Coco Gauff and the unknown of being a teenage Grand Slam champion

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Look, at some point, Coco Gauff was going to lose a tennis match. 

No one wins forever, even a teenage Grand Slam winner seemingly destined for greatness who has to deal with all the attendant pressures that come with reaching the pinnacle of the sport.

She was going to have to deal with the inevitable niggles, discomforts and injuries that happen when someone starts to reach the deep end at nearly every tournament they enter. 

The good feels that began with Gauff’s triumph in Washington, D.C. in mid-summer gained steam with another winner’s trophy near Cincinnati in late August and peaked with victory at the U.S. Open in September before hopping across the Pacific Ocean for four more solid wins at the China Open in Beijing.

But then came a semi-final loss in China on Saturday to Iga Swiatek, the world No 2, who herself knows something about the rough seas that can accompany a teenage breakthrough.

“One of the goals I set earlier in the year was for me to do well in the big events,” Gauff, 19, said after the loss to Swiatek, during which she received treatment on her sore right shoulder from a physiotherapist. “I accomplished that goal. I’m really proud of myself.”

As well she should be. Now comes the tricky part: making sure she isn’t a tennis one-hit-wonder, but rather the kind of enduring champion who fills a room with important trophies throughout her career.  

“She’s won her Grand Slam, but she wants to win many of them,” said Alessandro Barel Di Sant Albano of Team8, who is Gauff’s agent. 

There are plenty of road maps. Tennis does not lack teenage Grand Slam champions who went on to have epic careers — Bjorn Borg, Serena Williams, Chris Evert, Mats Wilander, Monica Seles, Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova among others.

Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz seem well on their way, but teen success hardly guarantees a career of triumph. Just ask Bianca Andreescu, Emma Raducanu or Jelena Ostapenko, who all experienced rapid journeys to the top of the mountain; maybe too rapid.

Even Swiatek, now 22, who also burst practically out of nowhere to win the French Open in 2020, was teetering on the edge of an emotional break by the end of the next year, unable to deal with the stress of adjusting to life as a Grand Slam champion suddenly playing with a massive target on her back. 

“A lot of tennis is about levels, moving up from one level to the next,” said Tracy Austin, who beat Martina Navratilova and Evert back-to-back to win the U.S. Open aged 16 in 1979, then returned to biology class at Rolling Hills High School in California days later. “Going through those levels gives you time to get grounded as you move from one level to the next.”

(Photo: Elsa/Getty Images)

Staying grounded has been one of Gauff’s top priorities in the weeks following the biggest splash of her nascent career.

Gauff’s victory in New York at the U.S. Open last month occurred just before 6:30pm and she stayed at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center conducting interviews with the press until nearly midnight.

The next day, she went to the Sunday Night Football game at MetLife Stadium between the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills and then appeared on The Today Show the next morning.

After that, she went home to Delray Beach, Florida, and essentially disappeared. She attended a 40-person party for friends and family at the nearby Ray Hotel, since many of those had not been able to attend the U.S. Open.

That included her brothers, who had been busy with their first weeks of school and their own sports. Codey Gauff is a serious baseball player and Cameron is a Pee Wee football quarterback.

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She turned down hundreds of media requests. Sant Albano politely declined dozens of approaches from companies wanting to sign her to sponsorships. Gauff has long-term deals with New Balance, Head, Rolex, Bose, Barilla, Baker Tilly and U.P.S. “That’s plenty for now,” Sant Albano said.

She had dinner with her friends. She did the usual chores her parents make her do. She slept, a lot. 

Last year, Alcaraz resumed competing just days after winning the U.S. Open. He spent the next months battling injuries and missed both the ATP Finals and the 2023 Australian Open. Gauff didn’t touch a racket for six days following her win.

Only after proper rest did she start thinking about practicing again and competing in the last tournaments of the season, which will conclude with the $9million (£7.3m; €8.5m) WTA Finals in Cancun, beginning on October 29.

After the shoulder soreness flared up in Beijing, she pulled out of this week’s tournament in Zhengzhou. If there is any risk of a serious injury that also causes her to pull out of the WTA Finals, so be it.

People who have done this all before say Gauff’s advantage is that, strange as this may sound, what happened in New York was borderline normal for Coco World.

Gauff in action during the U.S. Open final (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

With the memories of Gauff’s stirring win still fresh — the collapse on the court after that last rolling backhand down the line, the tear-soaked, three-way hug with her parents, taking possession of a check for $3million — it’s hard to think of anything that happened on that momentous Saturday evening as normal. But Gauff is not a normal teenage tennis player. 

She has been carrying expectations for years, ever since her breakout run to the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2019 when she was just 15. Billboards? Magazine covers? Been there, done that. She won her first WTA title in 2019 and another one in 2021. She made the final of the French Open last year, then rolled through this summer’s tournaments in the U.S. to her maiden Grand Slam title.

“Coco has been famous for a while,” Sant Albano said.

That wasn’t the case for Ostapenko, the Latvian who was ranked 47th when she blasted her way to the French Open title in 2017, or Andreescu, who began 2019 outside the top 100 but won the U.S. Open that September, becoming the first Canadian Grand Slam singles champion as well as very rich and very famous.

By the end of 2021, she was volunteering in a shelter for survivors of domestic violence and then later attended a yoga and consciousness-raising retreat in Costa Rica to figure out if she wanted to play tennis anymore.

“In a way, like, I had it all, but I didn’t feel fulfilled or happy inside,” Andreescu said during an interview earlier this year. “And that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I understand why people have whatever they want and then deep down they don’t love themselves or are not fulfilled in whatever way.’”

The 23-year-old Andreescu (Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)

Swiatek was ranked 54th when she won the French Open in October 2020. Thirteen months later, at the WTA Finals in Guadalajara in 2021, she broke down in tears after her loss to Maria Sakkari, who comforted her at the net.

Swiatek, who made the quarter-finals of just one Grand Slam that year, said she was overcome with frustration at not being able to handle the stress. “I forget this is new for me,” she said at the time.

Raducanu was an 18-year-old qualifier and just a few months removed from taking her university entrance exams when she won the U.S. Open in 2021. She morphed into a fashion icon at the Met Gala days later, then struggled to string together wins throughout 2022 and had surgery on both wrists earlier this year.

All of their lives were transformed practically overnight. 

In contrast, Evert, who was among the first teen phenoms of the modern era when she won the French Open and Wimbledon at the age of 19 in 1974, said players who experience a “natural progression”, who are known entities and justifiably highly touted before they win a Grand Slam, experience the triumph as a confirmation that they belong. 

She, Austin, Steffi Graf, Seles (who won an absurd eight Grand Slams before her 20th birthday), Martina Hingis, and Gauff didn’t surprise many people when they finally broke through.   

“It gets the antenna up a little more,” said Evert, who now commentates for ESPN. “It’s not pressure but being more aware that you know you are at that level.”

Wilander, a French Open champion at 17 who went on to win six more Grand Slams, said he was helped by having a social structure that kept him grounded, with his older brothers still treating him like their little brother.

Also, Swedish culture, he said, looked down on people who showed off their money or bragged about their exploits, so he didn’t. Other top Swedish players, such as Mikael Pernfors and Anders Jarryd, kept beating him in practice and making him fetch decks of cards in the locker room or beers at the players’ hotel. 

The challenge for him came later, after his seventh Grand slam triumph, after he had become No 1. He had achieved everything he had set out to achieve on the tennis court. That is when the emptiness and the lack of motivation set in. His fame had allowed him to hobnob with celebrities and fulfil his true dream of playing guitar with Keith Richards.

“There is an artificial twist to your life,” Wilander said. “It can be overwhelming and inject a false sense of confidence in you as a human being.”

So far so good on that front for Gauff. However, as Swiatek and Andreescu and so many others have shown, what comes next is anyone’s guess.

(Top photo: Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images)