Whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Cameroon, the first thing they bring up is the football. The Indomitable Lions. Roger Milla dancing at the corner flag in 1990. Samuel Eto’o at Barcelona, scoring goals against teams whose names we learned to pronounce just for him. The 1990 World Cup quarter-final against England, which we lost in extra time and never stopped talking about. Senegal reached the same round in 2002. Ghana followed in 2010. Morocco went one further in 2022 and made the semi-final, the deepest run any African team has ever managed at a men’s World Cup. I did not love football as a child. I learned to. There is no real way to live in Cameroon during a major tournament without being absorbed into the national mood.
We did not watch tennis. Roland-Garros, when I was growing up, was a thing that happened on television in May and June, between cooking and other lives. It was not for us. Nobody I knew watched tennis. Except, as it turned out, my aunt.
I moved to the United States as a teenager and ended up living with her. She is a nurse. The television in her house was permanently on whatever channel was showing Serena Williams. There was a kind of devotion in it. She caught the matches between shifts, late at night, before her early shift the next day. Serena was Serena, and my aunt was completely undone every time she walked on a court. The fearlessness mostly. Also the scream. Mostly, I think, the fact of her. A Black woman moving through the most genteel sport in the world with the kind of ease that suggested she had not been told the sport was supposed to be genteel.
I started watching with her. In the summer of 2013 I had foot surgery for an injury I picked up playing football, the soccer kind, and was bedridden for most of June. Between watching grown men cry on red clay and listening to my aunt explain why Serena was about to do something terrifying to her next opponent, I went looking up Yannick Noah, who I knew was Cameroonian and a tennis player but not much else. He turned out to be one of the most consequential things Cameroon has ever exported, and nobody had told me. I felt the way you feel when a relative has done something significant and the world informed you before your own family did.
Two years later, partly to fix this, I went to Paris. I picked the study-abroad program at Stanford that would put me there during Roland-Garros. I got tickets to the show courts including Philippe-Chatrier and arranged my schedule so I was on the grounds nearly every day. I read every page about 1983. I came home convinced that the story of how a Cameroonian boy ended up holding up the Coupe des Mousquetaires in Paris was bigger and stranger than the story France had been telling about itself for forty years.
This is that story. It begins, like most things Cameroonians eventually export, with someone leaving home.
It is 5 June 1983, late afternoon, Court Philippe-Chatrier. Paris is loud, sunstruck, slightly beside itself. Yannick Noah has just beaten the defending champion, Mats Wilander, in straight sets, 6-2, 7-5, 7-6, to become the first French man in thirty-seven years to win the home Slam. Wilander was eighteen and the betting favorite. The year before, at seventeen, he had become the youngest men’s champion in the tournament’s history. Noah, six years older and seeded sixth, was the underdog. He drops his racket, drops to his knees, lifts himself again, and then his father Zacharie comes onto the court. Not politely. Not ceremonially. He comes on like a man who has been waiting years for permission to walk into his own story.
Valdes Tita is Head of Editorial and Partnerships at Guzangs. Before Guzangs he led product and partnerships across travel, education, and consumer technology, and he brings a systems lens to questions of cultural value and visibility. He writes about movement, identity, and what gets built behind the images we already know.
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