Childhood friend of Lucas Pouille, Enzo Py is today a little more than that. While the Northerner went through a long phase of depression and was on the verge of ending his career, he finally found the motivation to attempt a comeback as unexpected as it was successful. And it was to Enzo Py that he turned at the beginning of the year to accompany him in the twists and turns of the Challengers tournaments, from Thailand to the United States.
The one who was initially only to be a moral support for the former world No. 10 finally turned into a full-time coach. In the front row to witness both the shipwreck of his friend, a little over a year ago, and his current resurrection, he has agreed to answer questions from 20 minuteswhile his boyfriend / colt faces Cameron Norrie in the second round of Roland-Garros this Wednesday.
A year ago, when Lucas decided to completely cut, he was on the verge of saying stop tennis, you would have thought such a return possible?
It’s complicated to say that we knew it, but, yes, we believed in it and we strongly hoped so. When I say us, it’s the entourage, even if in the entourage there are always people who believe in it more than others. I am happy to be one of them. The small distance that exists between being family and being one of the closest friends, it allows you to have a little more perspective and perhaps better feel if you have to believe it or tell yourself that it’s over. I have always believed in it. Anyway everyone was pushing in the same direction and we are all happy to see what is happening to him.
It is hard to imagine how hard this period of doubt, of depression as he said himself, must have been for those close to him. How did you go through that?
At first it was very hard for him. You mustn’t forget that it’s his job, it’s what he’s been doing four, five, eight hours a day since he was fifteen. For the rest, yes, it was also hard for us, his friends, and for his family, his wife. Seeing one of your close friends or, in Clemence’s case, seeing your husband suffer from doing his job, is terrible. The evil is known, it’s called burn-out. He called it depression. On arrival, it’s the same, we’re talking about something deep and serious. Afterwards, during the period when he completely stopped playing tennis, last summer, he was quite well, he was not reclusive at home drinking shots all day as I could read on the right or to the left.
He himself said it, he slept no more than an hour a night and found himself drinking alone in his hotel room…
Yes, but who hasn’t had a beer or two, or even ten, at home, all alone, on an evening when you’re not well and where you ask yourself a thousand questions? It was a period, and I think it’s important to be clear about that, when… (he tries to find his words) We didn’t think he was going to kill himself, but hey, it was very hard . And he lived it alone because he’s like that, he’s silent. Besides, with a few friends, we said to ourselves that we would have liked him to call us if he had any cannons to drink (laughs)!
Can we feel that the other is bad?
No. We knew things weren’t going well, but Lucas you might have to ask him the question 5,000 times in a row so that in the end he doesn’t answer you and you understand that it’s really not going well. He is someone who has such sensitivity that he has built a gigantic shell over the years. If you ask him if he’s okay, he’ll always say yes, even when he’s not. And even if we felt that this was not the case, you cannot force the person to put their discomfort into words either, as they recently ended up doing with your colleagues at The Team. Well, the depression, a little booze, it ended up coming out and I think it did him good.
How to explain, as he himself admitted, his backlash around 24, when he had just joined the top 10?
At some point, when you get almost all the way up there, you have to manage to set new goals and it’s not always easy, especially if you feel that they’re going to be hard to achieve, that you may have be reached your max. You have to succeed in raising the bar and find meaning in your daily work. I don’t know if it’s normal, but I find that there is a form of logic in demobilizing and, for a time, not knowing where you want to go. Once you’re 10, the goal isn’t to be 9 or 8 or 7. So what is it? It’s being up there, it’s winning a grand slam. Except that during these years you had the three monsters Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, who left only crumbs for the competition. At that time, perhaps he did not know how to find these new objectives.
How did he experience his return through the back door, the Challengers tournaments at the end of the world, the money that no longer goes into the coffers?
Very badly at the start, inevitably, it hurts the ego, it hurts comfort. But once you accept that, you tell yourself that you have no choice anyway. And then there’s what you put in all that. I think it did him good in the end. He had said in an interview “I stopped the train before it derailed, before I hit the wall”. Personally, I think on the contrary that he took it, the wall, and that given what he is doing to us today, we can say that he crossed it and that he got away with it. is raised. There are some who stop once the wall is taken, it’s over, they’re dead. Him, no, and I find that strong and courageous on his part. It doesn’t leave you unscathed, that’s for sure, you break things but you rebuild yourself and you may come back stronger in certain aspects. Today we can say it, he has a moral of steel. I find him serene, poised and confident again. However, we know that this is the most important thing in tennis. Confidence takes a very long time to acquire and it is lost in two minutes. The goal is for it to continue in this direction.
He recently explained that it was a phone call from Pierre-Hugues Herbert who offered to go and train with him at the CNE ten days before the Master 1000 at Bercy, which changed everything. It doesn’t matter anyway!
Yeah, we’ll never know if, without the phone call from Pierre-Hugues and without this training at the CNE, he would have really stopped, and so much the better I want to say. So much the better for his daughter, so much the better for Clémence, his wife, who absolutely did not want to see him stop. I think, me, that he would have resumed no matter what. But maybe because it’s just that I hoped deep inside me.
How do you recover physically after such a break?
Going for months without playing is one thing, your body loses the habit of exertion, but it also and above all loses the habit of pain. All these guys, these 100, 200, 300 pro players, every day they wake up and they are in pain, every day. It’s part of the job. And that, you end up forgetting when you put the racket down, it’s not easy to get back to it. So, inevitably, the body needs a few months to get used to that again, to re-engage pro mode, but that phase is over. There remains a legitimate question today that we have not yet answered, it is his ability to last five sets on the court. In my opinion he is ready. He will play Cameron Norrie, a formidable player, we will see how far we have to go.
What do the 2024 Olympics represent in his mind?
What we saw on court 14 between Lucas and the public, repeatedly throughout the week, plus his match in the first round, I don’t remember having seen that often. Of course there is often an atmosphere with the French players, but I felt something really special with Lucas. I talk about this because this relationship with the French public is fundamental for Lucas. I believe people are sincerely happy to see him back, to see what he’s been through and to witness his resurrection. And Lucas is a patriot, he is someone who loves to play for his country, he won the Davis Cup with the French team, so for him the Olympic Games represent a lot. He thinks about it every day and I understand it, doing Games at home, it happens once in a lifetime, and again. It’s a real goal for him, a real source of motivation, it’s part of the reason why he worked so hard to come back from nowhere.