Tennis — Andscape

Five things to know about Wimbledon finalist Jasmine Paolini

Jerry Bembry — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:49:53 +0000

Following a thrilling semifinal win that puts her into a second straight Grand Slam final, an exuberant Jasmine Paolini explained to the adoring crowd that filled the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club “this last month has been crazy for me.”

Paolini, an Italian with Ghanaian roots, who will be playing in her second Grand Slam final on Saturday despite having never gotten past the second round of a major tournament before her surprising run to the final of the French Open in June.

Short in stature (5-feet-4) and highly energetic, the curly-haired Paolini will likely be a crowd favorite after her gutsy three-set win over Donna Vekic that was the longest women’s semifinal match in Wimbledon history.

Who is Paolini, who will face Barbora Krejcikova on Saturday as Wimbledon crowns a different champion for its eighth consecutive tournament?

Here are five things you should know about Paolini who, after 13 years as a pro, is currently the seventh-ranked player.

She’s “fast because of Ghana.”

Paolini is Italian, born and raised, but as she addressed the media after her semifinal win Thursday, she expressed her pride in having “different bloods in my body,” and gave special praise to her bloodline that descends from the West African country of Ghana.

“I’m fast because of Ghana”#Wimbledon finalist Jasmine Paolini talks about her links to Ghana. Her grandfather is Ghanaian#3SportsGH pic.twitter.com/IIuCaNreRt
— #3Sports (@3SportsGh) July 12, 2024

Her family: Her father, Ugo, is Italian and her mother, Jacqueline grew up in Poland. Paolini’s maternal grandmother is Polish, and her maternal grandfather is Ghanaian.

Paolini, like tennis player Naomi Osaka (born to Japanese and Haitian parents), embraces the multicultural aspects of her background that make her unique.

“That’s a, I think, important part of my life,” Paolini said. “My mom, she’s Polish, but my grandfather is from Ghana. I think I’m fast because of Ghana.

She’s the first women’s player to reach consecutive French Open and Wimbledon finals in the same season since Serena Williams.

Williams last did that in 2016 when her victory at Wimbledon over Angelique Kerber came a month after she lost her French Open title match to Garbiñe Muguruza.

That 2016 Wimbledon title was the last for Williams at Wimbledon, where she won seven championships.

Since Williams won three of the four Slams in 2015, only Iga Świątek has won multiple Grand Slam titles in the same year (she won the French and US Open in 2022).

Neither Paolini nor Krejcikova have ever won a Slam at Wimbledon, so a new winner is guaranteed to hoist the trophy.

Not only does Paolini join elite company in becoming the first woman since Williams to play in consecutive French Open and Wimbledon finals, she’s also the oldest player (28) to reach their first semifinals in different Slams since 1977.

1 – Jasmine Paolini is the oldest player to reach their first semi-finals in two different Grand Slams during the same season since Betty Stove in 1977. Mesmerize. #Wimbledon | @wimbledon @WTA @WTA_insider pic.twitter.com/2q8mLscdi8
— OptaAce (@OptaAce) July 9, 2024

“Two Grand Slams in a row was crazy to believe,” Paolini said after her semifinal win.

Paolini had never advanced past the second round of a major before this year.

Paolini was ranked No. 31 entering the 2024 Australian Open in January, and even as she got past the second round of a major for the first time in her career by winning her first three matches. Those wins came over players ranked No. 92 (Diana Shnaider in the round of 128), No. 42 (Tatjana Maria in the round of 64) and No. 57 (Anna Blinkova in the round of 32).

No earth-shattering wins there, but it was progress (she lost in the round of 16 to Anna Kalinskaya, ranked No. 75 at the time, in straight sets).

Getting a sniff of her first solid run at a major clearly boosted Paolini’s confidence. She won her first WTA 1000 tournament in February at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, losing only two sets the entire tournament. After Elena Rybakina withdrew from the quarterfinals in Dubai, Paolini advanced to her first WTA 1000 semifinal.

Her run to the finals of the French Open was anything but a breeze as Paolini battled through three consecutive three-set matches (the last one to go the distance was a quarterfinal win over No. 4 Elena Rybakina).

Paolini lost to Swiatek, the top player in women’s tennis, in the French Open final.

Before 2024, Paolini had never won a main draw pro match on grass.

Before this year’s Wimbledon, the WTA posted its top 15 rankings of the most dominant women on that surface.

Ons Jabeur, world No. 10, was first.

Coco Gauff, world No. 2, was 15th.

Swiatek, world No. 1, didn’t make the list.

Paolini, of course, was not likely on the radar.

She entered this year having never won a grass court match in the main draw of a pro tournament, having played her pro career among all levels of pro tennis (ITF events, qualifying draws and WTA tournaments). Her career record on the grass courts at Wimbledon before this year: 0-3.

But there were signs that Paolini might have some success entering Wimbledon as she reached the semifinals on the grass courts of the Rothesay International tournament in Eastbourne, Great Britain (a WTA 500 event), by winning her first two matches.

With the wins at Eastbourne and Wimbledon, Paolini has now won eight of her last nine grass court matches.

“Maybe I didn’t realize before, but my coach was telling me that I could play well here,” Paolini said after winning her Wimbledon quarterfinal match. “I wasn’t believing too much … In Eastbourne. I was hitting the ball well on this surface, moving well. I was repeating to myself, ‘OK, it’s nice to play on grass. You can play well.’ ”

She’ll represent Italy in the Olympics.

Paolini’s rise from outside the top 30 in the WTA rankings at the start of the year to her current position as the No. 7 player in the world. Regardless of the Wimbledon final outcome, she will be ranked in the top 5 next week.

So the next stop for Paolini following Wimbledon will be the 2024 Paris Games, where she’ll compete in singles and doubles (with Sara Errani).

This will be the second Olympic games for Paolini, who lost her only singles match at the delayed 2020 Olympics in 2021 while finishing tied for ninth with Errani in doubles.

The expectations for Paolini will be higher as she’ll enter the games as one of the top players in the world.

She’ll be one of the favorites to win a medal.

Which would be the icing on the cake to an amazing year where Paolini has gone from a relative no-name player with no consistent track record of winning to the talk of the tennis world as the first Italian woman to reach a Wimbledon final.

“It’s a dream,” Paolini said after winning her semifinal match. “I was watching Wimbledon finals when I was kid, so I’m enjoying it and just living in the present.”

Phil Gordon spent decades helping poor kids become champions in tennis and in life

Dwayne Bray — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 13:24:00 +0000

HARTFORD, Conn. – I was jogging through Hartford’s Elizabeth Park recently when I happened upon Phil Gordon, a local legend who has devoted the past 50 years to teaching tennis to thousands of children – most of them from poor or working-class families.

Gordon used the sport to help them build self-esteem as well as learn composure, strategic thinking and etiquette. Many of his students took what they’ve learned from Gordon and used it to lift their families a rung up the economic ladder. His brightest pupils leveraged it into college scholarships.

We’re talking everything from small liberal arts colleges, schools such as Brown and Princeton in the Ivy League, and Power 5 schools such as Stanford, University of Southern California and the University of Florida.

Gordon is a lanky man, about 6-feet-4, who, when I ran into him just six weeks before his 80^th birthday, still had a strong, athletic build. He was sitting alone in a folding chair at the tennis courts of Elizabeth Park, which is also home to America’s oldest municipal rose garden. When I approached him, sweat-drenched from my jog, he had something on his mind that had nothing to with tennis or his impressive legacy of changing the fortunes of so many families.

“They’re trying to evict me, man,” he told me, referring to the managers of the apartment building in south Hartford where he’d lived for 35 years. “Right now, I don’t have any income,” he revealed and then said something that punched me right in the gut.

“But I’m not going to leave these kids.”

Over the years, I’d seen local television news reports on his deeds, such as when he stepped up for a family with three tennis-playing kids after their mom died of cancer. I had heard about families like that of Rollo and Rochelle Jones, whose kids got college opportunities in the 1990s after working with Gordon and now their grandkids are getting the same chances.

Tennis coach Phil Gordon serves to his students during a private lesson in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

Tony Spinelli for Andscape

“Your legacy has gone on from my children to my grandchildren,” Rochelle Jones, a retired high school principal, told Gordon at an impromptu 80^th birthday party held for him in November. “And they have taken what you have taught them to another level.”

But as is the case with many coaches, Gordon’s dedication and single-minded focus came at the expense of almost everything else in his life, including his finances and family. Dozens of his supporters spoke with me for this story, but his only child – and the greatest tennis player he ever coached, Alexis King – declined to comment beyond a brief note saying she and her dad have some “differences of opinion.”

There’s nothing new about the Black community embracing tennis as a way to raise up its best and brightest. We saw that with the first pioneers to make it big on the international stage: Althea Gibson was the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam championship at the French Open in 1956 and Arthur Ashe was the first Black man to win the US Open in 1968.

The first Black pro sports league of any kind was the American Tennis Association, started in 1916. Many of its finest players were developed through the support of Black community leaders such as Robert Walter “Whirlwind” Johnson, the founder of the association’s Junior Development Program, who instructed Gibson and Ashe.

“I tell people, man, I didn’t even know there were white tennis players,” said Arthur Carrington, 76, a tennis historian and a one-time ATA singles champion, who learned the game as a child at a Black-owned tennis club in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “Back in the day, with Arthur Ashe, Althea and us, we were developed in Black tennis communities.”

Gordon, though, sought to produce scholars through tennis, not pro athletes.

“Phil was taking inner-city kids, drilling them on the fundamentals of the game and aiming them at better opportunities through education,” said Michael Arace, a Columbus Dispatch sports writer who grew up in Hartford and played for one of Gordon’s teams.

The face of Tennis Unlimited

Gordon was born Oct. 18, 1943, in St. Thomas, a small U.S. territory with a population then of about 15,000. He generally waves off questions about his youth but he did confirm previous news reports that he was a ball boy at some St. Thomas hotels as a kid and he mentioned the woman who took care of him.

“My grandmother, the one that raised me, was Diana Lynch,” Gordon said, his Caribbean accent still evident. “She was a Carib Indian and we lived right by the waterfront.”

In the Sixties, he made his way to New York City and befriended a man whose family also hailed from the Virgin Islands. That man happened to live in Hartford and brought Gordon to Connecticut, he said.

In Hartford, he found work at tennis clubs and eventually worked as a pro for an outfit that ran a club out of the Connecticut Armory in Hartford, a facility that Gordon would eventually take over in the late 1970s. He spent most of his free time hanging around the tennis courts at Keney Park in the predominantly Black North End. At the time, it had 10 pristine tennis courts. (They’re all shuttered today.)

Listen: Phil Gordon on working with young tennis players in the Caribbean.

Those courts became Gordon’s domain. He and three buddies, Black men with white-collar jobs in the schools and social services, decided to start a nonprofit called Tennis Unlimited Inc. as a way to bring an organized tennis program to Keney Park.

Lamont “Monty” Aheart was one of the founders, along with Lewis E. Randall, an educator with the city schools, and William “Bill” Brockman, a social worker, both of whom are now deceased. Before meeting Gordon, Aheart hadn’t been a tennis player but he soon had a jones for it and purchased a home across from the Keney tennis courts.

Aheart said he, Randall and Brockman focused on fundraising and administrative duties, while “Phil was the face of Tennis Unlimited.”

‘A dream come true’

Shortly after Tennis Unlimited was established, the program caught the eye of Victor Jarm, the head of Hartford’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Jarm put Gordon on payroll as a part-time employee to take Tennis Unlimited into the city’s schools.

Calvin Dees learned of Tennis Unlimited in 1978, sometime after his three sisters had started in Tennis Unlimited’s free summer tennis program at Keney Park. Dees had suffered two concussions playing basketball and his doctor suggested it was time to find a non-contact sport. At the time, he said a cousin was trying to entice him into helping him sell drugs. Instead, he picked up a tennis racket and started learning from Gordon.

“It was like a dream come true,” said Dees, who is now a tennis pro at several clubs in the area. “It was like a brotherhood. Tennis made me understand what it is to be where I’m from, to be something. Phil made it positive.”

Gordon originally had intended that Tennis Unlimited would help Black kids but quickly realized he wanted to teach tennis to everyone from any part of the city or the suburbs. Which is how Derek Scheips, who lived in well-to-do West Hartford, began playing at Keney Park in the early 1980s. Scheips said in an email that his time spent at the Keney courts was unforgettable, as Gordon “reigned” over his popular program, which drew 40 to 50 kids to each of its sessions of summer camp.

“And it was simply a lot of fun with all that great music of the time – Rick James, Kool and the Gang, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Kurtis Blow etc. coming out of boomboxes, and people playing soccer and other sports in the fields all around,” wrote Scheips, now a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma.

A 5 a.m. pickup

With so many kids playing, prodigies were bound to emerge.

One of the first was Timothy “T.A.” Niles, a teen who began playing with Gordon’s program in 1974.

Niles had only been in Hartford for two years. His family – his dad, mom, three sisters and a brother – had moved to Brooklyn, New York, from Trinidad and Tobago in 1971. But Niles’ mom didn’t like New York City. She packed up the children and came to Hartford, leaving her husband behind in New York.

An undisciplined student and an excellent athlete, Niles enrolled in Hartford’s Weaver High School, where he began playing basketball and soccer before deciding that team sports frustrated him. But after meeting Gordon and picking up a racket, Niles was all-in on tennis. And he was all-in on his coach, even though they both had strong personalities that led to frequent clashes. Yet there was no quibbling with Gordon’s dedication to kids from the part of town where Niles lived.

Phil Gordon (top left) gathered his summer program students in 1978 for a picture between workouts at Keney Park in Hartford, Connecticut.

Phil Gordon/Tennis Unlimited Inc.

“At the time, Phil had an old convertible, I believe it was a Bonneville, and the plastic in the back was ripped,” Niles recalled. “And he’d drive around the north end of Hartford at like 5 o’clock in the morning, picking us kids up, to take us to clubs like the Canton Racquet Club, Simsbury Racquet Club – places we would’ve had no opportunity to play if it weren’t for Phil championing the cause and beating the bushes, convincing people that it would be a good idea to let us play at exclusive tennis clubs.”

Within two years of picking up the sport, Niles became Weaver High’s No 1 singles player and made the state tournament quarterfinals as a senior. Gordon wanted college to be in Niles’ future but Niles did things his way and enlisted in the Marine Corps. After nearly five years off from competitive tennis, Niles came back to train with Gordon in 1982.

By then, Gordon was running the In-Town Tennis program from the armory. He and his workers would lay down six tennis mats in the armory’s 50,000-square-foot drill hall. How was he able to get that space? Through tennis and his work with the kids, he had a network of influential allies. They included U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who would become governor, and Edythe J. Gaines, a former superintendent of Hartford’s schools and a member of several hospital boards. Several people told me that he leveraged those connections to get corporate donations, especially from the insurance companies headquartered in Hartford. (In 2020, Gordon received the Humanitarian Award from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission, Gov. Ned Lamont and the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.)

This was the scenario Niles returned to – Gordon, at least for the time being, had an indoor facility and money to put on tournaments and other events.

But the coach had another message for Niles, who was in his early 20s at the time.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to go to school,’ ” Gordon was telling me one day as the two of us sat in a car he was driving on loan from the father of some of his former students. “Next thing you know, boom, he’s at the University of Hartford.”

At age 23, Niles had received a tennis scholarship from the university and would lead the Hawks to undefeated seasons in two of his four seasons while winning 80 singles and doubles matches. Niles was also a star in the classroom, graduating cum laude in 1987. After getting a master’s degree in communication from the University of Miami, he started, but didn’t complete a doctoral program at Arizona State University.

No Mickey Mouse tennis

Over the years, Gordon would tell his players that tennis is 30% physical and 70% mental. He wasn’t known for tolerating anything less than 100% effort and concentration.

“He’d say, ‘This isn’t Mickey Mouse tennis,’ ” said Andre Freeman, who learned from Gordon along with his twin brother, Seth, and their older brother Paul.

“He’s not the easiest coach,” said Matthew Lord, who spent about a dozen years with Gordon alongside his two older sisters, Dayna and Melissa. “A lot of kids thought he was too hard.”

Tennis coach Phil Gordon told his players that tennis is 30% physical and 70% mental.

Tony Spinelli for Andscape

Matthew Lord said Gordon had a vicious bark but that “it was out of love.”

“I never took it personally because I know that maybe he’s right,” Lord said. “Maybe my shot was trash. Maybe I could have moved my feet. When I was younger I wanted to quit, but I realized that’s not what he teaches.”

Carlos Salmon Jr. did quit after working with Gordon for a few years, even though he had become one of the most highly ranked players in New England.

“His style as a coach was an animal. He was a bulldog,” said Salmon, who played under Gordon starting in the late 1990s. “It was, like, as soon as you step on the court, everything was very regimented. It was no games, no playing around. It was just you come here to work. That’s it.”

Salmon said he benefited from that approach at first but then it started to wear him down.

“I got tired of just working so hard, basically, and I needed to have quote unquote ‘a little bit more fun,’ ” said Salmon, now a self-employed financial adviser in the Hartford area. “So I ended up changing coaches. But it got to a point where I wasn’t winning. I was losing to the guys that I was practicing with and my game plateaued. I sat down with my dad and he was like, ‘Look, if you want to get better, you’ve got to go back to Phil because Phil’s going to help take your game to the next level.’ ”

And that’s what happened. He returned to Gordon, who made Salmon spend a third of his practices focusing on his serve. By the time Salmon was 16, he clocked a 142 mph serve in a national tournament in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which led coaches from Brown University and other schools to reach out.

But Salmon had his heart set on playing for USC, which had a top 5 tennis team. His guidance counselor at Windsor High School doubted he could get into USC or any of the other top schools.

“I printed out the top 10 tennis programs in the country at the time, and I said, ‘I want to go to these schools,’ ” Salmon said. “And she looked at me and she laughed. She’s like, ‘Our valedictorian couldn’t get into any of these schools. Why do you think you’re going to get into them?’ ”

So Salmon took things into his own hands on the junior circuit in the summer of 2005.

“I had some good, deep runs in national events,” he recalled. “And that’s when USC was like, ‘Hey, we only have 20% [of a scholarship] left, but it’s yours if you want to come.’ So that’s how I ended up at USC.”

He played for the Trojans for a year and finished his collegiate career at Wake Forest University.

When I watched Gordon train kids in October and November, I didn’t see the tough coach with the booming bass voice that his former players had described. Maybe old age is having an effect on him. I saw him laugh and joke with some of his teenage players and high-five a 7-year-old.

We were at the Bloomfield Tennis Club, an aging-but-well-kept complex with five indoor courts. Gordon was training the five children of two of his former players, Andre and Seth Freeman, who both ended up playing small-college tennis.

Jamir, 17, and Zuri, 15, are Seth’s kids. Jada, 13, and Kyrie and Brayden, both 7, are Andre’s kids. Tricia DeLorso, 40, who works at the center, often hits with whatever group Gordon is training.

I witnessed them engage in a game called “King of the Court,” in which one person serves until their service is broken. As long as you’re serving, you’re the king. When it came time for 7-year-old Kyrie to serve, Gordon joked that he could become the youngest king ever.

Later, when Kyrie was working on hitting balls at the net as his dad Andre volleyed balls and Gordon stood watch, Gordon praised Kyrie when the boy smashed a shot back in his father’s direction.

From left to right: Kyrie, Jada and Brayden Freeman are second-generation students of coach Phil Gordon.TONY SPINELLI FOR ANDSCAPE

“Don’t kill your dad,” Gordon said, laughing.

Then I heard a conversation Gordon had with Kyrie and his stepbrother Brayden.

“If you get really good on the court, you won’t have to pay for college because you know how to play the game,” Gordon told the two 7-year-olds, who I wasn’t sure even knew what college was. “People will like seeing what you do and they will pay for college for you.”

He also said this:

“If you want to win, you really want to learn to do something, you really pay attention to what you’re doing,” he told the boys. “No fooling around.”

Iona Lord took her three children to Gordon on the advice of a college friend who had played in his program at Keney Park as a child.

Iona and husband Alman Lord were Jamaican immigrants with four children living in the town of Bloomfield, a majority Black area of 21,000 residents north of Hartford.

Alman was a long-haul furniture mover. Iona had worked at Aetna International as a pensions analyst. Once she started having children, she became a stay-at-home mom, and money was tight.

Their oldest child, Alman Jr., had a disability and didn’t participate in sports. The other three kids – Dayna, Melissa and Matthew – all started with Gordon as 5-year-olds, starting in 2000. Seven years later, the Lord kids were the talk of the New England juniors circuit, each of them atop or near the top of the rankings for their age bracket.

Gordon had spent so much time training them that the children came to see him as more than their coach. “He was basically our grandpa,” Melissa Lord said.

When Dayna was 12, her play caught the attention of Ron Garcia, the head girls tennis coach at Kingswood Oxford School, a private day school in West Hartford. He approached Gordon one day in 2008 when he was training the Lord kids at Elizabeth Park. Iona Lord was sitting nearby.

Gordon told Garcia to speak with her but that the conversation needed to be about scholarships to Kingswood Oxford, where middle school tuition was $30,575 a year. The two had intersecting interests: Garcia wanted his tennis team to get better. Iona Lord wanted her kids to get the type of education Kingswood Oxford provides.

The girls were admitted in 2008. Matthew would join them a few years later, but not before Nov. 27, 2010. That’s when his mother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, died at Hartford Hospital.

One of her final conversations was with Gordon, who she told to make sure that the children continued to use tennis to further their education beyond Kingswood Oxford and into college.

A daughter’s story

Gordon had some personal experience with the college recruitment process because his only child, Alexis, had been a sought-after tennis player in the early 2000s.

Born in 1983, Alexis was ranked No. 3 nationally in junior tennis by age 9. That ranking, notably, wasn’t in her own age group but in the division for 12-year-olds.

Long and slender like her dad, she possessed strong strokes, excellent footwork and the mental acuity to block everything else out. In the early 1990s, the United States Tennis Association invited her to Bradenton, Florida, to participate in a showcase for the top 50 girls and top 50 boys in America at any age.

The event was held at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, now the IMG Academy, and Bollettieri, the famous coach whom the grounds were named after, requested that Alexis and Gordon take the court, according to Roxalina Rawls, Alexis’ mom and Gordon’s former wife.

Tennis coach Phil Gordon is 80. “I don’t want to stop. I want to keep going,” he said.

Tony Spinelli for Andscape

“And he said to her, ‘Show me what you got.’ And she showed him her serve, the different strokes or whatever, and Nick Bollettieri looked up at Phil and said, ‘I won’t touch too much here. Dad, you got it going.’ ”

The Gordons turned down Bollettieri’s offer for their daughter to move to Bradenton and train at the academy. But the family did have another brush with tennis royalty that week in Florida. Their daughter was asked by Richard Williams to hit with his daughters, Serena and Venus, so they would know they weren’t the only Black girls playing top-level tennis.

As she got older, Alexis Gordon trained a lot under her father alongside Maria Livadiotis, a future player at Princeton University. They would travel to a club in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, across the state border, each day after school.

“We were there for four hours every day, training,” said Livadiotis, who now lives in Cambridge, England, where she works in medical research. “And by the time we got home, it was like 9, 10, and we’d see him again the next day after school.”

Alexis King, who declined to speak to me for this story, attended the University of Florida, one of the nation’s top women’s programs, on a tennis scholarship. She was a three-time All American and was part of a team national title. She got pregnant before her senior season and took a year off from tennis to have Imani, her daughter.

Rawls said that Gordon was deeply affected by the pregnancy. “It was almost like the end of the world for him,” she said. “It was like a part of him just died. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t do anything.”

Alexis Gordon went back to Florida, along with her mom, to finish school for the 2006-07 academic year. Rawls and Gordon told me that their daughter had asked her dad to move to Florida, too, where being a tennis instructor is a cottage industry. Phil Gordon said that he preferred to continue the work he started in Hartford.

Rawls said that Alexis King believes that her father’s focus “was that of a tennis coach, but not as a dad.”

Gordon told me he’s perfectly fine with his relationship with his daughter, and said he loved her very much.

After graduating college and turning pro, she won a tournament on the USTA Women’s Pro Tour in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“When she held up that trophy, everything that she had done prior came forward,” said Missy Maloof, who was the USTA tour supervisor at that event. “It was magical because I knew the struggle behind that day. And I think that’s when she – at that moment – realized that that was her Wimbledon. That was her US Open. That was her moment.”

The win moved her up to 345th in the world, the highest rank she would attain. She had married former Gator hurdler Michael King, who had become her coach. She gave birth to Maniah, her second child, in 2009.

“Just because she didn’t make it to the top 5 in the tennis world doesn’t mean she was not a complete success,” Maloof said. “In my mind, she was a complete success because she was the person that she was and she had the family that she had.”

Keeping his promise

Gordon wanted to keep his promise to Iona Lord. So he continued to work with the three Lord children nearly five hours a week, even during their high school years when they were playing tennis for Kingswood Oxford.

It paid off.

Dayna Lord lost only one match at Kingswood Oxford and was accepted into Brown University, where she played tennis for four years and left as the school’s all-time winningest female player. She worked for a few years in San Francisco after leaving Brown and now at age 28 attends the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she is pursuing an MBA.

“We were sold on the vision and then us believing in the vision and the mission,” Dayna Lord said. “That’s kind of what propelled us and kept us moving forward.”

Phil Gordon’s top athletes	school	Graduation Year
Tim “T.A.” Niles	University of Hartford	1987
Alan Willis	Southern University	1988
Paul Freeman	Wesleyan University	1997
Maria Livadiotis	Princeton University	2002
Carlos Salmon	University of Southern California	2005
Greg Chang	Saint Joseph’s University	*2006
Alexis Gordon	University of Florida	2007
Dayna Lord	Brown University	2017
Melissa Lord	Stanford University	2019
Matthew Lord	University of Virginia	2021
*Graduated from North Carolina

Melissa Lord was undefeated at Kingswood Oxford and went to Stanford University on a tennis scholarship. She was part of three national championship teams, including one in her final year, when she was No. 2 at singles. She earned a degree in public policy with a focus on science and technology policy and now, at 26, works for Plaid Inc., a digital financial services company in San Francisco. She said that her Stanford degree “makes me feel like I tied the bow with tennis a bit. Tennis is such a great sport and we all love it, but it was sort of like a cherry on top at the end of my senior year when we had that positive ending.”

Matthew Lord won 109 of his 112 matches at Kingswood Oxford and went to the University of Virginia on a tennis scholarship. He played four years at UVA and, according to coach Andres Pedroso, “was a pivotal part of a rebuilding process” that eventually led the Cavaliers to two national titles after he graduated with a degree in anthropology. Now 25, he’s a commercial real estate broker in McLean, Virginia.

Their dad, Alman Lord, remarried in 2014 and marvels at Gordon’s impact on his kids’ lives.

“It’s a one-in-a-million story,” he said when we connected on the day in October when Kingswood Oxford inducted Dayna Lord into its sports hall of fame, “because it’s not just one person, it’s three.”

The day I came across Gordon in the park, I asked him how he was planning to deal with his eviction notice. He had also told me that his electric bill, which includes heat, was $4,000 overdue. He said that “Ruth” was dealing with the rent issue and “Paul” was on the electricity issue.

Ruth Freeman is a 75-year-old retired nurse whose three sons, Paul and the twins Seth and Andre, trained under Gordon. Paul is now 47 and Ruth has assigned him to handle issues related to Gordon’s electric bill, such as seeing if the Community Renewal Team, a local nonprofit, will pay part of it and negotiating for some of it to be forgiven by Eversource, the electric company.

Ruth was handling Gordon’s living arrangements herself. In June, she applied for him to get a one-bedroom unit in a subsidized senior facility in Bloomfield, not far from the public park and tennis center where he usually teaches. Gordon had correctly told me that he had no income – not even Social Security benefits – and the seniors development only requires a tenant to pay a percentage of their income, whatever that might be, even if it’s zero.

Help has come from many others as well. After Gordon’s car broke down, Alman Lord provided him with the Jeep Cherokee he now drives. Alman told me that he couldn’t stand seeing Gordon not being able to get to training.

Cynthia Lord, Alman’s wife, cooks Gordon’s food and packs it in containers so he has something to eat every day.

Monetary help has come from Alexis, as well as Carlos Salmon Sr., Andre Freeman, Rochelle and Rollo Jones, and DeLorso, the tennis center employee.

“It’s not just me,” Ruth said. “There is a community of tennis moms and dads and we all look out for him. We all want Phil to be safe and sound and the point is Phil did a lot for our kids.”

One thing his supporters couldn’t make happen was to build him his own tennis center. For the record, Gordon said he never wanted an entire academy, just a building. Niles, his former star player who graduated cum laude from the University of Hartford, put together a nonprofit to get the ball rolling in 2020. But logistical problems caused the idea to die and Niles, who is married and lives in Maryland these days, ended his efforts.

On Nov. 7, I was hanging around the tennis center when I noticed some adults show up during the time when Gordon usually trained kids.

There was an elderly man sitting at the conference table in the lobby with his eyes fixed on Gordon, who was out on Court No. 3, putting Jamir, Zuri, Jada, Kyrie, Brayden and DeLorso through their paces. Ruth introduced me to 93-year-old Guy Blais, the only white regular at the Keney Park courts in the early 1960s. He’d known Gordon for six decades.

I knew something was going on when Rollo and Rochelle Jones came through the door. Next to walk in was Carlos Salmon Sr. Seth Freeman was also in the house.

Ruth told me she had decided to have a party for Gordon, since no one had done anything three weeks earlier for his birthday. She had a cake and some cups of apple juice.

When Gordon emerged up the stairs into the lobby from the tennis floors, he was surprised to see his old friend Blais and the others and could barely contain his glee. With the young Freeman children still around, Gordon’s past and present were colliding in a happy way.

Tennis coach Phil Gordon’s longtime friends gathered together after a lesson to celebrate his recent 80th birthday with cake and drinks. Clockwise from left to right: Rollo Jones, Gordon, Guy Blais, Rick Wu, and Kyrie and Brayden Freeman.

Ruth called the gathering to order and asked her son Seth to start it off.

“Phil, who has given so many years of instruction and mentorship and, frankly, love to myself, our family – all of our families. I want to say thank you. Phil, we appreciate you. I want to celebrate and say we love you.”

Gordon took a step closer to the conference table with the cake and most of the people.

“Well, I’m happy to be here, that’s for sure,” he said. “And I hope that the great Lord keeps me here for the rest of ever so I can do more. See, that’s the whole situation. I don’t want to stop. I want to keep going.”

“Amen,” Rochelle Jones said.

Rollo Jones told a story about the first time he’d brought his daughter Rolanda and son Rollo Jr. to Keney Park. “I said, ‘I’ve got two kids here. Can they be a part of your program?’ He said, ‘Can they play?’ I said, ‘No.’ Phil said that’s all right. They’ll learn.”

Almost a week after the celebration, Ruth sent me a text. She had been worried there would be a lengthy wait to get Gordon into the senior-living facility, after all. But he had been approved and could move in at the end of November.

A day later, on Nov. 14, Ruth met with the staff at Gordon’s new digs. She was talking to two employees there and about to leave when a third person, Yvette Moore, the resident services coordinator who plans activities, entered the room. She wanted to know the name of the new resident.

Moore was told his name is Phil Gordon. A smile creased her face. “When I was 9 years old, my mother brought me to Keney Park to Phil’s program,” she said.

Tennis legend Serena Williams honored as ‘fashion icon’ at fashion industry’s big awards night

The Associated Press — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 14:11:57 +0000

NEW YORK — Tennis legend Serena Williams told a glittery fashion industry audience how fashion became a favored mode of expression as she grew up in the public eye, with the tennis court serving as her runway.

“I knew when I was a little girl that I was different, so I explored fashion and style as a way to distinguish myself,” Williams said as she accepted the Fashion Icon award Monday night from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “In many ways for me, the tennis courts became my runway, and the US Open was my own New York Fashion Week.” Reimagining the traditional tennis outfit became a way, she said, to express “my individuality and my confidence and most importantly, my culture.”

Williams, who retired from tennis last year, is the first athlete to win the Fashion Icon award, and it was presented to her by media personality Kim Kardashian, a council honoree last year. Kardashian called Williams “fearless, heroic, authentic, iconic — the greatest of all time.”

The fashion industry’s equivalent of Oscar night was held at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and hosted by actor Anne Hathaway. In top designer awards, Catherine Holstein of the label Khaite was named womenswear designer of the year, and Willy Chavarria won for menswear. The award for accessories went to Ashley Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen of the label The Row.

Among other honors: Actor Gwyneth Paltrow accepted the Innovation award for goop, her 15-year-old lifestyle brand, presented by actor Demi Moore. Actor Vanessa Hudgens presented a tribute from the council’s board of directors to designer Vera Wang, for her impact on the bridal industry. Designer Maria Cornejo won a lifetime achievement award, presented by actor Laura Linney.

There was also a tribute to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop with a short film by director Hype Williams, introduced by singer Mary J. Blige and with music by Pharrell.

When Williams, now 42, retired from tennis, she said she needed to make the tough choice to focus on motherhood. She gave birth in August to a baby girl, almost exactly a year after her last match as a tennis star. Adira River Ohanian is the second child and second daughter for Williams and her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Their first child, Olympia, was born in 2017.

In her speech, she spoke fondly about how she’d learned to express her creativity on the court. “I designed skirts out of denim and I wore purple tutus and bodysuits,” she said, “and put beads in my hair, and braids. It was really just a fun time for me.”

Williams studied fashion during her playing career, and in 2018, launched her S by Serena clothing line, which she said in her speech was intended “to inspire women women to embrace their bodies and love who they are no matter their size, race or income.”

Among her many thank-yous, she saved her last for her mother, “for actually making those first tennis outfits when I was young.” Watching her sew, she said, “created this creativity in me that I still have to this day.”

The CFDA awards are presented by Amazon Fashion. Other honors: Journalist Alina Cho received a media award, Tom Ford International chairman Domenico De Sole won the founder’s award, designer Mara Hoffman won a sustainability award, and the international award went to designer Jonathan Anderson for JW Anderson and Loewe.

The story behind New Balance’s ‘Call Me Champion’ campaign for Coco Gauff

Aaron Dodson — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:50:56 +0000

For hours after she won the 2023 US Open, Coco Gauff refused to change out of the baggy white T-shirt she put on over her match outfit following the trophy presentation.

The shirt worn by the 19-year-old tennis star featured one sentence in black script on the front:

“Call Me ~~Coco~~ Champion.”

For New Balance, this celebratory piece of apparel had been years in the making, since 2018, when Gauff turned pro at 14, and the Boston-based sportswear company signed her to an endorsement deal.

Last year, Gauff extended her New Balance contract after becoming the only active player in pro women’s tennis with a signature sneaker. And, at this year’s US Open, she laced up her shoe, the New Balance CG1, en route to winning her first career Grand Slam title.

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A post shared by New Balance (@newbalance)

To celebrate the milestone, New Balance brought back the “Call Me Coco” slogan from the brand’s original marketing campaign, only this time with a revision.

“We’ve known Coco’s potential since we started working with her. And we’ve never questioned that potential, on or off court,” Evan Zeder, head of global tennis and baseball sports marketing for New Balance. “New Balance has been preparing as if her winning a Grand Slam could happen — as if it would happen. From our side, it eventually became is this US Open going to be that moment.”

The special-edition shirt went live on New Balance’s website minutes after Gauff fell to the court in tears at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, where she defeated the Nike-endorsed Aryna Sabalenka, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, in the US Open women’s singles final. The first batch of T-shirts, which totaled a “few thousand,” according to New Balance, sold out in five hours. After being restocked, the shirt is now sold out again.

Following the US Open, New Balance reported 145,000 unique visits to the T-shirt’s page on newbalance.com, which experienced a 500% increase in the keyword search for “Coco” in September.

Also, according to New Balance, the brick red and thirty watt “City Brights” colorway of the CG1, which Gauff wore in the final, has been the brand’s top-selling footwear model in all sports this month. Only one unisex size of shoe, the M14/W15.5, is currently in stock online.

“The rollout wasn’t as smooth as it looked,” Zeder said. “There were so many different moving pieces, from getting the copy approved by legal to having T-shirts onsite in case she won to then putting the shirt on the website immediately after she did. But, we had the shirt ready. We’ve actually had the shirt ready for a couple of tournaments.”

In the video that captures the reaction of Gauff’s friends and family box when she won match point, Zeder, dressed in a black New Balance T-shirt and hat, is the first person who Gauff’s mother, Candi, hugs in elation.

Zeder attended the US Open final not only to support New Balance’s face of tennis but also to make sure that, if Gauff won, she, her family and friends could celebrate in the T-shirt commemorating the moment and partnership.

Candi Gauff (second left) and Corey Gauff (center), parents of US Open women’s singles champion Coco Gauff, and coach Pere Riba (right), react to her victory search after her win against Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus during the US Open tennis championship 2023 on Sept. 9 in New York.

Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images

“We made about 50 shirts in various sizes,” Zeder said. “We had a big bag — I think it was like a Trader Joe’s bag — that we stuffed in a locker in the players lounge.We basically stored the shirts in a place we knew we could get to. Then, when she won, we had someone on our team who ran them over. Coco’s agency made sure he had a ticket ready, in case security stopped him.”

According to Zeder, the Gauff family signed off on New Balance releasing the “Call Me Champion ” shirt if Gauff won the 2023 US Open. And when she did, Candi Gauff couldn’t wait to break out the championship swag honoring her daughter’s first major victory.

“Candi looked at me and was like, ‘Where’s that ‘Call Me Champion’ shirt?’ ” Zeder said.

New Balance didn’t sell any shirts onsite at the US Open the night Gauff won. The set, which was composed of approximately 50 shirts, was only handed out to Gauff’s camp — except for one shirt.

“The only one I gave outside of her team was to a little kid who saw I had a bag of the shirts and said, ‘Can I have one?’ ”

Tennis player Coco Gauff won the US Open while wearing her signature shoe, the New Balance CG1, in the brick red and thirty watt “City Brights” colorway.

Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

Zeder remembers the first time he met Cori “Coco” Gauff when she was 14 years old, and she and her family went to Boston to visit New Balance headquarters. Following that first meeting, Gauff memorably handwrote a note to New Balance chief marketing officer Chris Davis, thanking him and the brand for considering signing her. In October 2018, New Balance officially announced a multiyear endorsement deal with Gauff.

By July 2019, Gauff became the youngest player in history (at 15 years and three months) to reach the main draw at Wimbledon. Then came her statement Wimbledon debut — a straight-sets victory over five-time tournament champion and tennis legend Venus Williams.

“At Wimbledon, people kept calling her Cori Gauff,” Zeder said. “Every tournament after that, it was still Cori. But she was adamant to New Balance that she’s Coco, and her dad is Corey. In speaking with the Gauffs, and Coco’s agency TEAM8, we said, ‘Well, if you want everyone to call her Coco, let’s make some T-shirts that tell them to. Then, it was thrown out, ‘What if we make an entire ‘Call Me Coco’ campaign?’ ”

After the original “Call Me Coco” T-shirts dropped in 2019, New Balance began plotting a potential relaunch of the campaign slogan with the revision as Gauff made progressively deeper runs at Grand Slam tournaments.

The brand brought back the “Call Me Coco” shirts for the 2022 US Open, where she debuted her first signature sneaker, the New Balance CG1. Gauff, however, lost in the quarterfinals at the US Open in 2022.

“New Balance has gotten a lot of questions about our partnership with Coco,” Zeder said. “Why did they make a signature shoe for a player who hadn’t won a Grand Slam? But, at some point, you gotta be a little bit predictive. You gotta be ready for a moment.”

That moment arrived at the 2023 US Open, where Gauff became the first American teenager to win since Serena Williams in 1999. At last, she’s a Grand Slam champion — and New Balance made sure tennis is calling Gauff just that.

“There’s some bravado behind ‘Call Me Champion,’ because no one can ever take that first Grand Slam away from her,” Zeder said. “The T-shirt tied a beautiful bow around what is the true start to this partnership. Just like Coco, New Balance is just getting started.”

Coco Gauff has overcome self-doubt en route to the US Open title

Jerry Bembry — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 15:48:08 +0000

A tennis coach vividly remembers the day he was summoned to the Rainberry Bay Tennis Club in Delray Beach, Florida, to watch a young girl hit. He was so impressed by what he saw that he immediately accepted the job to coach her, commenting at the time the 8-year-old “is going to be a champ.”

Gerard Loglo, that tennis coach, knew.

A father using the unconventional guidebook of Richard Williams, who raised tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams, to raise a Black tennis star realized his daughter’s fiery competitive spirit at a young age, admiring her refuse-to-lose approach in everything from checkers to basketball. Watching her exceed expectations as she took up tennis, he told her she “would entertain the world with her racket.”

Corey Gauff, the dad, knew.

Which makes it incredible that Coco Gauff, who won the US Open championship and her first Grand Slam title in Saturday’s exciting win over Aryna Sabalenka, carried doubts about winning a tennis major as recently as the morning of her US Open semifinal match against Karolína Muchova on Sept 7.

“I was like, that Cincinnati final. I beat her because Muchova wasn’t physically ready to play that final,” Gauff said. “Then … I looked in the mirror and I was like, ‘no, you’re a good player and you can beat her regardless of her physical standard.’ ”

Gauff, showcasing her brilliant tennis skills in Saturday’s championship match and since Aug. 4, has proved she has the ability to dominate any player in the women’s game. Over those five weeks, Gauff has defeated five women currently ranked in WTA top 10 (Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Muchova, Maria Sakkari, and Marketa Vondroušová).

That ability to beat, over a short stretch, what could be deemed the murderers’ row of women’s pro tennis should erase all the inner doubts Gauff revealed earlier this year when the 19-year-old expressed the insecurities she felt in an interview with the WTA website.

“Imposter syndrome is a thing,” Gauff said. “So, sometimes I get that, but it’s something that I’m working on to realize I’m here for a reason and my ranking is here for a reason and I definitely deserve that.”

Gauff’s WTA ranking this week: world No. 3, her highest since turning pro in 2015 (behind the new No. 1 Sabalenka, and Świątek at No. 2). That’s an improvement of three places (Gauff was No. 6 last week), tying Vondroušová for the highest jump among top-10 players.

The US Open win in her second appearance in a Slam final allowed Gauff to reach the high bar many set for her when she burst on the scene four years ago at the age of 15 with a win over Venus Williams on the way to reaching the tournament’s second week before losing in straight sets to Simona Halep, the eventual champion.

“I think people put a lot of pressure on me to win and I felt that at 15, then I had to win a Slam,” Gauff said after her win on Saturday. “Everything led to this moment, so there were no mistakes. But that was a little bit of the pressure that I was feeling.”

Tennis player Cori “Coco” Gauff (right) is congratulated by Venus Williams (left) after winning their first-round match at the 2019 Wimbledon at the All England Club in Wimbledon, England, on July 1, 2019.

BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images

In her first Slam win, four years in the making since Gauff defeated Venus Williams in 2019 Wimbledon, she realizes that the molding of some of the greatest champions in sports takes time. It took NBA legend Michael Jordan seven seasons to win his first title with the Chicago Bulls. NBA champion LeBron James finally won his first championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in his ninth season. Tennis player Novak Djokovic spent five years on tour before winning the 2008 Australian Open.

The perception is that Gauff has all the tools to dominate the sport: her court coverage, length, ability to mix up her shots. Now, her confidence seemingly puts her in position, at 19, to be the dominant women’s player in tennis.

The reality is that, ever since Serena Williams won her last major at the Australian Open in 2017, women’s tennis has played out more like a sports version of Game of Thrones: Halep won a couple of majors in just over a year and appeared ready to dominate, Ashleigh Barty, for a stretch, seemed unbeatable and Naomi Osaka (four Slams between 2018 and 2021) and Świątek (four Slams since 2020, and three since 2022).

There have been, since Serena Williams’ last Slam, 15 women who have won their first Slam in the 26 majors played (57.69%). The women’s game is in such a state of flux it would be near appropriate for TV talk host Oprah Winfrey to show up at the four awards ceremonies.

“You get a Slam, and you get a Slam, and you get a Slam …”

Variety among winners is good for the game.

A dominant figure in the top spot is better.

The interest in the Tiger Woods era of golf will never be duplicated, and the same can be said of Serena Williams in women’s tennis and the dominance by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and now Djokovic on the men’s side.

Is Coco Gauff satisfied with achieving her goal of winning a Slam title? Or will the taste of victory at the US Open unleash a hunger, a drive to remain satiated?

Gauff, at 8 years old, got an early taste of the US Open, dancing near her upper deck seat during kids day at Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2012.

COCO GAUFF US OPEN FINALIST TURN IT UP pic.twitter.com/jOIoXEqEpD
— Bastien Fachan (@BastienFachan) September 8, 2023

“She had a dream,” Gauff said of that video. “I don’t know if she fully believed it.”

In 2017 at age 12, Gauff was just weeks from from winning her first Junior Orange Bowl title, winning her seven matches in straight sets. Inspired by Serena and Venus Williams, Gauff was asked how big of a star she could become in the sport.

“I want to be the greatest of all time.”

Gauff, now 19, is now a US Open champion. She’s the youngest American player to win the US Open since Serena Williams won her first Grand Slam in 1999 at the age of 17.

The early prophecies of her coach and father are fulfilled. That coach, Loglo, told me during a 2019 interview, that Gauff would be the US Open champion in three years.

He was wrong.

It took four.

“You told me you were going to call when it happened and then I see your call,” Loglo said by phone Sunday afternoon. “I was impressed how she kept everything in emotionally. She was in a zone in terms of what she wanted to do.”

Loglo spent the early part of Sunday grooming the next generation of players.

“They have a new role model now,” Loglo said. “Just like Coco wanted to be Serena, all the Black girls now want to be [Coco].”

And what about that prophecy from Gauff, where she expressed a desire to be an all-time great in the sport?

Now that she’s got a taste, the ball is in her court.

“In the French Open moment [her 2022 loss to Świątek] I watched Iga lift that trophy,” Gauff said. “I said, ‘I’m not going to take my eyes off her because I want to feel what it felt like for her.’ ”

Now that she has experienced that feeling, Gauff knows she must now embrace the change that includes the demands on her time, her desire to remain among the best in the sport and the target on her back from other players.

“I’m ready,” Gauff declared.

Gauff is ready because she now knows what everyone else — her early coaches, her father — already knew.

Coco Gauff is finding her voice

William C. Rhoden — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 13:58:34 +0000

NEW YORK — Young Coco Gauff made US Open history on Tuesday.

With a convincing straight sets victory over Jelena Ostapenko (6-0, 6-2), the 19-year-old Gauff became the first teenager since Serena Williams to reach the semifinals at the US Open. She took a step closer to winning her first major (Note: Gauff defeated Karolina Muchova 6-4, 7-5 on Thursday to advance to Saturday’s final against Aryna Sabalenka).

During her postmatch session with reporters, Gauff didn’t recoil or deflect her connection to Williams. She reveled in the connection and embraced it.

Williams is Gauff’s role model, her hero and continues to be her North Star.

“Being in any sentence with her is great,” Gauff said of Williams. “I mean, she’s the greatest player of all time. You know, I’m nothing close to that yet. I’m just really honored to be in the same sentence as her.”

The more I listened to her, the more apparent it became that the most impressive part about Gauff is not her tennis but her presence.

Over the years many young phenoms have been paraded through the US Open interview room. I can’t think of one 19-year-old who offered more insightful observations than Gauff, and that includes 19-year-old Venus Williams and 19-year-old Serena Williams.

Because they were the first Black female tennis superstars, because they were “different,” they were often guarded, leery of a probing, mostly white tennis media eager to explore the Williams sisters’ mystique. Their father Richard and mother Oracene were ferocious protectors.

Because they endured and broke down a wall, Gauff has been able to blossom and be her authentic self. This underlines the importance of role models and pioneers.

“She’s my idol,” Gauff said of Serena Williams. “I think if you told me when I was younger that I would be in these same stat lines as her, I would freak out. I’m still trying not to think about it a lot, because I don’t want to get my head big or add pressure, but it is a cool moment to have that stat alongside her.”

Tennis player Coco Gauff celebrates her defeat of Jelena Ostapenko in the quarterfinals of the US Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Sept. 5 in New York City.

Robert Prange/Getty Images

Gauff will face yet another challenge Thursday when she takes on Karolina Muchova in the semifinals. The pressure of being a fan favorite at the Open, and the ever present specter of filling Serena Williams’ unfillable shoes, looms. Gauff said as the year and matches have piled up, she has built up her mental endurance. Gauff won the Mubadala Citi D.C. Open last month. On Aug. 20, she won the Cincinnati Open, her biggest victory thus far.

“I always had the physical endurance, but it built my mental endurance,” Gauff said. In the past, Gauff said, she succumbed to the pressure of big moments.

“What I learned about myself is that in these moments that I should not put so much pressure [on myself] in these matches, because when you’re playing these tournaments, the pressure is always on,” she said.

“Right now, I feel emotionally fresh, which I think was the problem in the past in Grand Slams. I would emotionally be drained. Obviously, I’m physically fresh and emotionally fresh, and I think that just came from experience. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been tricking myself or maybe when this is over I’m going to hit a wall. But I’m really proud of how I’m able to get through these matches.”

Gauff’s best performance at a major came at the 2022 French Open. Since a first-round exit at Wimbledon in July, she has won 17 consecutive matches.

Gauff is also learning how to be her own best advocate. She’s learning to put her foot down. In a match on Sunday, Gauff said, “No!” During the second set of her match against Caroline Wozniacki, when games were slipping away and momentum turning, Gauff turned to her consultant Brad Gilbert and said, “Please stop.” After Wozniacki forced a third set, Gauff told Gilbert. “Stop talking.”

She defeated Wozniacki to advance.

“I’m still learning to speak up and say things that I don’t like and do like,” Gauff said. “Just from being coached my whole life, being young, I’ve just been used to saying yes, yes, yes, even in situations where I wanted to say no.”

She added Pere Riba as her full-time coach and Gilbert as a consultant. She also added Jarmere Jenkins, who worked with Serena Williams.

Her parents have shifted roles, becoming less coaches and more parents. “They’re just really my support system,” Gauff said. “They’re helping me remember, you know, my clothes and everything, and my dad is still sending me scouting reports for every match. But my mom is more so, you know, just being mom. My dad just being dad other than the scouting report part.”

More than anything else, Gauff said, she is embracing the fun of being in high-stakes, top-tier tennis. Tennis is fun but also a business.

“I wish I embraced the fun parts a little bit sooner,” she said. “Not even just the tour, just, like, sports in general, you feel like you have to be, especially individual sports, you don’t have the one teammate that always is making jokes or the one teammate that maybe messes up at the wrong moment where you can laugh at. So, it’s really just you. I feel like now I’m just being all those types of teammates for myself and I’m enjoying it.

“I thought to play and win you have to be ultraserious and ultrafocused, which, that is true, but also you still have to enjoy it. I think that’s what’s been the change is that I’m having more fun.”

Tennis player Coco Gauff hits a forehand during her US Open quarterfinal match against Jelena Ostapenko at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Sept. 5 in New York City.

Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

Gauff was asked about the challenges of living life — growing, maturing, making mistakes on a public stage where every move is dissected, every victory and loss judged.

It’s a challenging life.

“I would say it’s definitely weird,” Gauff said. “I think in the sports, it can be difficult sometimes because I think, people do forget that you are a person, so they see you as an athlete and they’re rooting for their favorite person, and when you lose, they say all types of things about you.

“I think it’s important that you really know yourself, because it’s very easy to feed into what you should and what you shouldn’t do when everyone is giving their opinions. I think for the most part I’ve done well with it. I think it’s because of my family. They have always kept me grounded and always see the importance of my self-worth, because sometimes you can lose your sense of self in this environment, going from country to country, social media, all of that.”

Gauff added, “When I was a kid, I just thought about winning tournaments. I don’t know why I never imagined, the dreams never came with the people in the stands and autographs. That was never in the dreams. It was just, like, the trophy.”

Finally, Gauff said, she has embraced finding the joy in a demanding sport that has given her much and provided unforgettable experiences many teenagers will never experience.

“I think it’s just putting my life into perspective,” she said. “At first, I used to think negative things, like, why is there so much pressure, why is this so hard. I realize in a way it’s pressure but it’s not. I mean, there are people struggling to feed their families, people who don’t know where their next meal is going to come from, people who have to pay their bills.

“That’s real pressure, that’s real hardship, that’s real life. I’m in a very privileged position. I’m getting paid to do what I love and getting support to do what I love. I have a lucky life, and so I should enjoy it. I know there are millions of people who probably want to be in this position that I am now, so instead of saying, ‘Why this, why that?’ I should just be, like, ‘Why not me? Why am I not enjoying this?’ I should. So that’s the reason why, I think it’s just putting my life in perspective and realizing how grateful and blessed I am.”

As her media session wound down, Gauff was asked about her grandmother. Gauff fused past and present and subtlety raised the issue of activism, specifically why she has not been shy about using her elevated platform to comment on social issues.

Her grandmother, Yvonne Lee, integrated Seacrest High in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 1961. Gauff has supported the Black Lives Matter movement. During a peaceful rally in her hometown, Delray Beach, Florida, Gauff told a crowd, “I demand change now. You need to use your voice. No matter how big or small your platform is, you need to use your voice.”

“I think she’s probably the sole or one of the main reasons why I use my platform the way that I do and why I feel so comfortable speaking out,” Gauff said.

“She had to deal with a lot of things, like racial injustice. For her to go through what she did during that time is something that I think what I do — putting out a tweet or saying a speech — is so easy compared to that. So that’s why I have no problem doing the things that I do. She always reminds me that I’m a person first instead of an athlete.”

Beyond tennis, Coco Gauff is finding her voice, and the process is a joy to behold.

Ben Shelton ‘dialed in’ during historic run to US Open semifinals

Jerry Bembry — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 15:10:15 +0000

NEW YORK — With his historic win in the US Open quarterfinals complete, Ben Shelton stood near center court soaking in the applause of an adoring crowd. Then he mimicked answering a phone call with his left hand, mouthing a few words in a brief fake convo before emphatically hanging up.

“For me,” Shelton said after his match, “it’s kind of like saying I’m dialed in.”

On a night where Shelton and Frances Tiafoe strolled onto the court of Arthur Ashe Stadium to the sounds of the rap anthem “We Dem Boyz” for the first US Open quarterfinal match between two Black American male players, it was Shelton, the relative newcomer to the tour, who showed he was “that dude” with an exciting four-set win to set up Friday’s semifinal against No. 2 seed Novak Djokovic.

Shelton, the 20-year-old who turned pro a year ago, is the youngest American to reach the semifinals of the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2003. That’s incredible accomplishment for a player who, before this week, had never played a match in Arthur Ashe Stadium (his first match, Aug. 28, was on court 10).

The sudden emergence of Shelton, along with the play this past year of Tiafoe (who fell short of reaching his second consecutive US Open semifinal) shows that American men’s tennis, with the solid play of African American men, might be a step closer to ending a Grand Slam drought that’s lasted 20 years.

“It’s pretty cool to be a part of it,” Shelton said of the rise of American tennis that also includes Chris Eubanks, who also broke through this year with a deep run at Wimbledon, where he reached the quarterfinals. “I love to see American tennis going in a great direction and tennis, in general, going in a great direction.”

Tennis player Ben Shelton reacts after defeating Frances Tiafoe during the quarterfinals of the US Open on Sept. 6 in New York.

Charles Krupa/AP Photo

And Shelton seems to have positioned himself into a prominent role in that movement, which is incredible considering many of the fans who cheered him in victory on Tuesday may not have known who he was before this tournament started. That’s mainly because of the route he’s taken to get here: Shelton played two years of tennis at the University of Florida (where he was coached by his father, Bryan Shelton, a former tour player) before turning pro after beating world No. 5 Casper Ruud in the second round of the 2022 Cincinnati Masters in August 2022.

What makes Shelton special?

His talent: He has a tournament-best 149 mph serve at this year’s US Open and notched several 139 mph aces against Tiafoe on Tuesday.

His taste of success: He was a member of the Florida team that won the NCAA championship in 2021 and followed that with the NCAA singles championship the following year. It doesn’t hurt that his father is the only college coach to win national titles in both men’s and women’s tennis.

His strong belief in himself: During a sit-down discussion several months ago with Tiafoe and Eubanks set up by the Ultimate Tennis Showdown, Shelton made some pretty audacious comments about what he expected from his career:

“I want to be that dude in the draw where there’s not one player who wants to see me … I’m talking scared of me.”

“I want to be one of those guys where you’re scared of the animal they are.”

“I want to be able to say something on a big stage one day, and it really carries some weight.”

“I have full belief in myself that I can win Grand Slams. That I can be No. 1 in the world.”

Those comments were applauded by Tiafoe, 25, the current No. 10 player in the world who made his ATP Tour main draw debut at the age of 16.

“When I was 20,” Tiafoe told him during that conversation, “I ran away from that.”

Tiafoe couldn’t run away from Shelton or the weather on Tuesday, dropping the first set on a muggy night where he changed shirts on practically every changeover. Tiafoe won the second set easily, setting up a pivotal third set where the vet couldn’t capitalize on Shelton’s mistakes, which resulted in 11 double faults for the night.

Two of those double faults came when Shelton was up 6-5 in the third-set tiebreaker, giving Tiafoe a chance to serve for the set. But Shelton delivered a powerful return of an 83 mph second serve from Tiafoe, leaving “Big ‘Foe” frozen in his tracks.

“Sometimes,” Shelton said of that return, “you’ve got to shut off the brain, close your eyes and just swing.”

Como salvar un set point por Ben Shelton. pic.twitter.com/yKBaNPfX6y
— Iñigo (@solodetres) September 6, 2023

Shelton went on to win the tiebreaker, the next set and the match against an obviously flustered — and fatigued — Tiafoe.

“I just wanted to win and play well,” Tiafoe said. “That didn’t happen, so I’m just frustrated.”

Yet even in frustration, the significance of the night, which was the first match between two Black American men at a US Open quarterfinal since the Open era began in 1968, wasn’t lost on him.

“It’s great with two people of color going at it,” Tiafoe said. “Obviously, a historical moment.”

And a career moment for Shelton, who will face tremendous odds Friday as he tries to answer the call against the player with 23 wins in Slams.

“It’s an advantage with my game style playing someone who’s never played me before,” Shelton said. “I’m definitely going to try to bring some things to the table that are different and hopefully disruptive on Friday.”

Frances Tiafoe, Ben Shelton share brotherly bond ahead of US Open quarterfinals

Andrew Jones — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 16:56:43 +0000

NEW YORK — After securing a fourth-round victory at the 2023 US Open over Caroline Wozniacki, tennis player Coco Gauff decided to share an entertaining story to the press involving two of her closest friends.

Those same friends just happen to be the first Black American male duo to reach the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam since the Open Era began in 1968: Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton.

In that amazing anecdote, Gauff tapped into her inner promoter to hype the upcoming boxing-like showdown between Shelton and Tiafoe, their first match against each other.

“After my match, Ben and Frances were in the cooldown area and it was just really just cool to see us all there,” Gauff said. “And obviously, the conversation, they already started the trash talk. I’m indifferent on who wins, but I did say that Frances was a little bit upset because I said Ben had the better outfit than him. Frances told me at the French Open that he had something crazy planned for US Open and I said, ‘You’re wearing confetti.’ ”

It’s that comfort in camaraderie and competition that makes the growing bond between Tiafoe and Shelton all the more enthralling, for hard-core tennis fans and especially for the part-time watchers of the sport who usually pop in only when the US Open and Wimbledon come around.

Tiafoe’s and Shelton’s stories are reflective of the Black tennis experience in America, which has never been higher in the post-Serena Williams era.

Frances Tiafoe celebrates a match point to defeat Rinky Hijikata during their fourth-round match at the US Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Sept. 3 in New York City.

Sarah Stier/Getty Images

Tiafoe, 25, who ascended to stardom after his parents’ well-documented journey from Sierra Leone to Maryland, has become a top 10 player after being a world-class junior beset with the pressures of instant expectations. Shelton’s pathway couldn’t be more different. His father, Bryan Shelton, an ATP Tour veteran whose highest ranking was 55 in the 1990s, was an important bridge, with MaliVai Washington, for the next generation of Black male tennis figures before James Blake’s arrival in the 21st century. Despite those contrasts, they are proud of their Black experience in tennis and in life.

Tiafoe told Andscape about the significance and excitement of their first showdown, fittingly taking place in a stadium named after the first Black male tennis legend Arthur Ashe, who was first African-American man to win the US Open.

“Ben has wanted to play me, talked about wanting to play me, at the US Open for a long time,” Tiafoe said. “So he’s going to be superexcited. He’s going to come out with a lot of energy and I’m going to have to tame him down, try to be the vet and get the win.

“But it’s going to be good, it’s going to be a great atmosphere. And I think a great representation for people of color, right? You know, two people of color playing in the quarterfinals, a huge match on Arthur Ashe, so a pretty monumental moment. I’m pretty excited to compete against him and hopefully it’s a great battle.”

Tiafoe was asked about Gauff playfully expressing her preference for Shelton’s choice of on-court style at the Open.

“Yeah, yeah, she’s all loving Ben’s light-skin energy,” he said with a laugh. “I think my outfit is much better, you feel me?”

Shelton, the powerful 20-year-old lefty, beamed at the prospect of playing someone he considers a spiritual sibling in Tiafoe.

“Frances as a player is electric,” Shelton said. “He’s kind of been a brother to me since he’s been on tour, and a guy who’s kind of told me he believes in me from my first ATP tournament [July 2022 at the Atlanta Open]. Just a great guy off the court but on the court, a nightmare to deal with. He does so many things well. One of them being engaging the crowd. He’s just one of the guys where it’s must-see TV. You want to watch him play all the time. He kind of has that Carlos Alcaraz effect. And especially here in New York, this is his place where he really wants to show up.

“So, to be able to play against him in the quarterfinals on Arthur Ashe is something that’s pretty special.”

Tennis athlete Ben Shelton serves to Tommy Paul during the fourth round of the US Open on Sept. 3 in New York.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo

When asked about their brotherly banter, the former University of Florida standout gleefully documented how far they take their trash talk.

“Everything,” Shelton said. “There’s not a time he walks by me in the locker room and doesn’t say something about, ‘Man, I’m looking way better than you in this sleeveless shirt. You got to get to work on those shoulders, buddy.’ Maybe that’s the last one, but we always have some good banter there.”

With the career of fan favorite Gaël Monfils of France winding down and the retirement of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France and Jamaican-German Dustin Brown, Tiafoe and Shelton, Michael Mmoh, Chris Eubanks and talented teenage Black Frenchman Arthur Fils represent what tennis needs in the next wave of Black male tennis stars.

Big games, big diverse personalities.

Shelton and Tiafoe are kind to any person they interact with, whether it’s NBA superstar Jimmy Butler or a regular fan. They truly do enjoy engaging with people and that is evidenced by how Tiafoe and Shelton want the crowd to match their energy and give them the NBA and NFL fan atmospheres they thrive in.

If ever there was a match that unlocked all the exciting elements of a night at the world’s largest tennis stadium, Tiafoe vs. Shelton is that match.

And no matter if you are impartial about this matchup, like Gauff is, or favor one player, those who watch this special quarterfinal will be the real winners.

Michael Mmoh in the midst of a career-defining season at US Open

Andrew Jones — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:48:17 +0000

NEW YORK — “Mmohmentum” is not just some cringey pun, but a proper description to describe what Michael Mmoh (pronounced “mow”) is feeling at the 2023 US Open.

Off the back of another career-defining win for him this year, a straight-sets defeat of No. 11 seed Karen Khachanov in the first round of the tennis tournament, the 25-year-old expressed a joy that personified his positive spirit.

“It feels amazing,” Mmoh told Andscape on Tuesday after his impressive performance. Mmoh will play John Isner in the second round Thursday (11 a.m. ET, ESPN+). “I know obviously I was watching him [Khachanov] play last year here, got to the semifinals, you know he has been very clutch at Grand Slams, last couple Grand Slams he has been tough to beat. So, to come out here and play at the level I’ve played and to win in the fashion that I did, it gives me a lot of confidence moving forward. I’m excited about what’s to come in the next couple rounds because I feel like my game’s there to make a run.”

And why shouldn’t Mmoh feel like he can make quite a run in Queens? His 6-2, 6-4, 6-2 mastery of Khachanov was the fourth notable victory for the former junior tennis prodigy against a former top-10 and current top-20 player this year.

It all began in January with his upset of Alexander Zverev at the Australian Open. That was followed by Mmoh topping Felix Auger-Aliassime at Wimbledon, then a dramatic final set tiebreaking victory over Hubert Hurkacz at the Citi Open in Washington.

It’s been a remarkable year for Mmoh that easily could not have been.

Tennis athlete Michael Mmoh (left) defeated Karen Khachanov (right) in straight sets in the first round of the US Open on Aug. 29 in New York.

John Minchillo/AP Photo

The defeat of Zverev at the Australian Open came only after Mmoh stuck around after a heartbreaking loss in the final round of qualification. In just a few hours, he went from failing to qualify to a “lucky loser,” which according to the ATP Tour, is “a player who lost in the qualifying rounds but later was given passage into the main draw following a player’s withdrawal […] typically due to illness or injury.”

“It’s funny, the day that I got the call that I was going to be in the draw, my fiancée was actually telling me to fly out that same night,” Mmoh told Andscape in March. “And I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t know. Obviously, the chances are not high but what if I get a last-minute call? Like, I got to be here for at least this afternoon.’ ”

Mmoh described how watching Tom Brady’s game as an NFL quarterback, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, on Monday Night Football, indirectly contributed to starting his greatest year.

“Luckily enough, I was watching the Cowboys and the Bucs play,” Mmoh said to Andscape. “And all of a sudden, I got a call. And at the time the match before me was 6-0, 2-0 and I was still at the hotel. So, I had to basically just pack up whatever I had in my tennis bag, get a match outfit. I didn’t even have rackets strung for the match. I just had to rush to the site, drop it off at the stringers, they didn’t even get it in time for the beginning of the match. But luckily there was a little bit of a heat delay, so we got out on court. And then they delayed the match by like three or four hours.

“So, that really helped me so I could settle my thoughts, not be like in this rushed scenario. And also, I could obviously string my rackets and prepare the way that I wanted to. And I thought that really helped me.”

Mmoh is the son of trailblazing tennis pro Tony Mmoh of Nigeria, who reached No. 105 in the ATP Tour rankings in 1987 and played at the 1988 Seoul Games. Mmoh, who is a wiry 6-feet-2, was raised in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, until age 13 when his father and mother Geraldine moved the family to Florida. Although Mmoh was trained at the famed IMG Academy as a teenager, his passion for tennis started when he was much younger at age 3. He became one of the best teen tennis players in the world in the mid-2010s, winning prestigious events such as the Orange Bowl doubles and the USTA Boys 18s singles Championship. He debuted at the US Open singles draw at just age 18.

A junior ranking as high as No. 2 in the world served as a final building block for potential professional success for Mmoh. The professional life, however, has been far from smooth. The adjustment to the difficult ATP Tour, along with injuries throughout his career, have greatly tested his resolve throughout his six years as a pro. The latest physical setback came just weeks after his breakthrough win over Zverev. A painful abdominal injury during his match against Tommy Paul in Acapulco, Mexico, sidelined him in March for the two biggest tournaments in tennis outside of the Grand Slam tournaments, Indian Wells and Miami Open.

Mmoh expressed his gratitude for the one who worked on getting him healthy.

“Even before the [Wimbledon] tournament started, I was telling the physio that I was working with, like the whole rehab process, that I finally feel like my body now is in the place where I can play multiple matches in a row,” Mmoh said. “Like I finally felt 100% fit. I actually sent him a message and thanked him for all the work he put in.”

Tennis player Michael Mmoh returns a shot to Karen Khachanov during the first round of the US Open on Aug. 29 in New York.

John Minchillo/AP Photo

Mmoh is in the current group of promising Black American tennis players in their 20s, with his childhood friend Frances Tiafoe, Chris Eubanks and new sensation Ben Shelton all ranked among the top 90 players in the world. This collection has picked up from the legacies of Arthur Ashe, MaliVai Washington, James Blake and Eubanks’ mentor, Donald Young, to forge their own paths.

An exciting matchup against Isner, who has announced he will retire after the tournament, awaits Mmoh in the second round Thursday. In a tone that featured a smile and laugh, the Floridian hopes that retirement for Isner becomes a definite by defeating him.

“Me and John are pretty friendly,” Mmoh said. “He’s one of the nicest guys on tour and to play him in hopefully his last match, that would be a special moment, something that I will never forget.”

Coco Gauff, like Serena Williams did, tempts us to look ahead

Ken Makin — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 13:43:55 +0000

Four years ago, when Coco Gauff defeated her heroine, Venus Williams, we wanted to fast-track her to the top. She looked and sounded like a Williams sister on the biggest stage in tennis – Wimbledon.

We forgot about the little things.

There are hints of meticulousness in the pro landscape – the manicured lawns, the pitch-perfect presentations. Those hints should remind us that greatness requires a similar attention to detail.

The game itself doesn’t care whether you’re a teen prodigy or not. Lofty expectations can be quickly struck down by opponents who perceive weakness. Concerns about Gauff’s forehand play rose after a loss in February to Veronika Kudermetova in Qatar, which inspired ESPN commentator and former pro Mary Jo Fernandez to suggest a “six- to eight-month break.”

Months later, at the site of her introduction to the world, Gauff lost a three-set heartbreaker to Sofia Kenin at Wimbledon. Targeting Gauff’s forehand had become an effective strategy.

We’ve seen a different Gauff ever since her Wimbledon setback — one who has made highlights at the net and has done the work to transition from child genius to contender ahead of this week’s US Open.

In those clips, her game reminds me of Serena Williams — specifically a video that had captured my dad and kid brother far beyond social media attention spans. I walked in my dad’s house a few weeks ago, and they were trapped in a YouTube rabbit hole – 21 Minutes of Incredible Serena Williams Points at Wimbledon.

“Why are y’all watching this?” I inquired.

“Why not?” my kid brother responded.

I settled in and just laughed – at improbable shots and line-tagging lasers. Excellence at the net and affirmative exultation.

Tennis player Coco Gauff reacts to defeating Karolina Muchova in the women’s singles final of the Western & Southern Open at Lindner Family Tennis Center on Aug. 20 in Mason, Ohio.

Robert Prange/Getty Images

When Gauff won the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati on Aug. 20, I noticed a hint of greatness. It wasn’t because she finally knocked off world’s No. 1 Iga Swiatek or had a streak of 11 wins in 12 matches. It was that trademark twirl that Gauff displayed, the same playful pirouette from Venus and Serena Williams that personified grace under fire.

It’s been a banner summer for Black women in sports competition. Simone Biles made her triumphant return with an eighth U.S. gymnastics championship, and Gabby Douglas told us that she’s taking aim at the Olympic Games in 2024. During the same weekend Gauff wrapped up the singles title, the unseeded duo of Taylor Townsend and Alycia Parks clinched the doubles crown in Cincinnati. Off the court, Naomi Osaka, famously a picture of serenity, became a mother.

Perhaps the most compelling comeback story was that of Sha’Carri Richardson. The sprinter’s finishing kick at the 100 meters of the World Athletics Championships overcame the favored Jamaican speedsters and offered a defiant and long-awaited rebuke of naysayers who said that Richardson – widely seen as the second coming of Olympic sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner – was a flash in the pan.

In short, we’ve been spoiled. Much like Serena Williams painted the white lines at Wimbledon and all over the world, the surname Williams is spread throughout the list of major championship winners from 1999 to 2017. I’ve gotten so used to Black women – excuse me, Williamses – lifting the trophy over their heads that Osaka’s back-to-back majors from the US Open in 2018 and the Australian Open in 2019 are not enough to satisfy me.

“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” my dad would tell me in my days as a ravenous child. Despite the brilliance of Black women in tennis, the game is not a buffet line. We should appreciate the fine dining of it all.

Part of the brilliance of “King Richard,” the father of Venus and Serena Williams, is that he knew where his greatness stopped. He was a master motivator and meticulous dream merchant. His daughters needed more, hence the addition of tennis coach Paul Cohen to the Williams empire.

Gauff’s team made changes before her first-round loss to Sofia Kenin at Wimbledon. First came a coaching change before Wimbledon in the hiring of Pere Riba in June, then shortly after the tournament, the acquisition of Brad Gilbert, who coached Andre Agassi to Grand Slam glory and and Andy Roddick to win the US Open, in July.

It would have been easy to chalk the loss up to a bad draw against Kenin, a former major winner who was once ranked second in the world, but that’s not how championship accountability works. Kenin hit toward Gauff’s forehand and forced 16 forehand errors. Overall, Gauff had 33 unforced errors.

After the match, Gauff lamented her serve and the tentativeness of her forehand in an interview with ESPN:

“When asked after the match what she feels she needs to work on in the coming months, Gauff said, ” ‘Taking care of my service games. I do think I’m a better server than [Kenin], but she took care of more of the plus-ones and plus-twos a lot better than I did. And, obviously, my forehand, being more aggressive on those shots.’ “

Tennis legend Serena Williams’ coach Patrick Mouratoglou (left) and Corey Gauff (right), Coco Gauff’s father and coach, watch a practice before the start of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Club on June 29, 2019, in London.

Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images

Perhaps Wimbledon, for better and for worse, is a flashpoint for Gauff. She has followed up the tournament with two of the biggest wins in her career, both in Cincinnati and at the Citi Open in Washington. The Citi Open win earlier in August was her first at the WTA 500 mark, and the Western & Southern Open crown was her first win at the WTA 1000 level. She joked about “doubling up” on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, but as the final major of the year quickly approaches, I can’t help but quote the late rapper Nipsey Hussle:

“Double up / I ain’t tellin’ no lies,” he famously rapped. “I just run it up / Never let a hard time humble us.”

The temptation to look ahead is ever present. Five hundred rankings points, one thousand points, two thousand points for a Grand Slam. A win in the US Open would put Gauff, who will be the sixth seed at the Open, among the queens – the Gibsons, Williamses, Osakas and Sloane Stephenses of the world.

Much like Gauff has charted her path with her experiences at Wimbledon, Serena Williams did the same at the Open. She won her first major there in 1999 over Martina Hingis at the age of 17. She twirled toward retirement just last year as she summoned her magic for three memorable rounds.

I’m trying my best to temper my expectations, even as there are so many signs that it’s happening again – a Black family leading its wunderkind daughter to tennis immortality. For now, I’ll just be satisfied with a victorious twirl – the most confident of signs that things are turning in our favor once again.