A tribute video played, with messages from some of his greatest rivals and friends, including\u00a0Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Stan Wawrinka, and his compatriots Gasquet, Noah, Gilles Simon, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Arthur Fils, before he was reunited on-court with his fellow \u2018Musketeers\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His opponent, too, paid tribute when meeting the media afterwards. The 25-year-old Gaston said that Monfils was always generous with time and advice and, overall, enjoyed being part of the experience.<\/p>\n
“It was quite a strange feeling when, at the end of the third set, everyone was shouting, ‘Gael, Gael,’ I wanted to shout with them,” Gaston said. <\/p>\n
“It is a difficult position, because I used to watch him play on TV. He’s quite the showman. I love the man he is. He’s a genuinely nice guy. I was expecting for the crowd to be with him, but there was a lot of respect and the atmosphere was good, so that’s cool.”<\/p>\n
While Monfils’ stay in Paris is over, with his\u00a040 wins remaining the joint most for a Frenchman at Roland-Garros in the Open era, Gaston’s continues against Argentina\u2019s Francisco Cerundolo in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A tribute video played, with messages from some of his greatest rivals and friends, including\u00a0Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-604011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}