Defense is perhaps the least-talked-about aspect of tennis. It’s not quantifiable, like the number of aces. It’s not readily captured in the highlight videos that tend to get uploaded on social media. In an era in which the game is ever more athletic, and punishing offensive shots are struck under pressure from almost anywhere on the court, it can be hard to tell just when it is that a player is actually defending. At its starkest, great defense is simply—but not so simply—the ability to get one more ball back over the net which has no business getting back over the net, and to keep doing it. That, more than anything else, is what earned Coco Gauff the U.S. Open women’s championship on Saturday. It bought her time to get the measure of Aryna Sabalenka’s formidable power; it gradually wore Sabalenka down, mentally and physically; and it bolstered Gauff’s confidence, the self-belief that she’d need to finally prevail, 2–6, 6–3, 6–2.
This summer, it was mostly Gauff’s offense—the aggressive mind-set that saw her stepping inside the baseline, getting her body behind her ground strokes, and ending points quickly—that raised the level of her game and won her a pair of hard-court titles in the weeks leading up to the Open. She arrived in Flushing being discussed, for the first time in her still young career, as a favorite to win a major championship. But, from the opening moments of Saturday’s final, it was clear that offense wasn’t going to be an option for Gauff. Sabalenka’s power was simply too much for her. Sabalenka was targeting her big first serve and penetrating flat ground strokes at Gauff’s forehand—her only weakness, and a glaring one when subjected to the kind of pace Sabalenka can bring. It took away the time Gauff needed to get her feet properly set to start what is a long forehand swing with an unforgiving Western grip. The results were shanked forehands, drifting forehands, netted forehands. What kept games close early on was that Sabalenka was missing, too, double-faulting and botching easy sitters. It was a mess of a first set. But there was a point in the sixth game—a point Sabalenka won to hold and go up 4–2—after which I scribbled in my notebook, “Gauff defense!” Gauff had scrambled to extend the point to thirteen shots. It wasn’t a turning point, exactly (Gauff would lose not only that point but also the next two games and the set), but it was a foreshadowing.
Great defense requires speed, and there may be no one faster in the women’s game than Gauff. It also requires tireless fight, and Gauff has that, too. She went down a set in her first-round match (against Laura Siegemund), in her third-round match (against Elise Mertens), and in her Round of 16 match (against Caroline Wozniacki). She didn’t quit. She doesn’t seem to know how to quit. As the second set unfolded, Gauff began diminishing Sabalenka’s pace by dialling back on her own. She looped her forehands and blocked Sabalanka’s serves back, shots that kept Sabalenka off balance and unable to drive her ground strokes. Time and again, Gauff ran down and got back what surely looked like Sabalenka winners to the corners, and the capacity crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium, under a roof closed against the rain, grew louder and louder in its roars for her, with little concern for waiting until a point was over. It was all making Sabalenka tense and weary, or so it appeared. She surrendered a break with a double fault in the fourth game of the second set, and then allowed Gauff to consolidate the break in the game that followed by making three forehand errors in a row. Even when Sabalenka won what was, to my mind, the most remarkable point of the set—an eleven-shot rally that she ended with a lob winner off a very good Gauff lob—it was a point that unfolded on Gauff’s terms, lengthy and physical. Serving at 5–3, Gauff earned a pair of set points by finishing a fifteen-shot rally with a volley winner. Still another Sabalenka forehand error sent the match to a deciding set.
When Gauff broke Sabalenka to open the third set—with an overhead smash after yet another indefatigable defensive stand—the crowd reached a state of delirium that tennis produces only in the cavernous Ashe Stadium, and only for an American on the verge of a U.S. Open championship. (Think Serena Williams, six times.) It did not let up. There was an overwhelming sense that things were heading toward the climax so many wanted. The entire tournament had been Gauff’s. It was her unfolding narrative that captivated. It had been her match during the first evening session that the Obamas watched from courtside, and then arranged to greet her after she won it. It had been her semifinal, Thursday night, when climate-change activists interrupted with a loud protest, delaying play for forty-five minutes. And it was Gauff who said, following her victory that night, “I wasn’t pissed at the protesters. . . . I believe in climate change.” She is nineteen years old—that’s been a big part of the narrative, too—but she has been, and is likely to continue to be, an American champion who makes not sticking to sports an essential part of her story.
The final on Saturday ended, fittingly, with an eleven-shot rally, Gauff striking a beautiful backhand winner down the line. She fell to the court and sobbed. Sabalenka would cry, too, later, during the trophy ceremony. She had won the Australian Open; reached the semifinals at the French Open, where she also had a heated exchange with reporters who questioned her about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Sabalenka is a Belarussian who makes her home in Florida); and made the semifinals at Wimbledon. She will rise next week to No. 1 in the world. But Gauff’s legs and grit—and the deafening encouragement of which rained down on the court in Ashe—had broken Sabalenka’s big game, and eventually her will. Gauff had found a way to impose herself, had got one last ball back enough times in a match of consequence to come away the victor. It’s a story likely to be repeated. ♦
