It’s Sunday evening, just after 6 p.m., and Coco Gauff is going through her postmatch routine in the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center area, where players warm up before matches and cool down after them.
Two other stars of American tennis, Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton, who are among her close friends, are also there. Tiafoe relaxes after his fourth-round victory at the US Open, which set up his All-American quarterfinal match against Shelton, who is preparing for a mixed doubles match. The friendly trash talk has begun, and Gauff can’t resist getting involved. She knows exactly how to do it.
Tiafoe, who spends a lot of time shirtless and doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to his muscular physique, and Shelton are playing this tournament in light-colored sleeveless shirts. Shelton looks better in his, Gauff tells Tiafoe.
And by the way, Carlos Alcaraz, the world number 1, who beat Tiafoe in the Open semifinals last year and also plays in sleeveless Technicolor. “You’re wearing confetti,” says Gauff.
She then brags about defeating one of the tournament’s princes and mocks her 60-plus-year-old trainer’s fondness for Jolly Ranchers and the dad rock songs he constantly sends her. She also gets to pose for the endless series of selfies that so many, especially Gen-Z fans, desperately want while giving her their ultimate compliment.
“My queen,” they say about her.
In Tuesday’s quarterfinals, sixth-seeded Gauff will face No. 20 seed Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia, who eliminated top-seeded Iga Swiatek in her previous game. If Gauff wins, she will have to survive two more exciting games to win the tournament. But over a week after the start of the last Grand Slam event of the year, one thing has become clear: at 19, Gauff is the queen of this US Open.
Fans rush across the grounds to get to their seats at Arthur Ashe Stadium before their singles games. No one wants to miss their first fist-pumping “Come on!” or one of her ball-chasing spots that go from corner to corner, backcourt to net and then back again, increasingly ending with her hitting an overhead smash or her opponent sending the ball into the net.
Seats on the smaller, general-admission courts begin to fill up long before she and her doubles partner, Jessica Pegula, step onto the court. Organizers moved their doubleheader to Ashe on Monday when space became available late in the afternoon. They have won.
NBA player Jimmy Butler of the Miami Heat is one of the many bold names who have come out for their games. Others include singer Justin Bieber and his wife Hailey, a model and influencer. They were in the house on Friday when Gauff won in the third round against Elise Mertens. Butler was also there, returning Sunday for her fourth-round win over Caroline Wozniacki.
Gauff’s reaction: “Again?”
Perhaps it has always been this way for Gauff, who at the age of ten secured a coveted place in the training program at the tennis academy of Patrick Mouratoglou, who coached Serena Williams.
Like everyone who saw Gauff on the court at the time, Mouratoglou was impressed by her early speed, power and ability to change direction in a flash and hit a good shot. He called her into his office for an interview, through which he interviewed all of his prospects, and asked her why she believed she could become a top player. She had seemed shy on the court, but now she looked him in the eyes from the beginning to the end of their conversation and told him that she wanted this more than any other girl.
Many players say that, Mouratoglou said in an interview on Monday. He began putting them on the field in games against players who were more advanced in their development than they were. Most of the time she found a way to win.
At the age of 13, she reached the final of the US Open junior tournament. At 15, she beat Venus Williams on Center Court at Wimbledon and reached the fourth round.
“She’s ready for big things,” Mouratoglou said. “Of course she feels the pressure like everyone else, but the difference is the belief that you belong there, that you should do well, that you are allowed to be in the spotlight, but you enjoy having that pressure, the pressure “that she has had since she was a child.”
Living under this observation, especially when early success occurs, can have both advantages and disadvantages. In women’s tennis over the last decade, there have been many players who won a Grand Slam tournament in their late teens or early 20s and then struggled to win three matches in a tournament the next year.
In her first few seasons on the tour, Gauff couldn’t wait to reach the top, given her breakthrough performance at Wimbledon in 2019 and her run to the French Open final last year. Before this season, however, she spent some time studying the top 10 players and recent Grand Slam tournament winners. She saw that many of them peaked between the ages of 22 and 26.
She wasn’t yet 19 years old, but she was about to begin her fifth season in elite tennis. Her mother told her to be patient, that she did not have the “strong strength of a grown woman” yet, and said she would know when she had it.
“I don’t think I’m as mature as other players,” she said one afternoon in Australia. “That depends on life on Earth, not on how many years you’ve been on tour.”
Some may disagree with this assessment. Three years ago, when she was 16, Gauff took the microphone at a Black Lives Matter rally in her hometown of Delray Beach, Florida, days after the killing of George Floyd.
“No matter how big or small your platform is, you must use your voice,” she told the crowd that day. “I have a quote from Dr. King said: ‘The silence of good people is worse than the brutality of bad people.’ We cannot remain silent.”
This summer she was one of the standout players at the Citi Open in Washington D.C. She had endured some disappointing results in the previous two months, losing in the quarterfinals to Swiatek for the seventh straight time at the French Open and being eliminated in the first round of Wimbledon .
But the role of a headliner at a mid-sized tournament comes with some responsibilities. Mark Ein, the owner of the Citi Open, watched as Gauff chatted with VIPs, including a member of President Biden’s Cabinet and a Supreme Court justice, as if everything was business as usual. Then she went out and won the tournament, and Ein sensed there was something different about the teenager who first competed in his event in 2019.
“She exuded a feeling of being in control of the situation, both on and off the court,” Ein said. “In every generation in tennis there seems to be someone who breaks through at a very young age and the test is how you cope with that. The greats seem to have a composure that enables them to be successful.”
Since 2019, Gauff’s face has been hard to find on the billboards at any tournament she plays in. Still, her management team at Team8, the boutique agency Roger Federer founded with his longtime agent Tony Godsick, has tried to take a slow and steady approach.
She could do deals with dozens of companies. So far, their portfolio only includes Rolex, Bose, Barilla, Baker Tilly and UPS, in addition to the usual racket and clothing sponsors New Balance and Head
Gauff still sometimes rocks back and forth when she speaks in public. She will giggle at herself mid-sentence. She’s still over a year away from legally ordering a drink in the United States.
If she loses to Ostapenko on Tuesday or anyone else in the coming days, time will be on her side for a long time. But in many ways, her time has come.