it was not.
The 20-year-old Brazilian managed everything during the two weeks of the French Open with quite remarkable savoir-faire for one so inexperienced in the ways of the Grand Slam world. And with such brio.
This was an astonishing victory. Prior to arriving in Paris Kuerten, a string bean of a player, had never won a senior ATP tournament anywhere. But Spain's Sergi Bruguera, the French champion in 1993 and 1994, had quietly told Spanish journalists after the semi-finals that he believed he would be extremely hard-pushed to defeat this dynamic and delightful young man.
And so it proved. Kuerten rushed in on Bruguera like the sea. The Spaniard tried desperately to build defensive ditches, but the blue and yellow tide swept over his best efforts and he went under 6-3 6-4 6-2 in under two hours.
This time last year Kueiten, as a qualifier, lost in straight sets to South Africa's Wayne Ferreira. He went one round better in Australia last January. but nobody - just nobody - expected this to happen. But then it has been a most remarkable French championship, with upsets, upheavals and surprises virtually around every corner.
"It will be extremely interesting to watch Gustavo's progress from now on," said Bjorn Borg, who won this title five times and was there to present the trophy, along with Guillermo Vilas, a former champion himself. It certainly will.
Kuerten's sudden and spectacular emergence can be placed alongside the startling win by Boris Becker at Wimbledon in 1985.while the range and quality of his shots might be compared to John McEnroe, who never managed to win here.
It is easy. in the heat, passion, and excitement of such moments to get matters hopelessly out of perspective, but Kuerten does appear to have virtually every shot in the tennis book, and a wonderful temperament to go with them. In this respect he is the complete antithesis of that other gifted-South American, Marcelo Rios of Chile.
Kuerten is sun where Rios is so often scowl. There were glorious moments at the culmination of the most blisteringly competitive and varied rallies when the Brazilian burst into a smile, seemingly unable to contain his joy. Long may he be able to continue in such a vein within a sport that frequently takes itself far too seriously.
It might even become the beautiful game.
Here are the stats: Kuerten is the first Brazilian male to win a Grand Slam tournament: he becomes the second player to win his first career title at a Grand Slam the first being Sweden's Mats Wilander here in 1982; he is, at number 66, the second-lowest ranked player to win a Grand Slam after Australia's Mark Edmondson (ranked 212 when he won the 1976 Australian 9pen).
Hems a really, really good player - very complete," said Bruguera, whose best chance of changing the relentless flow of the game came in the ninth game of the second set when the Spaniard had three break points for a 5-4 lead. They all slipped away. and Kuerten immediately broke the 16th seed, the only one to reach the last four, to take the set.
There is no question that Kuerten deserved to win, for he beat two other French champions, Yevgeny Kafeknikov and Thomas Muster, in earlier rounds of this topsy-turvy tournament. His delight was huge, him and his family performing a samba afterwards outside the court in true Rio style.
