If, as someone once said, Andy Murray resembles “a tennis pro drawn by Dr Seuss”, then David Goffin, as a Belgian with blonde hair, pink cheeks and a lean frame, is always going to attract comparisons with Hergé’s creation: Tintin. So don’t be at all surprised if the 26-year-old’s matches by The Thames are presented in some quarters as The Adventures of David Goffin.
And Goffin himself has hardly distanced himself from this in the past, telling one interviewer that if he could be any comic book character, he would be Tintin. Weighing a Tintin-esque 68 kilograms, which is under 11 stone, Goffin is comfortably the lightest qualifier for this year’s Nitto ATP Finals – for comparison, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer are each 85 kilograms, while Alexander Zverev weighs 86 kilograms and Marin Cilic, who must be considerably bigger than even Captain Haddock, is a hefty 89 kilograms.
Spooling back through the recent history of the season finale, it’s hard to remember any competitor lighter than Goffin, though Frenchman Gilles Simon was around the same weight when he reached the 2008 semi-finals, the last year the event was played in Shanghai before moving to south-east London.
But no one in the crowd at The O2 should imagine that Goffin, who is an inch under six feet, is a tennis lightweight, and is in any way lacking clout on the baseline, or indeed anywhere else on court. You can be sure the other seven players will be fully aware of Goffin’s class, and his threat to their ambitions.
Goffin might be the only singles player in this year’s field under six feet, but he is still an inch taller than Kei Nishikori, a 5’10” Japanese weighing 75 kilograms, who hasn’t qualified this November, but who featured at the last three season finales, including making the semi-finals in 2014 and 2016. Every sport needs some variety so thankfully, while this often looks like the age of power-ball tennis, there’s still room for those of a smaller build who play a little differently to the rest.
Beyond both of them being Belgian, and the physical similarities, Goffin has something else in common with Tintin: the ability to torment and confound those bigger than him. Born in the suburbs of Liege, Goffin is uncommonly fast. He also takes the ball early, has excellent rhythm and doesn’t make too many mistakes. There’s also a more aggressive edge to his tennis this year, with his serve and his volleys stronger than before, a product of the work he put in when preparing for 2017. As ever, his return has been an attribute, and he can take a rally away from an opponent with just one backhand strike. As the 85-kilogram Nick Kyrgios observed this autumn, just after losing to the Belgian, when Goffin is on form “he’s up there with the best in the world”.
You’ll know Goffin is playing well this week if he’s swinging from the baseline, or stepping inside the court. “I don’t have the same serve speed as some of the guys, but I have good footwork and I take the ball early,” he has said. “I am trying to play more on the baseline, to move into the court.”
As a boy, Goffin had posters of his idol, Federer, on his bedroom wall, and now, after a season in which the Belgian broke into the Top 10 in the Emirates ATP Rankings for the first time, he joins the Swiss among the elite eight singles players. If qualifying for the Nitto ATP Finals for the first time is a special achievement for Goffin, playing on this court won’t feel entirely new to him as last November, as an alternate, he deputised for the injured Gael Monfils in a round-robin match against Novak Djokovic. But this year will feel quite different for Goffin. For one thing, he will have more time to prepare for his matches (as an alternate, you are on standby all week, not knowing when, if ever, you are going to be called upon). More significantly, he will feel as though he belongs, as though he truly deserves to be out there.
Goffin’s elevation to the Greenwich elite is all the more astonishing when you consider he had a freak accident at Roland Garros this year, when he ran deep behind the baseline to retrieve a ball and his foot caught on the tarpaulin stored at the back of the court. In agony from that ankle injury, Goffin retired from his third-round match in Paris, and played no part at all in Wimbledon.
That injury was bang in the middle of the season, but Goffin’s form was strong both at the start of the year, and also in recent weeks. After making the quarter-finals of January’s Australian Open, Goffin then appeared in two finals on the ATP World Tour in February, with a runner-up finish in Sofia and Rotterdam. Those results propelled Goffin into the Top 10 of the Emirates ATP Rankings, and he said at the time how “it means a lot, even if it’s just a number”. “To be in the Top 10 for the first time, it’s like a dream. When you start to play tennis, it’s something you think about. It’s a great feeling. In the future, I can tell my children that I was in the Top 10.”
One of Goffin’s most pleasing tournaments was April’s ATP World Tour Masters 1000 on the Monte-Carlo clay, where he took out Dominic Thiem and Djokovic on the way to the semi-finals, where he was eventually stopped by Rafael Nadal. But it was during the recent Asian hard-court swing that Goffin had the most successful fortnight of his tennis life. Goffin’s run in Shenzhen brought him his first ATP World Tour title since 2014 and within a week he had scored another, winning in Tokyo in front of Her Imperial Highness Princess Mako.
Known in Belgium, and across the international tennis, for being a fairly unflappable character, Goffin has taken his nation into another Davis Cup final. British tennis fans will doubtless remember that historic moment in Ghent a couple of years ago – in a hangar on the concrete outskirts of the city, just across the road from an Ikea furniture store – when Murray arched a lob over Goffin’s head to give Great Britain a first Davis Cup title since 1936. Perhaps they won’t recall how that was Belgium’s first appearance in a Davis Cup final since 1904. Well, just two years later, Belgium are back in the final again, playing France next week, and that’s in no small part thanks to Goffin.
As you’ll come to appreciate while watching him at the Nitto ATP Finals this week – that’s if you haven’t discovered this for yourself already – Goffin is a tennis player of quite considerable stature.