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Costa finds his moment at French

After years of rooting for other countrymen in Open final, Spaniard wins his first Grand Slam title.

By Washington Post
June 10, 2002

PARIS -- A few minutes after Albert Costa won the French Open on Sunday and a few minutes after he fell to his knees and covered himself in clay, he looked over at the young man he had just vanquished.

Juan Carlos Ferrero was barely moving. This final was supposed to be Ferrero's coronation as the prince of Spanish tennis; instead, he had been completely embarrassed 6-1, 6-0, 4-6, 6-3 and his eyes burned with the kind of enraged impatience a 22-year-old can manufacture.

Costa held Ferrero's gaze for an instant, then turned away and smiled. He had been waiting for this for more than eight years. Let the kid stew.

"Now is my moment because I won Roland Garros," he said later, and he laughed. It was his week, really, and it's not over. On Friday, he will marry Christina Ventura, the mother of his 1-year-old twins, and with his best man, Alex Corretja, in the stands supporting him, and the young player who is supposed to succeed them all, Ferrero, outdone across the net, for the first time in his career Costa was the man of the moment.

"I feel the happiest of my tennis life," he said.

The attention has been a long time coming for Costa, and not because he hadn't won a tournament on any level since August 1999. A talented ball-striker who has reached as high as No. 9 in the world, Costa has been the vanilla wafer of Spain's rich dessert plate, the mild-mannered counterpart to Corretja, Carlos Moya and, more recently, the fiercely talented Ferrero.

He was the kind of player everyone liked and no one feared. When he took out two-time Gustavo Kuerten earlier in the tournament, the victory was attributed more to Kuerten's slow recovery from hip surgery than his prowess. His semifinal win over Corretja was similarly regarded -- once the lion of Spanish tennis, Corretja has been playing through one of the roughest seasons of his career, and Costa was considered a beneficiary.

It is just that Costa turns 27 this month. Only nine men have reached their first Grand Slam final after the age of 26, and Costa hadn't made the semifinals of a major tournament before last week.

"I was feeling, 'Oh, I am never going to win Roland Garros. This could not happen to me,' " Costa recalled, noting that when Corretja and Moya played in the 1998 French final, he was crestfallen, and when Corretja returned to the final last year, he again was discouraged.

"But I think I learned a lot from this, because if they can be in the final, why can I not be in the final?"

When Costa walked onto the court Sunday, he looked as comfortable as if he were on the red courts of his native Lerida. Ferrero, also playing in his first final, was stiff and unfocused to start, and after the players returned from an early 25-minute rain delay, he fell apart.

His serves flew wildly. His forehands, which usually find the corners of the court like homing devices, skidded far from their targets. Costa, meanwhile, played beautifully, mixing his game with groundstrokes and drop shots to reel off 11 games.

"I played very badly in the first two sets," said Ferrero, who added he was feeling pain from the ankle he twisted last week. But Ferrero said much of his problem was mental.

In his only two previous French Opens, he reached the semifinals. Now that he had reached the final, soundly defeating Andre Agassi en route, he was expected to win. When things began to unravel so completely, he crumbled.

"I lost my confidence and courage when I was already down two sets," he said.

The first two sets flew by in 49 minutes.

Finally, in the third set, Ferrero held serve and, eventually, took the set. He never got a real rhythm going, however, and he double-faulted on Costa's second match point.

All that was left was to watch Costa drop to his knees and then fall completely onto the clay, overwhelmed. After all the years he had cheered for someone else, finally, he was the one soaking up the applause.

"The most difficult thing is to believe in yourself," Costa said. "And now I'm believing."

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