“It doesn’t end the way you want it,” said ESPN’s John McEnroe as he watched 39-year-old Novak Djokovic lose in five routinely excruciating sets on opening night at the US Open to a player he once would have used for batting practice.

McEnroe, now 67, says a great many things, too often in the midst of a rally, but he knows all about downbeat career endings. He won the last of his seven singles majors at the US Open in 1984 at age 25 and then played on for more than a decade. His final singles match was a first-round loss to Magnus Gustafsson at the Rotterdam Open in 1996.

There have been exceptions for a select few tennis superstars. Chris Evert, in her farewell, led the US team to victory at the 1989 Fed Cup final, concluding with a victory over Conchita Martinez. Australian Ash Barty retired on her own terms, though much too soon for the rest of us, after winning the 2022 Australian Open at age 25 and has shown no sign of making a comeback. Pete Sampras also won his last tournament – the 2002 US Open, beating archrival Andre Agassi in the final – though it took Sampras nearly another year to make his retirement official.

If we go way back, the poker-faced American Helen Wills walked off in 1938 after winning Wimbledon for the eighth time, never playing singles again.

But much (much) more often, it ends with something closer to a whimper than a roar. See Djokovic’s measuring sticks Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer for confirmation, and I’m referencing Federer’s last singles match, not his ceremonial and deeply moving Laver Cup adieu.

What makes a player great -- self-belief, tenacity, pure talent and innate drive -- can also greatly contribute to them pushing it to a point where it gets hard for the rest of us to watch.

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With another US Open upon us, it is Roger Federer’s time again even though he is long retired and has not played in the Open in seven years:

Exhibition matches in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Interviews and media appearances in Manhattan, and on Saturday in Newport, induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame with his family and friends in attendance.

Federer’s place in Newport was never in doubt with 20 Grand Slam titles, 83 other singles titles and a beautiful game and winning personality that connected with those inside and outside the sport.

I was fortunate to have a courtside seat for much of it, and I will be in Newport on Saturday. To mark the moment, I’m publishing an excerpt from my biography The Master.

It’s from the first of the book’s 18 chapters, and it focuses on a late-night conversation Federer and I had in a limousine in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2012 after he played an exhibition match against Juan Martin del Potro.

****

As the Argentines shouted and pressed toward the car, Federer did not shrink from the window. He drew closer to it.

I asked him if he knew the English word “jaded.”

“A little bit,” he said, sounding hesitant.

“In French, it basically means ‘blasé,’” I said. “You’ve been through it all before, things no longer give you the same rush. It’s kind of how you imagine Björn Borg in the car leaving the US Open, never to return.”

Borg was twenty-five then.

Federer considered that for a moment.

“It happens very quickly,” he said. “You’re just, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m tired of it all.’ And really, that’s what I try to avoid by having the proper schedule and the proper fun and the proper change, because, like you mentioned, if you do the same thing, it doesn’t matter what you do, too many times, all the time, too often you get bored of it. It doesn’t matter how extraordinary your life might be, so that’s where I think these kinds of trips, or a good buildup practice session or a great vacation or some amazing tournaments in a row, toughing it out, whatever it might be, it’s in the mix that I find the resources for more, the energy for more. Really, it’s pretty simple in a way.”

Watching Federer stay fresh and eager deep into his thirties, against logic and against tennis precedent, it was intriguing to realize that his ability to remain in the moment was in fact about forethought. If he was relaxed and accommodating despite all the forces pulling at him, it was because he knew himself and his microcosm well enough to avoid the pitfalls that would likely snuff out his pilot light.

But then such intentionality is very much in harmony with his career as a whole.

He has often made the game look astonishingly easy through the decades: hitting aces, gliding to forehands, and, in his most gravity- defying act, remaining high above the waterline in a world right- fully flooded with icon cynicism. But his path from temperamental, bleached-blond teenager with dubious style sense to one of the most elegant and self-possessed great athletes has been a long-running act of will, not destiny.

Federer is widely perceived as a natural, and yet he is a meticulous planner who has learned to embrace routine and self-discipline, plotting out his schedule well in advance and in considerable detail.

“I usually have an idea of the next one and a half years, and a very good idea about the next nine months,” he said in Argentina. “I can tell you what I’ll be doing on Monday before Rotterdam or what I’m doing Saturday before Indian Wells. I mean, not hour by hour, but I pretty much talk it through day by day.”

Though it is rare to see Federer sweat, there has been tremendous toil and ample self-doubt behind the scenes. He has played in pain far more than most of us realize. There has also been no shortage of bruising setbacks in the spotlight. One could easily argue that the two greatest matches in which he has played were the 2008 Wimbledon final against Rafael Nadal and the 2019 Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic. Both ended in bitter defeats in tight fifth sets that extended past regulation.

He has been a big winner, racking up more than a hundred tour titles and twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semifinals, but also a big loser.

That has no doubt contributed to his everyman appeal, helping to humanize him. To his credit, Federer has absorbed the blows, both public and private, and rebounded with the accent on positive energy and the long run.

He has transcended tennis, not by using it as a platform for higher or edgier causes but by remaining largely within the confines of the game. That is no small achievement for a sport with a dwindling and aging fan base in Europe and North America.

It is an old-school approach: low on controversy and on glimpses into his personal life, long on bonhomie and Corinthian spirit.

Boring? Hardly. How can anyone who unites in a divided world be a source of ennui? He has long had the beautiful game: balletic, often airborne as he leaps to strike a serve or groundstroke with his eyes on the contact point for a moment longer than any player I have watched in my more than thirty years of covering tennis. That ability to finish, truly finish, the stroke can make him appear nonchalant, but it is also integral to what makes him magnetic to the gaze. It is the equivalent of Michael Jordan hovering a little longer than everyone else in flight to the basket, of a dancer holding a pose for emphasis.

“He is the most beautiful and balletic player I’ve ever seen,” Billie Jean King told me. “His kinetic chain stays very connected. That’s where the elegance comes from.”

Professional tennis has been put into a particle accelerator during the last quarter century, with more powerful rackets and polyester strings and with taller, more explosive athletes. Stroke technique and footwork have had to be adjusted to deal with the speed, but Federer still seems to have the time he needs to put a final coat of paint on his shots. How can he play this way and still recover before hitting the next polished stroke? Because of rare vision, mobility, and agility but also because of relatively compact strokes and the confidence that comes with knowing that while others must plan and grind and press, he can conjure solutions on the run or full stretch that others simply lack the tool kit—or Swiss army knife—to create.

Marc Rosset, the best Swiss men’s player before Federer moved the goalposts to a faraway place, likes to talk about Federer’s “processing speed.”

Rosset remembers doing a drill in which someone would throw five balls of different colors into the air and ask players to catch the five balls in order according to color. “The maximum I ever did was four,” Rosset said. “It was really tough for me. Rog, you gave him five balls, and he caught all five.”

In Rosset’s view, “People focus a lot on an athlete’s talent with his hands or his feet. But there’s a talent we don’t talk about enough and that’s reactivity, the ability of their brain to interpret what their eyes are seeing. When you look at the great champions, a football player like [Zinedine] Zidane or [Diego] Maradona, or you look at Federer, Djokovic, or Nadal in tennis, you have the impression sometimes that they are in the Matrix, that everything is going so fast, too fast for you and me, but they pick up on things so quickly that it is as if they have more time for their brains to process it all.

“Zidane, when he dribbled, there were four people around him, but he was calm. It’s all in slow motion for him. These great champions are a fraction of a second ahead of everybody else, and that allows them to be more relaxed, because when you see some of the incredible shots that Roger could hit in his career, those are not shots you can practice.”

To watch Federer on his finer days is to be swept away by the flow of his movement but also to be put on edge by the sense that legerdemain is surely on the way, but when? It is a double dose of intoxication: intensified by how little he has deviated from the challenge at hand for most of his career. Without tirades or banter and with his inner journey rarely reflected in his deeply set eyes on court, the focus has remained on the physical act of him practicing his craft.

“He plays the ball, but he also plays with the ball,” his friend and longtime coach Severin Lüthi once told me.

It is a quality that appeals to insiders as well as outsiders. “Fed is the guy that probably more than anybody else still astounds other players,” said Brad Stine, a longtime coach who worked with Kevin Anderson and No. 1 Jim Courier. “They watch him and they honestly say, ‘How does he do that? I mean, really, how do you make that shot?’ ”

John McEnroe was an artist with a racket, too, but a tormented one. If Johnny Mac were Jackson Pollock, splattering paint in an attempt to express some internal struggle, Federer would be much closer to Peter Paul Rubens: prolific, well-adjusted, enduring, and perfectly accessible to mainstream tastes yet capable of giving chills to the experts with his brushwork and composition, too.

It is quite a school of performance art but also one that leaves ample white space on the canvas for others to find their own meaning in his work. Federer would rather not overthink the formula—“it’s pretty simple in a way,” he says—but he accepts that others will have at it, like a writer whose novels get parsed to the nth degree in a graduate seminar.

I remember talking with Federer about this before we boarded that private jet in the California desert in 2018 (it was my first and probably last ride in a private jet). He had played the final of the BNP Paribas Open the previous day against del Potro, blowing three match points on his own serve and losing in a third-set tiebreaker: his first defeat of the season. The margins had been so slim, the reaction time so compressed, even for him.

“Tactics? People talk about tactics,” Federer said. “But a lot of the time at this level it just comes down to instinct. It happens so fast that you have to hit the shot almost without thinking. There’s of course some luck involved.”

Fortune has indeed played a role for Federer. He might not have become a champion, at least not a tennis champion, if an Australian journeyman pro named Peter Carter had not decided to take a coaching job in, of all places, a small club in Basel, Switzerland. Federer might not have had the staying power if he had not met a cerebral, sensitive, and gifted fitness trainer named Pierre Paganini or crossed career paths with Mirka Vavrinec, an older Swiss player who eventually became his wife, part-time press agent, and organizer in chief. There is no way he would have played on so long and so convincingly without her full support and her own ambition.

“She has a desire to succeed that is just as strong as Federer, perhaps stronger,” said Paul Dorochenko, the French fitness trainer who worked with Vavrinec and Federer in their early years in Switzerland.

But in life and certainly in pro tennis it is really about what you do with your good fortune, what you make of your opportunities, and Federer built on many of them rather than squander them.

Federer is not as debonair as his marketers can make him appear. He is intelligent and intuitive but no master of the Bondian bon mot. He did, after all, stop school at sixteen and was not a particularly serious student. But he approached adulthood and the tour with much more rigor.

“I consider this life school,” he said in Argentina of his nomadic life on tour.

Though Federer was undeniably gifted, one of the things that differentiated him from some of the other great talents of his generation was that he had both an abiding love of the game and the drive to demand more of himself. He believed that maintaining the same level in pro tennis was actually losing ground, a belief that rubbed off on his younger rivals.

“The number one requirement to succeed at this level is I think the constant desire and open-mindedness to master and improve and evolve yourself in every aspect,” Djokovic told me recently. “I know Roger has talked about this a lot, and I think it’s something most top athletes in all sports can agree on. Stagnation is regression.”

Federer understood, or came to understand, his weaknesses and addressed them: anger management, mental toughness, concentration, endurance, a chronically sore back, and his single-handed backhand drive. He switched tactics, attacking more from the baseline than the net. He switched to a larger-headed racket to increase his chances of thriving in extended rallies and switched coaches repeatedly—but not impulsively—to get a fresh perspective and sometimes went without a coach at all. Throughout his life he has sought out people who could serve as mentors, even role models for his next phase: from Sampras to prelapsarian Tiger Woods to, more recently, Bill Gates, whose philan- thropic approach Federer hopes to emulate in his later years.

His tennis skills have been the main ingredient in his success, but his people skills are also part of the recipe. Tennis superstars get a lot of free footwear, but it is rarer that they are able to put themselves in others’ shoes. Federer is an empath, constantly registering the feelings and energy in the stadium, the street, the room, the backseat.

“He’s extremely socially intelligent, and I think that’s a huge reason why he’s so popular,” said Andy Roddick, the American star who became his friend. “He’s a chameleon. He can work in kind of any room, and it’s a genuine emotion. It’s not like he’s fitting the mold in a calculated sense.”

Federer’s finely tuned antennae are part of the explanation for his postmatch tears, much less frequent now but still inseparably part of his persona. They seem to be not just an expression of joy or disappointment but a release after all the input he has absorbed on court.

It is not just about what he has invested emotionally in a match or a tournament; it is about what everyone has invested emotionally in a match or a tournament.

Argentina was an unexpectedly meaningful stop on the journey, and as we approached his hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, Federer, winner of a record seventeen Grand Slam singles titles at that stage, was emphasizing how much he still wanted to improve.

“I’m going to take a vacation after this, rest and just get away from it all, because the last few years have been extremely intense,” he said. “I feel if I keep on pushing at this pace I might lose interest like you mentioned, just get jaded.”

Federer laughed.

“ ‘Jaded.’ That’s the new word I have in my vocabulary, and that’s the last thing I want happening,” he said. “Hopefully next year is going to be a platform for many more years. That’s the opportunity I want to give myself.”

*****

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P.S. I also got the chance earlier this year to discuss Federer’s evolution in depth with Patrick McEnroe for TennisWorthy, a podcast presented by the Hall of Fame.

You can find the latest edition of The Master here, and it’s on sale for a limited time, so I hope you’ll enjoy the savings and, above all, the book. I look forward to reconnecting with many of you as I write about the US Open.

Thank you!

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WIMBLEDON — It was a new-age Wimbledon: plenty of sweat but not a drop of rain, at least not on my watch. There were bare shoulders to go with the bare baselines. Fans were nearly as numerous as fans.

It was an old-school Wimbledon: Serena Williams came back to play at 44 and exited quickly. Roger Federer came back to watch at 44 and lingered.

Arthur Fery, a Wimbledon local, made excellent use of his wildcard. Linda Noskova saved a match point on July 4 and won her first major on July 11. Jannik Sinner stormed back after a year without a major title and was an irresistible force down the stretch and on the stretch.

It was a memorable Wimbledon, if not quite a great one, and the photographers captured the big swings in mood and light. The grass is not just the players’ canvas, and Henry Nicholls rose to the occasion with his image of Alexandra Eala holding nothing back. So did Matthew Stockman, one of the best in the business (and a Tennis & Beyond subscriber), with his photo of Noskova blowing a kiss to her late mother: an image that seems the right one to finish off this collection.

Shots that will stay with me:

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WIMBLEDON – Order was partially restored on Sunday at the granddaddy of all tennis tournaments.

Jannik Sinner, the No. 1 who was often unplayable this spring on smaller stages, is a Grand Slam ch…

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WIMBLEDON – After covering her ears on Centre Court to block out the bad news earlier in the afternoon, Linda Noskova covered her eyes and basked in the best moment of her career.

She was lying on what was left of the grass on Centre Court, emotionally spent after winning this sun-baked Wimbledon in much more dramatic fashion than she would have liked.

It could have been 6-2, 6-2 in her first Grand Slam final.

“I would have liked that, absolutely,” she said.

Instead, on the brink of a straightforward victory, she had lost five games in a row and failed to convert five championship points to lose the second set 7-5 to Karolina Muchova, her friend and much more experienced Czech compatriot.

“In the second set, it was very tough for me, my hand kind of froze at certain moments,” Noskova said. “My feet were not as quick as they had been before.”

After covering her ears as she walked to her chair, she wisely left the court to collect herself and on her way to the bathroom, she got a glimpse of the future.

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WIMBLEDON -- Andre Agassi likes to say that one of the best things about tennis is that you cannot run out the clock.

A lead is certainly better than a deficit, but there is no protecting…

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WIMBLEDON – Let’s imagine the behind-the-scenes meetings before Wimbledon this year.

“All right, we’ve got a World Cup happening again at the same time as our precious tournament, and England might just bring it home for real, though I doubt it. Still we need some counter-programming. Any thoughts.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Don’t hold back. Think way outside the box.”

“All right. How about a little-known British wildcard with a triple-digit ranking making a deep run? We already had Emma Raducanu winning the US Open as a qualifier in 2021. Too bad that didn’t happen at Wimbledon, but how about we make our unlikely hero a men’s player this time?”

“Why not? And let’s have him be local, really local. Maybe he walked to the All England Club as a kid and he’ll sleep at his family house during the tournament, just like old times.”

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WIMBLEDON – Novak Djokovic is not playing often in the extended twilight of his career.

A tournament here; a tournament there. A bit of clay; a bit of grass with a major emphasis on the Grand Sla…

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WIMBLEDON – The All England Club used to give everyone a chance to catch their breath.

Not anymore.

Retractable roofs have ended rain delays on the two main show courts and eliminated whatever demand remained for Cliff Richard (or anyone) breaking into courtside song.

The traditional day of rest on the first Sunday of the tournament was abandoned in 2022, turning Wimbledon into an uninterrupted 14-day event. We will see how long that lasts with the other majors at 15 days. But for now, Wimbledon’s move – driven by improvements in grasscourt maintenance and interest in more revenue and continuity– has neatly divided the world’s oldest tennis tournament into two full weeks.

While the English — and not just the English — recover from staying up too late to watch the World Cup, let’s look at week one:

BIGGEST SURPRISE

It was a tight race, and, for me at least, it does not include Alexandra Eala beating defending women’s champ Iga Swiatek, or a resurgent Naomi Osaka rumbling past No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in straight sets.

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WIMBLEDON -- It’s tough to be a nostalgic in Grand Slam tennis. So much of the physical evidence is gone.

The US Open left Forest Hills in 1978 and keeps remodeling its new home at Flushing Meado…

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WIMBLEDON – So was it worth it?

It is a question that only Serena Williams can answer, and she wasn’t available to respond on Tuesday night, declining the supposedly mandatory press conference after her latest first-round defeat at Wimbledon.

Williams, as she made clear upon arrival at the All England Club, still enjoys the back-and-forth with an opponent much more than she does the give-and-take with the news media. Yet it seemed no way to treat a grand occasion and a tournament that had happily offered her a wildcard and a fresh opportunity to test herself in the closest thing tennis has to a temple.

In bottom-line terms, she did not pass the test, losing in the opening round on Centre Court to Maya Joint, an 87th-ranked Australian who is more than half her age. Williams was up an early break in the third set and could not ride the wave, playing a particularly poor service game at 2-3 and failing to come up with the returns and inspiration she needed down the stretch.

Final score: 6-3, 6-7 (6-8), 6-3 for the 20-year-old Joint, who has struggled to win any matches this season after a breakthrough year in 2025. Williams is the first player Joint has beaten on the main tour since January.

This was the sort of vulnerable opponent Williams once rumbled past in the majors, flexing her serve, groundstrokes and intimidating aura and expeditiously moving on to the next challenge.

Those days are gone for good, but in light of the circumstances, more nuance than the bottom line seems appropriate.

Williams is 44 years old and had not played a singles match in nearly four years. Viewed through that lens, this was a remarkable performance, one in which she produced some flashes of first-rate, first-strike tennis and in which she showed trademark competitive fire under duress late in the second set: finding her still-formidable first serve in the tiebreaker, saving a match point with a forehand winner and extending the festivities.

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WIMBLEDON — It felt like old tennis times at Wimbledon, tracking the draw to see whom Serena Williams would face in her opening round on Centre Court.

But these are not the same times. Williams w…

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PARIS — It was two Grand Slam tournaments in one: a scorcher in the opening week where the Panama hats and ice towels really did seem essential; and then a rainy and blustery final stretch where the wind sent red grit swirling into contenders’ and spectators’ faces.

Photographers embrace different light and weather, and tennis photographers, like tennis writers, enjoy capturing the spirit of a major that goes off the rails. The moment the unbeatable Jannik Sinner melted down with a two-set, 5-1 lead in the second round, the 2026 French Open became a wild ride.

Shots that will stay with me:

Moise Kouame: Sudden Impact

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PARIS – So, will the 2026 French Open be a blip or a true fork in the road?

It was awash in breakthroughs and surprises, including Maja Chwalinska, the first qualifier to reach a Roland Garros fi…

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PARIS – I was at Roland Garros on Saturday watching Mirra Andreeva manage the moment, the gusting wind, the partisan crowd and the tricky, throwback game of Maja Chwalinska, her longshot opponent.

Andreeva, just 19 years old, passed all of those tests and won the French Open, her first major title. As the Russian teenager hoisted the trophy without the usual trappings because of her nationality -- no anthem, no flag raising – I was flashing back to a conversation in Athens.

I was there last month for a tournament organized by the agency IMG and reserved for players under 12 years of age. Clinton Coleman, a senior scout for IMG Tennis, trots the globe looking for young talent, and in March 2019 he found himself in Moscow for a European junior event and spotted a gem.

Andreeva was 11 years old, and Coleman showed me a video he took that day:

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PARIS – An Italian man is guaranteed to be in the final of this French Open, and it’s not No. 1 Jannik Sinner. A Polish woman with a heavy topspin forehand is already in the final, and it’s not …

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PARIS – So it won’t be quite like 1997, after all.

Jakub Mensik made sure of that by ending Brazil’s chances at another dream run to the title at Roland Garros by defeating Joao Fonseca.

Mensik did it in straight sets in the quarterfinals with a brilliant all-court performance under a closed roof that did not exist in 1997 when Fonseca’s effervescent compatriot Gustavo “Guga” Kuerten came out of close-to-tennis-nowhere to win it all in Paris.

The roof, inaugurated in 2020, was a factor on Tuesday night, helping Mensik to play and serve with the power and precision required to keep Fonseca on the stretch and at bay, even after he saved six match points on serve to force a third-set tiebreaker. Kuerten, his abundant mane gone gray, was in the front row for it all: urging on his would-be successor, twisting away when supersonic forehands smacked into the tape or landed just wide.

It was that kind of evening for the 19-year-old Fonseca after he helped flip this tournament on its head by upsetting Novak Djokovic from two sets down and then avoiding the hangover by beating Casper Ruud.

But neither Djokovic nor Ruud was as relentlessly good from the backcourt and forecourt as Mensik, who, at age 20, is also making his first big splash in a major after beating his idol Djokovic to win the Miami Open last year.

Last week, the Czech youngster looked down and out after cramping at the finish of his marathon second-round victory over Mariano Navone: lying on the clay for several deeply unsettling minutes and then needing help to get to his feet and the locker room. But youth is made of rubber, and Mensik, not Fonseca, will face No. 2 seed Alexander Zverev in the semifinals on Friday, and they will be joined by a much more unlikely pair from the top half.

It has taken a series of long-shot happenings to get to this stage, including a wrist injury for Carlos Alcaraz that kept him out of the tournament and the ultimate meltdown in the first-week heat for clear No. 1 Jannik Sinner after he led by two sets and 5-1 against Juan Manuel Cerundolo.

You can’t make this stuff up, but as in 1997, the most off-the-rails French Open I have covered, this wild and crazy edition keeps getting wilder and crazier and not just for the men.

On Wednesday at Roland Garros, world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was up 6-3 and two breaks at 4-1 on Russian lefty Diana Shnaider only to start losing her edge and her cool on the same patch of red clay where she lost both against Coco Gauff in last year’s final.

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PARIS – The guard changed quite some time ago. Novak Djokovic, the most prolific champion in the rich history of men’s tennis, is a part-timer now and has not won a major singles title in nearly…

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PARIS – As Jannik Sinner was dissolving into a puddle and losing 18 points in a row on Thursday against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, I was flashing back to a dash up a staircase on another spring afternoon at Roland Garros full of surprises.

It was May 31, 2009, and, as I wrote in my recent book THE WARRIOR, I was hardly sprinting alone. Rafael Nadal had just gone down two sets to one on the Philippe Chatrier Court against Robin Soderling of all people. A number of us who had been camped out in the old French Open media room working on routine stories were suddenly scurrying up the stairs to the press box to get a firsthand look at the biggest French Open story imaginable.

Nadal had never lost at Roland Garros, securing four straight titles from 2005 to 2008. He had won 31 straight matches and was a preposterous 48-0 in best-of-five-set matches on clay. A few weeks earlier, he had demolished Soderling 6-1, 6-0 in Rome. But Nadal was, improbably, on his way out that afternoon, a victim of sore knees, family trouble, an off day and an inspired and well-schooled adversary (bravo, coach Magnus Norman). It all demonstrated that nothing is a given in sports and that even the king of kings of clay can fall victim to a palace coup.

Soderling’s third-round victory was perhaps the biggest upset in tennis’s long history (it’s a good debate). Though Sinner, who had won 30 straight matches, was nearly as big an oddsmaker’s favorite in Paris this year as Nadal was in 2009, Thursday’s earthquake of a defeat on the same rectangle of clay does not truly equate on the Richter Scale.

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PARIS – In the French capital, they are risking fines and jumping into canals to get a break from the heat, which has hit record highs in France for the month of May.

Things have gotten a little …

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