The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, who defeated Mathias Bourgue in the French Open, is ranked second in the world. He is also a walking existential crisis. Photograph by Ian MacNicol / Getty

The tennis player Mathias Bourgue, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman, is ranked No. 164 in the world. Until today, in the second round of the French Open, he had never played a five-set match. He had never played anyone inside the top fifty. Until he beat Jordi Samper-Montaña, a Spanish qualifier, in his first-round match—it took him nearly three and a half hours—he had never played in a major.

In the second round, Bourgue played Andy Murray, the second-best player in the world. Murray, a Scotsman, is a two-time Grand Slam champion and the winner of the most recent big clay-court title, which he won by defeating Novak Djokovic in the final. But Bourgue is French, and Murray is a walking existential crisis, and so there was a crazy match.

It began straightforwardly enough. Bourgue showed a few flashes of flair in the fourth game, but Murray handled it—easily, if not calmly—and went on to win the first set, 6–2, and the first two games of the second. Then came the plague of locusts, the weak forehands into the net, the drop shots that hung in the air, the backhands curving wide, the double faults. Murray lost the next eight straight games.

For most of the next three sets, Murray failed to put away easy winners. He hit junky forehands and sprayed his backhand—normally one of the very best in the game. He netted easy volleys. His serve was a mess. He played in his old, crouched, passive style, moving in a jerky way. He berated himself; he gnashed his teeth; he clenched his fists and grimaced in despair. _Why? _he seemed to howl. Why?

On the other side of the net, Bourgue shrugged. _Why not? _He started to play with deft power and finesse and flair, hitting dozens of feathery little drop shots. The crowd went wild for its new champion, the sixteenth-best player in the country. On a changeover, drawing on avant-garde nutrition science (and the example of another Frenchman, Gael Monfils), Bourgue asked for a Mars bar and Coke.

Murray started to find his form in the fourth, and, though he never played his best, by the fifth he was playing his kind of intelligent tennis—an attacking style that combines inventive shot-making with steady, powerful ground strokes. Always quick, always a masterly defensive player, he has become more sure-footed on this surface, capable of sliding and recovering, moving seamlessly from one shot into the next. It used to be that Murray’s chances on clay were dismissed out of hand. Now his game seems made for dirt. Murray won the fifth, and so the match.

And yet. There are plenty of signs of trouble. In his first-round match in Paris, Murray dropped the first two sets to Radek Stepanek, ranked No. 128; it took him three hours and forty-one minutes, over two days, after play was stopped for rain, to finally win that match. Stepanek is a talented player with an unusual game, playing in conditions that slowed the ball, but he is also a thirty-seven-year-old qualifier whom Murray has beaten easily in the past.

Murray is at an interesting point in his career. He has the burden and blessing of playing during an era of dominance by three of the greatest players in history, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Djokovic. He has accomplished the one thing, winning a Wimbledon title, that was demanded of him, as a British subject. He has made himself an agent of social progress, hiring a female coach, Amélie Mauresmo, and defending his choice at every turn—including after their recent split. He is a new father. He has just turned twenty-nine; he may have several years left as a top player, but he has neither the game nor the time to join the ranks of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic in the conversation about the greatest player ever. He is no longer playing for history.

The afflictions continue. There is another match ahead. For what? _Why? _This is part of the pleasure, and pain, of watching Murray play: anything and everything can be a test. _Allez, _Murray. Allez.