Home courts haven’t been an advantage

The familiar sentence, “No Frenchman has won the French Open since Yannick Noah in 1983,” may lack the dreariness of the ancient refrain, “No British man has won Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936,” but many of the locals here clearly want to delete that first sentence.

They get loud during French players’ matches, demonstrating that they might even care, not a given at a tournament where Roger Federer once said he got a kick out of the fans trickling in slowly from lunch.

Well, the hardboots who stayed on toward 9 p.m. beneath gloomy skies Wednesday night helped an anonymous 23-year-old Frenchman ranked No. 134 upend a departing two-time Grand Slam champion in a four-hour, 34-minute, second-round donnybrook. They roared serially until Josselin Ouanna beat Marat Safin, 7-6 (2), 7-6 (4), 4-6, 3-6, 10-8, and they beheld a hopeful French first week.

“Had we played in Russia, I think the situation would have been different,” Ouanna said after posting only his second tour-level win on clay.

They also roared suitably for Safin in what became his last French Open match in this, his retirement year. They appreciate his stormy genius and his glib wit, as in his closing news conference when a reporter said he had read that Safin planned “to paint” during retirement, and Safin replied, “You’re crazy.”

While the French hugged a Montreal-born Mary Pierce with her French mother and American father -- and Pierce in 2000 became the first French woman to win the title since Francoise Durr in 1967 -- they have grown accustomed to profound talents who melt here. Those include Amelie Mauresmo and Richard Gasquet, whose Grand Slam heydays have come elsewhere. At least one French tennis expert has wondered aloud if the French tennis blood lacks some sort of champion’s moxie.

Now a new generation copes with this annual crucible, and it’s doing fairly well this week even while confessing to nerves. Ten of 19 men and five of 14 women reached the second round.

The highest-ranked French male, No. 7 Gilles Simon, a skinny thing who throws every cell into every shot, looked much smoother in the second round than in the first while tearing through American Robert Kendrick on Wednesday.

No. 11-ranked Gael Monfils, who in 2008 became the first French male semifinalist in seven years and wrangled Roger Federer into a scary fourth set, breezed through his first round Tuesday.

Still, there’s duress, as confessed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the world’s No. 9 player, who has reached the final and quarterfinals in the last two Australian Opens but reported major jitters before winning his first-ever match here Tuesday against countryman Julien Benneteau.

Alize Cornet, a 19-year-old ranked No. 21 in the world, endured her interrupted, two-day, first-round match Wednesday, and said, “I am not going to lie to you. I’m not going to tell you, ‘Wow, that was great, I made the most of each moment.’ . . . People are supporting me on the big court, and I practiced all year-round to experience that feeling. But I didn’t experience the extreme feeling, the feeling of extreme joy you have, I’ve had, sometimes.”

If there’s not always composure, at least there’s candor.

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chuck.culpepper@yahoo.com