Stanislas Wawrinka can’t continue to play with fire. On Monday afternoon in the first round of the French Open, a gifted player toyed with disaster before waking up in time to live another day.

Wawrinka faced a devilishly tricky opponent in France’s Nicolas Devilder, but amidst the heat of battle on a sun-baked day in Paris, the Swiss stalwart managed to avoid getting burned. After trailing two sets to one and 3-0 in the fourth set, Wawrinka found firm footing on the terre battue to rally for a five-set triumph. Sluggish for most of the match, Wawrinka hit freely in the final one and a half sets to defeat Devilder, 6-2, 5-7, 2-6, 6-4, 6-4, in 3 hours and 59 minutes in a Court 1 collision. Wawrinka advances to the second round, where he’ll face Chilean veteran Nicolas Massu, a five-set winner over Austria’s Daniel Koellerer.

Wawrinka isn’t a title contender at Grand Slam events, but the 17th-seeded Swiss should certainly reach the round of 16 at the world’s biggest tournaments. An authoritative backhand and above-average court coverage enabled Switzerland’s other top professional to crack the top 10 in June of 2008. In August of last year, “Stan The Man” teamed with a certain guy named federer to win an Olympic gold medal in men’s doubles. This 24-year-old talent should be playing into the second week of slams, and that goal had to be in the back of his mind when he arrived in Paris for the curtain-closer to the claycourt season. Last year, Wawrinka appeared to be ticketed for the fourth round of the French, but a shocking collapse turned a two-seat lead over Fernando Gonzalez into a five-set third-round loss.  For a player who is quite capable on clay (Wawrinka reached the 2008 Rome Masters final before losing to Novak Djokovic, and then advanced to this year’s Monte Carlo Masters semis before Djokovic stopped him in a vigorous three-set fistfight),  the red clay of Roland Garros needs to be felt for more than three matches. When Devilder–a journeyman playing on home soil–shrugged off a bad first set to race through the next two and a half sets, Wawrinka saw another Parisian nightmare unfolding before his eyes.

His French Open fortunes being held at tennis gunpoint, Wawrinka began to play as though his life depended on the outcome of this encounter. Down 0-3 in the fourth–a double-break disadvantage–Wawrinka proceeded to break Devilder four straight times. By winning a majority of Devilder’s first serve points (10 of 18) and claiming eight of nine points on the Frenchman’s second serve, Wawrinka turned his return game into a primary weapon. The momentum gained as a receiver of serve eventually translated to the Swiss’s service games… enough, at least, to scratch out the fourth set and level the match at two sets apiece.

Liberated by his Houdini act, Wawrinka began to unload on his groundstrokes. On a day when he sprayed 59 unforced errors compared to Devilder’s 42, Wawrinka was at least able to find his range in the deciding set. The Swiss unloaded 18 of his 53 winners–just over one-third of his overall total–in a clean-hitting fifth stanza that lasted 58 minutes. Devilder, to his immense credit, forced Wawrinka to remain strong throughout the set, but the No. 17 seed was able to do exactly that. Most tennis pros don’t recover from double-break deficits in sets that can close out matches; on a mind-testing Monday in France, Stanislas Wawrinka defied the odds.

Speaking of defying the odds: If Wawrinka aims for more pulse-pounding theatrics in future rounds at Roland Garros, he’s probably not going to reach the second week of action. Taking care of business–removing any drama from his matches–offers this lad from Switzerland a better chance of climbing the ranks on the ATP Tour.

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