All in the family for Gomez and Korda

NEW YORK • Tennis remains a family game, and former French Open champion Andres Gomez's five children all became good enough to play college tennis in the United States.

Only one became good enough to follow their father's path and play in the French Open, and when Emilio Gomez took to Court 3 on Monday for his Grand Slam tournament debut, Andres Gomez was back home in Guayaquil, Ecuador, watching it on a screen in the early morning.

His son got close, very close, pushing Lorenzo Sonego of Italy to a fifth set, but there will be no second round for the younger Gomez. Sonego prevailed 6-7 (6-8), 6-3, 6-1, 6-7 (4-7), 6-3 in just over four hours.

"That's how tennis goes," Andres Gomez said by telephone. "I'm still happy. Obviously, I would have wanted a different result today, but clay is not his best surface. Good things are coming for him, I think."

Just reaching the main draw was quite a journey for Emilio Gomez, a former collegiate player at the University of Southern California. He is 28 and nearly quit the game in 2018 after a string of disappointing results, only deciding to push on after winning two satellite events in Ecuador. But in this strange and disjointed season, he finally broke through in Paris, coming through three rounds of qualifying.

Thirty years after his father won the French Open in 1990, defeating Andre Agassi, Emilio made it into the main draw, breaking into tears.

"To be on the courts where my father won is something special," said Emilio, ranked 155th. "I'm not a first-level player like him, but I enjoy it."

Choosing the same path as a champion parent is not without its perils. "Emilio had to carry the name on the back, and it was a heavy load, sometimes even heavier because he thought it was heavy," Andres said.

"But I think Emilio started to enjoy being my son. Everybody is the son of somebody, and there's always expectations and sometimes expectations are a little tougher on some of them."

The next challenge for the late-bloomer: Making the main draw at another Grand Slam tournament on a surface better suited to his tight-to-the-baseline game.

Emilio is not the only child of a Grand Slam champion making his main-draw debut at this year's French Open. There is also Sebastian Korda, a 20-year-old American who will face John Isner in the second round of men's singles today.

Korda's father and coach is Petr Korda, the 1998 Australian Open champion from the Czech Republic who also reached the French Open final in 1992, losing to Jim Courier.

But the next-generation Kordas are not just tennis players.

Petr Korda and his wife, Regina, who was also a leading Czech player, also have two older daughters: Jessica, 27, and Nelly, 22, who are two of the leading women's professional golfers and each has won multiple LPGA Tour titles.

"They are having a good year this year, so we're always in contact, and we're always talking about what we can do better, and how we're doing it," Sebastian said of his sisters.

Sebastian, nicknamed Sebi, started out with a passion for ice hockey but decided to focus on tennis at age nine after travelling to the US Open in 2009 with his father when Petr was coaching the Czech player Radek Stepanek.

"He played Djokovic on Ashe at like 10.30 at night," Sebastian said of Stepanek.

"It was completely packed, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I went home and said, this is exactly what I want to do, just kind of fell in love with it."

The Korda parents taught Sebastian the tennis fundamentals, which included a two-handed backhand, which has developed into his best shot and is quite a contrast to his father's flat one-hander.

NYTIMES