Coco Gauff Is Still Just Getting Started

I think Coco Gauff is going to have a better career than many of us can imagine right now. Though she’s just 19 years old, she rose to prominence a full four years ago by beating Venus Williams at Wimbledon. Her experience and maturity belie her age. When her forehand was falling to pieces for much of this year, concern rose about her odds of winning a major one day. Then she improved the shot significantly in, seemingly, the space of a couple weeks. Given the increased longevity of modern athletes, she may have close to another two decades on tour. What she will accomplish during that time is anyone’s guess.

During Gauff’s fourth-round U.S. Open match against Caroline Wozniacki today, I felt like I was watching two seasoned veterans, despite Wozniacki being 14 years older. Wozniacki is an elite defender, even now, deep into her 30s and after a retirement in 2020. After losing the first set, she continued to doggedly chase down every ball, sometimes finishing the point with a huge backhand, sometimes frustrating Gauff into errors. When she tied the match and then went up a break in the third, she would have had good reason to think she’d be the eventual winner.

And it wasn’t that the 19-year-old didn’t get frustrated, because she did. It was that she clearly never lost belief that she was the better player. Brad Gilbert was incessantly telling her from the stands to hit with more shape; instead, Gauff blasted the hell out of consecutive backhand winners en route to breaking back. She never lost control of the match after that.

Gauff to the Races!

The best player of the summer hardcourt season keeps racking up the wins!

Coco Gauff recovers from an early break in the 3rd set to defeat Caroline Wozniacki, 6-3, 3-6, 6-1, and reach the quarterfinals of the US Open.

Gauff now faces Ostapenko or Swiatek. pic.twitter.com/q7APgR0MQa

— Tick Tock Tennis (@TickTockTennis) September 3, 2023

Midway through the third set, I realized that I had never really been nervous for Gauff, even when she trailed by a break in the third set. I’m trying to figure out why that is — Wozniacki looked a lot like her old self during the match, and Gauff wasn’t at her best, making 36 unforced errors through the first two sets. What I’ve arrived at is that right now, it seems like Gauff is playing utterly without pressure.

That probably seems an odd thing to say — of course she’s playing with pressure. Even at 19, she is an established star. She is an American playing in New York behind the hopes of an entire crowd. But her game has become imbued with a sense of reliability. There’s the crushing crosscourt backhand, the electric movement, the big serve. The forehand, once among the worst shots on tour, seemed to dip to the baseline when it mattered most while Wozniacki’s would fly long. Despite Wozniacki’s brave performance, even when she was in the ascendancy, her success was at least partially due to Gauff’s lapses. When Coco went on a run, it was because she was imposing her game.

It feels as if Gauff has forgotten how to lose. She won Cincinnati, breaking the duck against Iga Świątek in the semifinals on her eighth try. She has lost a set in three of her four U.S. Open matches so far, yet has come through all of them. Her last loss was a nail-biter to doubles partner Jessica Pegula in Canada; before that, you have to go all the way back to Wimbledon, which already feels like a different era in Gauff’s career, to find her most recent defeat. Świątek is Gauff’s likely quarterfinal opponent. While the world number one would undoubtedly be a favorite in that match, she’s no longer the easy pick.

That Gauff has come so far in so little time is staggering. The magnitude of the win over Świątek in Cincinnati is difficult to exaggerate — in seven tries, Gauff had never even won a set against Iga. But she went into the Cincinnati semifinal armed with a steadier forehand and (somehow) the confidence that she could pull the upset. Now that she has, there’s no obvious barrier between her and the biggest prizes in the sport. In the Roland-Garros final last year, Świątek crushed her, and it was thought at the time that Gauff had no way to win. Though that was on clay, which Świątek will probably rule for the better part of the next decade, the equation has now changed.

Brad Gilbert’s much-discussed influence has no doubt been helpful, but if the coach is to get credit for an idea, the player should always get more for implementing it. Knowing the problem with something without having the intent and the ability to fix it is not particularly helpful. Gauff clearly has both.