Paris • A bushel of baffling facts backlight the ongoing heyday of the charismatic 25-year-old American Sloane Stephens. There’s that No. 957 ranking she held at the dawn of last August. There are the last nine Grand Slams she played until Wimbledon 2016, clogged with four first-round defeats, one measly fourth round and a deepening of her status as an afterthought.
There’s the 11-month hiatus that followed — the broken foot, the 2017 Australian Open spent at home on a couch, the cast. And now that Stephens has taken her 2017 U.S. Open title and piled a French Open final berth atop it after her 6-4, 6-4 passage through friend Madison Keys on Thursday, there’s this question: Where did she spend last French Open, anyway?