Gustavo Kuerten: The Heart Drawn in the Clay
Two sets down and 5-3 behind in the fourth round of the 2001 French Open, Gustavo Kuerten faced match point against the American Michael Russell. The rally that followed ran twenty-six strokes. Kuerten won it, won the match, and then knelt and drew a heart into the red clay with his racquet. He went on to win the tournament for the third time. "When I drew the heart on the court," he later said, "it showed all the love I had for the tournament and the crowd." The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2012, describes him as looking "like a low-key surfer dude" while carrying "the heart of a passionate warrior."
Florianópolis, and Two Losses
Gustavo Kuerten was born on 10 September 1976 in Florianópolis, in southern Brazil, into a family of German descent. His father, Aldo, a former amateur player, died of a heart attack in 1985 while umpiring a junior match in Curitiba. Guga was eight. His youngest brother, Guilherme, was deprived of oxygen at birth and lived with cerebral palsy; Kuerten gave him every trophy he won as a keepsake, including the three miniature replicas of the Coupe des Mousquetaires, and donated the whole of his prize money from one tournament each year to support disabled people. Guilherme died in November 2007 of complications from his condition.
Kuerten started playing at six, coached for eight years by Carlos Alves. At fourteen he met Larri Passos, who convinced the family that the boy could turn professional and then coached him for fifteen years. As a junior he won South American titles, frequently competing above his age group. He turned professional in 1995.
Paris, 1997
Nobody expected what happened in June 1997. Kuerten arrived at Roland Garros ranked 66th in the world, having just won a Challenger event the week before, playing only his third Grand Slam. He beat the 1995 champion Thomas Muster in five sets in the third round, the 1996 champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov in five in the quarter-finals, and the two-time champion Sergi Bruguera 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 in the final. It was his first ATP Tour title of any kind. He remains the third-lowest-ranked Grand Slam champion in history and the only player ever to win a Challenger and a Grand Slam in consecutive weeks. Björn Borg and Guillermo Vilas presented the trophy.
"Roland-Garros became everything to me," he said. "It was where everything happened — the tournament, the fans and I, all having this love affair."
Number One in the World
The 1997 win could have been a freak. The next four years established that it was not. In 2000 Kuerten took his second French Open, beating Magnus Norman on an eleventh match point. Then, at the Tennis Masters Cup in Lisbon, he beat Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi back to back and finished the year as world number one — the first South American ever to do so in the history of the ATP rankings, breaking an eight-year American grip on the position. He held the top ranking for 43 weeks.
In 2001 came the third French Open title, putting him alongside Borg, Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander as a three-time open-era champion at Roland Garros; in the final against Àlex Corretja he again drew a large heart on the clay. That summer he beat Patrick Rafter to win Cincinnati, the biggest hard-court title of his career and evidence against the charge that he was a clay-court specialist. He led the tour in prize money in 2000 and 2001, earning $4,091,004 in the latter year.
The Hip
The decline was physical and it was fast. Kuerten had won a title every year from 1997 to 2004. In September 2004 he withdrew from competition for examinations on his hip. By 2005 the injuries had stopped him winning anything; by 2006 he was outside the top 200 and missed the French Open for the first time in his professional life.
He announced that 2008 would be his last season. On 25 May 2008 he played his final professional singles match at Roland Garros, wearing the same blue and yellow "lucky" kit he had worn in 1997, and lost to Paul-Henri Mathieu 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 in front of 15,000 people. He finished with 20 ATP singles titles, eight in doubles, and three Grand Slams.
The Davis Cup Rebellion
Kuerten debuted for Brazil in the Davis Cup in 1996 and played regularly until 2005, helping beat Austria to reach the World Group. He drew criticism in 1999 and 2000 for allegedly not giving the competition his full effort. But in 2004, when the Brazilian Tennis Confederation sacked the captain Ricardo Accioly, Kuerten refused to play in protest. Other Brazilian players followed him, and the confrontation forced organisational reform — an unusual instance of a national sporting body being brought to heel by its own star.
Why Gustavo Is Called a Genius
The claim here is about physical craft and temperament, not intellect, and it has two components. The first is technical, and it changed the sport. Kuerten built his game on extreme topspin from a single-handed western-grip backhand — an arcing, looping stroke that his contemporaries could not replicate — and he was an early adopter of polyester strings, which allowed him, in the standard description of his game, to swing for pace and generate the topspin needed to control the ball simultaneously. That combination is now the default in professional tennis. He was playing modern tennis a decade before it became modern.
The second is competitive nerve. Winning Roland Garros ranked 66th, in your third major, having never won a tour event, by beating three former champions of that same tournament — two of them over five sets — is not luck. Neither is saving match point at 3-5 down and two sets adrift in a tournament you go on to win, nor converting an eleventh match point in a final. The Hall of Fame's phrase for it is the passionate warrior inside the surfer.
The honest counter-case: all three of his majors came on one surface, and his hard-court record, while real — the Cincinnati title over Rafter, the Masters Cup wins over Sampras and Agassi — never produced a second-surface Slam. His peak was short, effectively 1997 to 2001, and ended in his twenties when his hip gave out. Compared with the sustained multi-surface dominance of Borg, Sampras or the generation that followed, his body of work is thinner. What is not disputed is that at his best, on clay, he was close to unplayable, and that the technique he pioneered outlived him.
Legacy
Kuerten's influence in Brazil is out of proportion to his title count: he made tennis a mainstream sport in a football country and remains its emblem there. He founded the Instituto Guga Kuerten in 2000 to support children and disabled people in Florianópolis, and the honours reflect the man as much as the player — the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award in 2003, the Prix Orange for sportsmanship at Roland Garros three times (1998, 2002, 2004), the ITF's Philippe Chatrier Award in 2010, the Jean Borotra Sportsmanship Award in 2011, induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2012 and appointment as its global ambassador in 2016. On 5 August 2016 he carried the Olympic torch into the Rio opening ceremony, handing it to Hortência Marcari.
He lives in the Lagoa da Conceição district of his home city, studied drama at Santa Catarina State University from 2009, and married Mariana Soncini in November 2010, on what would have been his late brother's birthday. In 2016 he faced tax charges relating to copyright and image rights between 1995 and 2002 and was ordered to pay approximately $2 million. The heart in the clay, however, is what survives.
Achievements
- International Tennis Hall of Fame
- Worked as tennis player
