Culture
Coco Gauff is enjoying a very different kind of Grand Slam
Coco Gauff walks onto the court in the middle of the day. The stadium is half-full, if that.
So far, she mostly takes care of her main business in a little over an hour. A couple of television interviews follow her warm-down. Not much more than that. Sometimes there are just two or three journalists at her news conferences. In the evening, she barely gets noticed while wandering the streets of Melbourne on her way to dinner, whether or not she’s wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses.
“Definitely more chill,” Gauff said the other day about her experience in this tournament compared with the last Grand Slam she played, and won, at the U.S. Open in New York in September.
Remember those nights when Gauff would kick off the evening sessions with thrilling, nail-biting wins? Three of her first four matches went to three sets. Twice she lost the first set. The crowd of nearly 24,000 at Arthur Ashe Stadium would explode nearly every time she won a point and will her to victory.
Coco Gauff has had less media scrutiny in Australia (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Then whatever boldface tennis name was conducting the on-court interview would hand over the microphone and let Gauff rile up the crowd with her version of the ‘stay tuned for Novak Djokovic’ message. Hundreds of players had entered the tournament. She owned it from start to finish, the 19-year-old debutante coming out as never before, celebrities seated courtside for her matches. Jimmy Butler. The Obamas. Her name on the lips of nearly everybody on the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
Four months later, life could not be more different for Gauff in Melbourne, and not in the way that one might predict. Sure, she’s on some billboards. It’s been that way for four years now, since that breakout roll she got on at Wimbledon when she was just 15.
Her game hasn’t changed much. She tweaked her serve slightly last month with some help from Andy Roddick, making the motion a little shorter and tossing the ball from a higher position, though it’s barely noticeable. “Maybe it’s slightly abbreviated,” said Pam Shriver, who has been watching Gauff throughout from her junior days. “But not much difference.”
Coco Gauff has tweaked her serve (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
The big switch is that while she is one of the biggest stars in the sport, Gauff is cruising into the quarterfinals practically under the radar, despite not dropping a set, and barely allowing her opponents to be competitive.
“She’s young but very experienced because she’s been around so long,” said Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine, who has the daunting task of facing her in the last eight Tuesday.
She has replaced the neon, tennis-ball-yellow outfit with a shade that more closely resembles the dulled yellow of a traffic light. There are no hordes of Gen-Z girls following her around and begging for selfies. Her doubles partner, Jessica Pegula, pulled out of that competition, so she isn’t packing field courts and smaller venues on her off days from singles.
Her matches, scheduled for prime time in the U.S., are ending so quickly, with so little energy expended, that she’s doing cardio workouts or hitting sessions after they are done. With so little tension during the matches, there’s almost no back-and-forth with her coach, Brad Gilbert, which is rather a miracle given that, well, let’s just say it takes a lot to keep Gilbert quiet.
Then come the media obligations and then, by the middle of the afternoon, Gauff is trying to figure out how to fill the rest of her day.
“Go to the movies, I don’t know, read a book or something,” she said Sunday, a couple of hours after she’d beaten Magdalena Frech of Poland, 6-1, 6-2 in 63 minutes. “It’s only, like, 3pm. It’s definitely a weird feeling.”
She saw Poor Things last week. She was planning to see The Iron Claw, a biopic about the professional wrestler Kevin Von Erich, on Sunday evening.
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There are some very logical explanations for this dynamic.
Gauff has had a massive impact at all the other Grand Slams. She had the British from that first win over Venus Williams on Centre Court at Wimbledon when she was 15. Very dangerous on clay, she was a French Open finalist in 2022. The U.S. Open has been a happy place since she made the finals of the girls’ tournament when she was 13.
As a professional, the Australian Open is the one Grand Slam where Gauff has never played a major role. This is the first time she has made the quarterfinals in singles and the Aussies spend the first part of the tournament obsessing through the afternoons and evenings over their own, while they are still competing. She plays while crowds are still arriving at Melbourne Park, so her matches take place in the American evening, which makes ESPN very happy.
Fans still warm to Coco Gauff in Melbourne (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
Fans here know her, like her, and cheer for her. There are scattered yells of “Let’s go Coco,” in quiet moments between points. She received the ultimate compliment on Sunday when Rod Laver took his front-row seat in the arena named for him just before she served at 4-1. She thanked him for coming afterwards, saying it was an honor to play in front of him.
But she’s not yet “a thing” here, so to speak, which makes for some quiet days. Not that she is complaining.
Gauff and her team have always urged her to embrace free time. They turn down dozens of sponsorship offers to minimize her obligations and keep her mind clear. Focus on the tennis and the money and opportunities will be there.
“Playing the long game,” her agent, Alessandro Barel Di Sant Albano of Team8, the agency that Roger Federer co-launched, reiterated on Sunday.
Gauff has taken that approach onto the court. She pays special attention to 30-all points when her opponent is serving, even if she is already up a service break, looking to shorten matches wherever she can, not just for this tournament, but for years in the future.
“I‘m 19 now, but I’m not always going to be able to bounce back as quick physically or mentally,” Gauff said Sunday.
Still, being a prodigy can have its pitfalls.
Gauff said she put tremendous pressure on herself to win a Grand Slam as a teenager ever since that Wimbledon breakout in 2019. Last summer, with less than one year to go, she lost in the first round at Wimbledon to Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion. No shame in that, but she took it hard.
“It sucked,” Gauff said. But, she added, “the world didn’t end. The sun still shines. I still have my friends and family. I realized that losing isn’t all that bad and that I should just focus on the battle and the process and enjoy it. When it’s 5-5 in the third set, enjoy that battle instead of thinking, ‘What if I lose?’”
Rod Laver watches Coco Gauff in action on Sunday (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
With just one Grand Slam left in 2023, she figured it was time to start planning for 2024. She wanted to bring in a big-name coach. Gilbert was interested. He joined her team in mid-summer, an “O.G”, as she refers to him (“original gangster”), with strange taste in music (Tom Petty) and candy (Jolly Ranchers).
Gilbert helped her focus on her strengths – her backhand, her powerful serve, her unmatched court coverage and endurance – rather than her weakness, which was her forehand. He helped her learn how to disguise it, giving it more shape and depth, extending points and turning matches into track meets, which she has excelled at since she was a child.
Six weeks later, she’d won her first Grand Slam, six months before she turned 20.
Now she’s the one feeling like the veteran and the “O.G.”
“I’m looking at the other girls on tour who are 16, and now coming up,” she said Sunday. “Like, they just feel so young and I just feel so old.”
Then she caught herself.
“I know,” she said. “I’m not that old.”
(Top photo: Martin Keep/AFP via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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