Wimbledon 2019: Felix Auger-Aliassime’s coming of age will have to wait as Ugo Humbert announces himself with mature win

When I first watched The Godfather, I was left impressed but also a little confused. I had gone in expecting to be blown away by Marlon Brando’s performance; instead, it was Al Pacino who captured my attention with his subtle histrionics, making me wonder why he had been extolled so little by the fans and the critics compared to Brando. [caption id=“attachment_6945561” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] France’s Ugo Humbert reacts during his third round match against Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime. Reuters[/caption] Something similar happened to me after I settled in at Court 1 to watch the third round match between Felix Auger-Aliassime and Ugo Humbert. I was expecting to be awed by Auger-Aliassime’s much-talked-about athleticism and all-round excellence. Instead, I walked away marveling at Humbert’s flat power and wicked accuracy. But there was one key difference between Brando and Auger-Aliassime: I did like what I saw from Brando (if only a little less than Pacino), while Auger-Aliassime was borderline unwatchable at times. The Canadian is just 18, and before this year’s Championships, he had never won a Grand Slam match. There must, therefore, have been many like me who had been keenly awaiting their first live glimpse of the prodigy. He has been considered such a can’t-miss prospect by literally everyone in the know that it has become a norm to assume he will eventually dominate men’s tennis. Auger-Aliassime’s results this year – he has reached multiple tour finals and is already into the top-20 of the rankings – have fueled the expectations even further. Surely we can be forgiven for thinking his clash against fellow (but considerably less successful and hyped) youngster Humbert was the perfect stage for him to make a statement display of his skills? Maybe he thought the same way, and let the pressure get to him. From about the middle of the first set, Auger-Aliassime looked less like the promised heir to the throne and more like, well, the promised deer that would be caught in the headlights. He rushed his serve, pressed on his groundstrokes, and lost his composure; by the end of the match every time he swung his racquet it felt like an adventure. At the other side of the net, Humbert was practically all of the things Auger-Aliassime wasn’t. The 21-year-old Frenchman, who has been flying under the radar ever since his Slam debut at the 2018 US Open, played with something resembling veteran smarts, as he clinically picked apart his opponent’s game. While Auger-Aliassime tried to impose his will on the proceedings by pulling the trigger (and missing) every chance he got, Humbert smartly navigated through the troughs before rifling the killer blow into the open court. Humbert has a lanky frame, which makes him look a tad taller than the 6’2” he is listed as. But his height is good enough for his weapons of choice: a typical lefty serve that swings away viciously from the right-hander’s backhand in the ad court, and a collection of flat groundstrokes that work perfectly on the low-bouncing grass. For a nation that hosts the only clay Grand Slam, France has an ironically high tendency to produce flat hitters who are naturally predisposed to do well on quick surfaces. Gilles Simon, Lucas Pouille, Adrian Mannarino, Jeremy Chardy and now Humbert – they all like taking the ball on the rise and hitting it with minimal topspin, a tactic that has proven to be pretty successful at Wimbledon. Unusually for a Frenchman though, Humbert seems less interested in putting up a show for the fans and more invested in winning points. There’s an almost workmanlike quality to his game, and many of his winners on Friday were passing shots born out of necessity rather than flamboyance. Even his serve is more about pinpoint accuracy than speedy bombast; although he rarely went past the 120mph mark on the first serve, he regularly got the ball out of Auger-Aliassime’s strike zone with it. Humbert went 2-5 down in the second set, but never wavered from his game plan; he continued moving the ball around with pace until the errors started flowing from Auger-Aliassime’s racquet again. Once he got the break back and leveled the set at 5-5, it seemed clear that there was only one way the match could end. Auger-Aliassime was asked later whether he thought getting broken while serving for the second set was the turning point of the match. “Yeah, maybe even before,” he replied. “I mean, the first set was pretty bad itself. I don’t know. I felt like the whole match was a turning point.” After you have stopped laughing at the ‘whole match was a turning point’ bit, you’ll realize that there is an unmistakable truth in what he said. Auger-Aliassime’s problems both preceded and succeeded that 5-3 game; while Humbert was solid from start to finish, the Canadian was, in his own words, ‘embarrassing’ throughout. As Auger-Aliassime continued his downward spiral in the third set, the noise from the adjacent Centre Court got loud enough to reach our ears. Fifteen-year-old Coco Gauff had saved match points in the second set and was doing another high-wire act in the third against Polona Hercog, and with each deafening roar of approval from the crowd we on Court 1 longed to be part of that action. It was just natural human behavior to be more interested in checking Gauff’s score than predicting whether Auger-Aliassime’s next error would be a forehand pushed long or a volley bunted wide. How quickly things can change in tennis. Two days ago I talked about Anastasia Potapova’s match on Court 16 being overshadowed by Auger-Aliassime’s star turn on Court 3. But on Friday, it was Auger-Aliassime who was upstaged by two players in similar-yet-different age categories: by someone three years older in the men’s draw, and by someone three years younger in our imagination. The good news for Auger-Aliassime and his already sizeable horde of supporters (he was clearly the fan favorite among the Court 1 crowd) is that this was just the first big test of his budding career. He may have let the pressure get to him, but it will take a brave person to bet that the same thing will happen every single time. The power, the speed, the athleticism – they are all still very much in place. Now he just has to keep plugging away, and wait for his Al Pacino moment.