Coco Gauff’s Long Game | The New Yorker
At the start of his first round match at the US Open last Tuesday, Coco Gauff – the winner of the US Open two years ago, the title champion of the French Open, and player No. 3 of the world – postponed the ball while she started her service movement, then, thinking better, let the ball fall. Usually nobody would note that kind of thing. Tournaments do not have captured throw statistics, which are perfectly legal. But it was not an ordinary situation.
Just before the start of the open, the Grand Colem at home in Gauff, she had dismissed her coach Matt Daly and announced that she was now working with Gavin Macmillan, specialist in service. The time of the move, and the decision to rebuild its service while playing its biggest tournament of the year, was unusual, if not unprecedented. Most players at this level do not shine much with their mechanics at all, even less invite millions of people to watch them learn something new. Each draw went up and descended under the spotlight. Tuesday, after this first throw, she settled herself, launched the ball again and struck a service of eighty-two miles at the hour-more than forty miles slowly than her usual first services, when they flow.
The goal was not to sink – not at the moment. The goal was to think, carefully, through each movement: to feel precisely in which direction his phalanges turned, to feel the inclination of his shoulder blade, to measure the angle of the elbow to his body, to ensure that his launch did not derive to the right (which was one of the reasons, Macmillan had explained, that his body did not spread correctly. body-spirit; the athletes train for years to avoid it in high stakes.
Gauff is not the first best player to modify or rebuild his service movement in recent years. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Iga świątek have all changed their requests in the past two years. Aryna Sabalenka struck double defects at such a high pace that she considered retirement; She turned to Macmillan, revised her service, then won several Grandes Colem and went up to No. 1. But these players tend to make these adjustments in several weeks, on private practice in Delray or Monaco or Abu Dhabi, far from television cameras and prening journalists. Gauff does it under the press microscope and the US Open fans.
Gauff has been presented for her potential since she was a child and has now spent most of her life under a meticulous examination. She has always shown supernatural maturity despite it, on and off the field. She defeated Venus Williams in Wimbledon when she was only fifteen, won her first title at fifteen years and, last year, was the most paid female athlete in the world. She grew up at a time when everyone has a camera, and the cameras are often on her. Maybe she imagined renovating her service while everyone was looking at nothing new.
She could Justify the surprising decision. She needed to make a “technical change” at her service, she said, at a press conference before the tournament, adding: “I don’t want to waste time continuing to do bad things.” She was ready to lose early, she continued-her accent is on the future, not this single tournament. And perhaps she thought she could lose early anyway, since she had trouble since she won the France Open. After losing in the first round in Wimbledon, she said: “I just feel a little disappointed with the way I introduced myself today.”
Gauff has already changed and saw rapid dramatic results. A year ago, she was eliminated from the US Open, as a reigning champion, when he served nineteen double faults. She struck more double defects than any other player on tour. She had then hired Daly, a membership specialist who had changed the way she was holding her racket, and she won her first tournament after starting to work together, then the Tour finals and the French Open in June. But, despite the change on its service handle and a new form at its forehand, its improvement blocked. For years, she had succeeded despite her service, relying on her higher reading of the game and her skills in racket and using her speed and athletics. But winning with grain focused on her, and she imagined how much she could play if the blatant weakness of her service had disappeared. “I know where I want to see my game in the future,” she said. So, it was there, a few days before the start of the tournament, Hitting served in the rain while other best players participate in the glamorous restart of mixed doubles for a first price of a million dollars.
She won her first match, on Ajla Tomljanović, in three dramatic and disorderly sets, hitting safely, he is used slowly, seeming to settle in a rhythm as and when. The two players combined for seventeen double defects and more than a hundred uns forked errors. But Gauff kept firm at the end, as she does so often, and torn one of her back-hacks blows that run to win it. “This is the match I needed,” she said at a press conference afterwards. “I don’t think it can become more stressful than that.”
Macmillan’s approach is resolutely technical, not psychological. Serving, for him, is a question of physics: strength and mass, levers and acceleration. He explains that there is something that does not go with the angle of the elbow; He does not say that there is something that does not go with his head. If the movement is effective and solid, he explained to Athletic Before the start of the United States’s opening, it will not decompose. “It is not a mental thing,” said Gauff, at another press conference, echoing this point of view. “It is a biomechanical thing that I had harm, and I just do my best to do things well.” It could be true. It is probably easier to fix the angle of the elbow, anyway, than to repair the feelings of doubt or anxiety. But the stress that Gauff seems to live is not an ordinary pressure. It seems to have become a kind of exquisite torture.
She also caught her first draw in her second match against Donna Vekić. This time, however, she did not settle down: she had seven double faults in the first set. After Vekić broke his service at 4 to 4, Gauff sat on his chair during the change and cried. During the next change, while Gauff was sitting on his chair, his hands were visibly shaking. A trainer came out to examine Vekić’s arm, and Gauff got up, went on the field and practiced his service while she was waiting for the game to resume.
There is no service hiding place, not to avoid it, not to strike a different plan. Vekić, hampered by an arm injury, served as bad as Gauff, which only increased the air of despair in the Arthur Ashe stadium. In one way or another, GAUFF held on, 7–6, 6-2 – a routine score, but barely a routine victory. On the ground thereafter, she thanked the crowd for the “joy” that fans gave her, then openly cried – stinging needles and even gratitude, seemed, but not happiness. The match, she told journalists thereafter, was “the worst that I have ever felt on the field”, although it was proud of the way she had been able to “get up”.
A person in the stadium that evening could have understood the position in Gauff’s position. It was not his coach, who shouted words of encouragement. The great gymnast Simone Biles was in the stands, and Gauff spotted it. She was inspired by Biles’ thought on a balance beam, she said on the field after the match. If Biles could do what she did on the four inches in this beam, she added, then she could surely get a ball in a large tennis court. But the mention of Biles by Gauff evoked, for me, the disorientation that the biles felt at the Tokyo Olympic Games, when it has twisted and lost its benchmarks in the air – a disconnection between body and mind, a condition that can occur under extreme stress. Gymnastics is also a matter of physics. But there are humans at the heart of it.
At the start of his third round match, against Magdalena Fręch, Gauff succeeded in her first draw during catching him, and this time his service entered. Finally, she was not broken in her opening match. Given how emotional she had been two nights before, how hard she looked, it was difficult to expect a lot from her – except for her fight, who never deserted her. But, this time, she seemed calmer. Fręch, a regular but not powerful striker, gave Gauff time to put his feet on his ground. The Gauff service has also stabilized throughout the match. She sailed, 6-3, 6-1, and finished with four double faults. Its first average service was closer to its usual speed. She did not seem precipitated. It was a remarkable turnaround in a long journey in progress. Humans can do extraordinary things. ♦
