In hindsight? No big deal. Gauff has rallied with the help of a new coaching team of former men’s pro Pere Riba and Brad Gilbert, the longtime coach, commentator and all-around tennis junkie. They’re working on her forehand and instructing her to pummel every serve. But what they’ve really done is help her relax a little, and with that, the summer of Gauff was born.
She arrived in New York having won 11 of 12 matches since that loss to Kenin, losing just three sets over that span and adding two hefty titles, in D.C. and Cincinnati, to her résumé.
In the first round of the U.S. Open on Monday night, the 19-year-old kept rolling with a hard-fought 3-6, 6-2, 6-4 win over Laura Siegemund, a 35-year-old who came through qualifying. Gauff moved on to the second round, where she’ll face a rare opponent — someone younger than her. Mirra Andreeva is 16.
Monday’s match seemed an amalgamation of everything Gauff had been drilling since Wimbledon — she wasn’t playing her best tennis, and the circumstances created pent-up frustration. She finally had a passionate conversation with chair umpire Marijana Veljovic in the third set while up a break. Gauff noted that Siegemund had been consistently running right up against the time clock — whether on her own serve or Gauff’s, when she would regularly go to her towel to wipe off during points, slowing the match, while earning only one time violation.
The International Tennis Federation’s Grand Slam rule book states: “The receiver shall play to the reasonable pace of the server and shall be ready to receive within a reasonable time of the server being ready.” Yet Gauff, who said she took note of Siegemund’s slow play in the second game of the match, was uncertain she should say something right up until the moment she did.
For that, she earned reassurance from one distinguished spectator: Michelle Obama. She and former president Barack Obama were in attendance Monday — Michelle spoke after the match in an on-court ceremony honoring Billie Jean King and the 50-year anniversary of the U.S. Open awarding men and women equal prize money — and he met Gauff afterward, raising the teen’s spirits. She was already acquainted with the former first lady.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I haven’t soaked it in because I literally just walked in here. I think I’m going to never forget that moment for the rest of my life. Yeah, I went from being really upset after a win to, like, being really happy,” Gauff said, smiling. “. . . She said it’s good to speak up for myself. I think she was happy that I spoke up for myself today.”
Before that meeting, Gauff was not the same lighthearted player who breezed through win after win over the past few weeks. But she corralled her frustration and prevailed anyway, raising her level of execution in the second set.
That type of problem-solving is what Gauff has been working on all summer. It started with the difficult task of accepting that, sometimes, less than perfect is still good enough.
One year after Serena Williams’s retirement, Gauff is treated as both a current icon of the sport in America and the next big thing. It was her face on the cover of the day’s program in Flushing Meadows, not world No. 1 and defending champion Iga Swiatek, who handily won her first-round match against Rebecca Peterson. No surprise there as it’s Gauff’s home Grand Slam — but it was also Gauff’s face on all the billboards and marketing materials this summer at Wimbledon.
That’s a hefty amount of pressure to place on someone naturally inclined to strive for perfection. But Gauff said she was relaxed heading into the year’s final Grand Slam.
“The mind-set is different. Having that first-round loss at Wimbledon shows that it wasn’t really [the worst thing that] could happen, so I’m not going into this tournament worried if I lose early or not,” Gauff said. “I can’t really control that result.”
Instead, she has faith in what she can control: her willingness to problem-solve and her natural talent. Not playing perfectly might draw Gauff into a few sticky situations, but now she trusts her ability to dig herself out.
“I have much more confidence now in other aspects of my game,” Gauff said. “Maybe if my serve isn’t working, I have confidence in my groundstrokes or vice versa.”
In Monday’s case, it was Gauff’s serve and shot placement that fueled a comeback after losing she lost the first set.
Gauff was too predictable to wrong-foot Siegemund early on. The German has a pair of U.S. Open doubles titles and is too skilled at the net to beat with mundane passing shots. She ran down all of Gauff’s shots and forced mistakes from her younger opponent by making her hit an extra ball on every rally.
The first game of the second set was a 26-minute doozy and turned the match around when Gauff won it after 12 deuce points. Siegemund tried to slow the pace by taking every second she could between serves, but Gauff’s determination did not flicker. She began moving Siegemund around with her groundstrokes and winning easy points with powerful, pinpoint serves.
“I definitely won ugly tonight. It was a lot of weird points, with the slicing,” Gauff said. “Usually something that I usually do well against — opponents who slice. We were prepared for it. I think today was just execution.”
They played the next seven games in 40 minutes and raced through the third set until the time-violation hubbub.
Siegemund pushed Gauff to 30-all, 5-4 in the third set — cheekily asking the umpire if she could go to her towel after one point in the game — before a backhand long gave Gauff match point. After faltering at the end, serving a let then a fault, Siegemund sent a backhand into the net and Gauff sealed the match, after which came a chilly handshake at the net.
Asked how the match was in her on-court interview, Gauff finally broke the ice and drew laughter from the crowd when she deadpanned, “Slow.”
“I wasn’t playing my best tennis. . . . I was able to overcome a lot of adversity,” she said. “So I’m happy with how I managed to get through.”
