Coco Gauff’s new serve and a U.S. Open win over Ajla Tomljanovic built on old foundations

FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — The first night of the rest of Coco Gauff’s tennis career looked a lot like a lot of the old ones.

Point-saving sprints, brilliant athleticism, and a three-set win built on grit and competitiveness rather than beautiful tennis. Across more than two-and-half-hours of a nervy, momentum-shifting match against Ajla Tomljanović at the U.S. Open, Gauff survived 6-4, 6-7(2), 7-5 on a night when old flaws resurfaced, but old foundations saw her through. That’s about what she thought would happen when she embarked on major changes to the two most important shots any tennis player has to hit.

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Night one with Gavin MacMillan, the biomechanics expert charged with remodeling her serve, saw Gauff focusing hard on her form and her spins rather than her power. Gone were the attempts at 125-mph bombs. In their place, Gauff tried to stay out of trouble with twisting balls and big margins. Her ball toss, which has a tendency to veer to her right and cause her to collapse forward when serving, was more to her left and more effective for it.

Gauff double-faulted 10 times, but it was the speed gun that showed numbers foreign to just two weeks or a month ago, when she was hitting up to 23 in a single match.

The numbers 77, 82, 79 and 83 flashed up on the boards courtside, revealing just how much Gauff was going for surety over speed. Only midway through the second set did she start to stretch her arm; by the end of the night, she had gone from an 88-mph average first-serve speed in the first set to 102-mph in the third.

For this night at least, it worked. A good deal of that was thanks to her opponent, the world No. 79 who had won just two matches in two months. Tomljanović failed to capitalize on an early break in the opening set; her smart strategy of relentlessly hitting to Gauff’s forehand started to lack real threat, and the American gained in rhythm and confidence, able to loop the ball back into play under little duress.

But the Australian, who saw off the 24,000-strong Arthur Ashe faithful when she turned a Serena Williams party into a last Grand Slam defeat in 2022, found the depth and bite she needed to accelerate through a second-set tiebreak and take the match to a deciding set.

Tomljanović said that match against Williams was on her mind Tuesday night. It always is.

“Whenever I prepare for big matches, it’s a big one that I always just tap into,” she said after the long tussle with Gauff didn’t go her way but left her with few regrets. “I always try to go back to the calmness I had back then.”

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Gauff knew this was a possibility last week, when she fired Matt Daly, who had tried changing her grip, and hired MacMillan, who is there to change her motion. MacMillan had turned Aryna Sabalenka from a double-fault machine into an indomitable champion and world No. 1. But players rarely try to make technical changes to their strokes in the middle of the season, much less days ahead of its most important tournament.

Gauff, though, was tired of wasting time with tweaks. She was ready to sacrifice a tournament, or even the rest of her season, with hopefully another decade or more left in her career. That didn’t mean that a first-round loss in front of her home crowd wouldn’t have hurt, or that the mental battle that she had to fight on this first night wasn’t incredibly difficult.

She had an opponent playing nearly fearless tennis across the net and then another inside her brain trying to pull her back toward the bad habits and error-prone motion that had landed her at this early career crossroads. She compared the process to learning a new language. And then she had to speak it fluently with the world watching just six days after she started learning it.

In the third set, she broke Tomljanović in the first game, then let her back in. The pattern continued all the way to the climax. Serving for the match at 5-4, she started the game with two double faults and was broken; with Tomljanović serving to go up 6-5, Gauff produced the defense and court coverage that have propelled her to so many wins at just 21 and got another chance to serve out the win.

And then the athleticism took over, one of those magical running backhand passing shots onto the line just as Tomljanović was closing in on another comeback. Instead all she could do was watch the ball whistle past, before Gauff was pumping her fists and the crowd was screaming like they hadn’t screamed all night — with equal parts joy and relief.

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“This is the match that I needed,” she said in her news conference. “I don’t think it can get any more stressful than this.”

(Photo: Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

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