Salad or McDonald’s: Arthur Fils’ Hard Lesson

In a letter to his younger self, published by The Players’ Tribune, Pete Sampras wrote that one day all tennis players would be nutrition fanatics and that, in hindsight, he should have been a pioneer of that movement. He was not. Hamburgers, pizza, irregular eating habits, and at least one memorable Coca-Cola mid-match were part of his diet during a career that produced 14 Grand Slam titles and defined an entire era of the sport. 

Sampras acknowledged that the poor nutrition occasionally left him feeling flat on court, and he pointed to his 1996 US Open quarterfinal against Alex Corretja as the starkest example. It was a match in which he was vomiting during the fifth-set tiebreak, running on empty after failing to eat properly beforehand. He reached for a Coke to revive himself, which made things considerably worse.

He still won the match and the tournament.

The point Sampras was making, perhaps without fully intending to, is that there was a time when elite sport had more tolerance for human imperfection off the court. Bad habits existed, were widely shared, and up to a point could be absorbed without catastrophic consequences. 

Nobody was tracking macros or following weekly nutrition protocols. The culture simply had not arrived there yet, and so players like Sampras could be genuinely unhealthy by modern standards and still be the best in the world.

That era is over. The margins in professional tennis today are too fine, the athleticism required too extreme, and the competition too deep for bad habits to coexist peacefully with ambition for very long. Sooner or later, as Sampras gently noted, they come due.

Fils’ Bad Habit

Arthur Fils is one of the more athletically gifted players on the current tour. His speed and explosiveness are immediately obvious, and it is that physical foundation more than any particular technical sophistication that allows him to dictate play the way he does. His touch and variety are works in progress, areas he will continue to develop, but the engine underneath everything is already exceptional.

Before his injury at Roland Garros last year, Fils was ranked 14th in the world and climbing. A top ten debut felt like a matter of scheduling rather than probability. Then came a marathon match against Jaume Munar in Paris, which he won at considerable physical cost. What followed was four months away from competition, a return that came too soon, and a further stretch on the sidelines before he genuinely felt like himself again.

The injury was to his lower back, and it had been building for a long time before Paris finally forced the issue. But there was a contributing factor that Fils has since been candid about, and it carries a certain uncomfortable honesty. He had a bad habit with food. Not in the way that would have looked out of place in Sampras’s era, perhaps, but in the context of what modern elite sport demands of a body, it was enough to matter.

“When you lose a match like that, it’s not like you always want to eat a salad,” he said after a quarterfinal defeat in Montpellier against Felix Auger-Aliassime. “But you simply have to. Now I want to go to my room and stay focused. I don’t know exactly what it will be, whether it will be a salad or something else, but it definitely won’t be McDonald’s.”

The McDonald’s line got some attention when he said it, partly for its candour and partly because it painted a vivid picture of what his post-match routine had sometimes looked like. 

Paying the Price, Then Paying Attention

In one sense, Fils was fortunate. The consequences arrived early enough in his career to serve as a correction rather than a conclusion. He is still in his early twenties, still developing, still well inside the window where the habits he builds now will define the next decade. The injury that cost him months of his career was the most important lesson he could have received at this stage.

The response has been tangible. Over the past several months, Fils lost 6 kilograms through deliberate dietary adjustments aimed at relieving pressure on his lower back. The weight was muscle mass, which makes the achievement more significant rather than less: restructuring a body that was already athletic to make it more durable requires a level of discipline that goes well beyond simply skipping dessert. 

He now follows a structured weekly nutrition plan and has spoken about the process at length. He also recently began working, on a trial basis, with Goran Ivanisevic, who joins Ivan Cinkus in his coaching setup. Ivanisevic brings a natural ease and charisma that should suit Fils’s personality, and his expertise on the serve will be valuable for a player whose placement and consistency in that department still fluctuate more than they should. What will be equally important is the dynamic between them off the court. 

Ivanisevic’s tenure with Stefanos Tsitsipas demonstrated clearly that he is not someone who will ignore uncomfortable truths to preserve a comfortable relationship. Whether that directness lands well depends on the player receiving it, and with Fils, who has shown every sign of being genuinely coachable, there is real reason for optimism.

What It All Points Toward

The Doha final against Carlos Alcaraz ended in 50 minutes, and the scoreline was not kind. But Fils played the entire tournament without pain, which was the real headline for anyone paying attention to where he actually is in his recovery and development. 

A player who spent much of the last year managing a serious injury, rebuilding his body, and restructuring his daily habits reached an ATP 500 final and competed with quality throughout the week. The final was an anomaly only because Alcaraz is an anomaly right now.

There is a version of this story that looks back on the Roland Garros withdrawal as the moment everything stalled. There is another version that looks back on it as the moment Fils finally confronted the habits that were limiting him. The second version depends on him sustaining what he has started, on the nutrition plan remaining a discipline rather than becoming a burden, and on the lessons of the past year staying with him as the wins return and the temptations to relax reappear.

Sampras ate hamburgers and won 14 Grand Slams. The world has moved on from that possibility. Fils, still young enough to build properly, seems to understand that. The salad over McDonald’s is a small thing in isolation. As a symbol of what he is trying to become, it is anything but.