By HOWARD FENDRICH AP Tennis Writer
NEW YORK — This would not have been easy for anyone, and it was not easy for Coco Gauff. She is aware of the expectations of others. She has her own expectations, too, of course.
An exit in the second round of the U.S. Open on Thursday night simply would not do. And double-faulting her way to defeat might just be the worst possible scenario. So after she missed two consecutive serves to get broken and fall behind in the opening set against Donna Vekic in Arthur Ashe Stadium, Gauff felt overwhelmed and couldn’t hide it.
The tears came. They wouldn’t stop. She covered her face with a towel on the sideline. When she walked back out on court after the changeover, Gauff kept dabbing at her eyes between points, trying to focus, trying to figure out a way to win. After she did just that, straightening out her serving issues in the second set and eliminating Vekic, 7-6 (5), 6-2, Gauff cried some more.
“I just show people what it’s like to be a human, and I have bad days, but I think it’s more about how you get up after those bad moments and how you show up after that,” said Gauff, who is seeded No. 3 at Flushing Meadows, where she won the first of her two Grand Slam titles in 2023. “I think today I showed that I can get up after feeling the worst I’ve ever felt on the court.”
Her serving woes resurface from time to time, including when 19 double-faults contributed to a loss that ended her title defense in New York a year ago. She leads the tour with more than 300 double-faults this season – 23 in one match not long ago – and hired biomechanics expert Gavin MacMillan, credited with rebuilding top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka’s serve, shortly before this U.S. Open.
MacMillan altered the way Gauff hits serves, and she’s been smacking so many in practice over the past week that her shoulder aches.
“The biggest challenge is just changing the motion and changing everything before such a big tournament for me,” Gauff said. “This is one of the most nervous tournaments for me in general, and on top of all this, it’s a lot.”
In the first round, she needed three sets to get past Ajla Tomljanovic, in part because of 10 double-faults.
But like in that match, Gauff’s defense and superiority at the baseline carried her past Vekic.
What left her as emotional as she was Thursday?
“It was just nerves and just pressure, honestly, and I’m someone that usually can thrive on that. There’s been a lot on me this tournament, more than usual, which I expected coming in,” Gauff explained. “Basically, what you saw out there was what it was, and I was able to reset through it. But it was a challenging moment for me on the court. It’s been a tough couple of weeks on and off the court, but I’m just happy to get through it today.”
Vekic, who beat Gauff at the Paris Olympics last year en route to the silver medal, took a medical timeout to have her right shoulder looked at late in the first set and was having plenty of serving woes of her own. She double-faulted 10 times.
In the first set, Gauff, a 21-year-old from Florida, had seven double-faults and lost four of her six service games, including to trail 5-4 – when the tears began – and then 6-5. But she broke right back each of those times and then was superior in the tiebreaker.
When Vekic sent a forehand long to end the set, Gauff’s mother rose from her seat, one row behind MacMillan, and shouted, “Come on! Let’s go!”
Gauff headed to the locker room to splash some water on her face and regain focus.
It worked wonders.
She gathered herself, and the second set went much more smoothly: just one double-fault, zero service breaks, in front of a crowd that included star gymnast Simone Biles.
By the end, Gauff was in a much better mood, yelling while shaking a closed left fist when the match was won.
She had noticed that Biles was on hand.
“She helped me pull it out. I was just thinking: If she could go on a 6-inch beam and do that, with all the pressures of the world, then I can hit the ball. … It brought me a little bit of calm, just knowing her story, with all the things she went through mentally,” Gauff said. “She’s an inspiration, surely.”
SO FAR, SO GOOD FOR OSAKA
Naomi Osaka is back in the third round of the U.S. Open for the first time since 2021, the year after she won her second championship at Flushing Meadows.
She’s playing rather well at the moment, too, under the guidance of a new coach. Just don’t expect Osaka to weigh in on whether she feels as if she is ready to make another deep run at the place.
“Honestly, I don’t really know. I don’t make it my business to know anymore. I kind of just leave it up in the air,” the 23rd-seeded Osaka said after eliminating Hailey Baptiste, 6-3, 6-1, in the second round in just 70 minutes Thursday. “For me, I realize that I’ve done everything that I could. I’ve trained really hard. I practiced really hard. If it happens, it happens.”
Osaka’s four Grand Slam trophies all arrived on hard courts: two at the U.S. Open, two at the Australian Open. Since her 2020 title in New York, her trips there have gone this way: losses in the third round in 2021, first round in 2022, second round last year.
The surface tends to favor the big serves and powerful, first-strike tennis Osaka is best known for, and something she displayed against Baptiste, of course, although she also demonstrated a willingness to vary speeds and spins.
The other talent Osaka is using to great effect so far this week is returning that gets an opponent on the defensive. Osaka already has won 11 of the 18 return games she has played so far, including during a 6-3, 6-4 win over Greet Minnen in the first round.
After her third-round exit at Wimbledon last month, Osaka split from coach Patrick Mouratoglou and began working with Tomasz Wiktorowski, who used to be part of Iga Swiatek’s team.
One key, Osaka said: Wiktorowski has encouraged her to focus more on the placement of her shots “and not necessarily going for winners most of the time.”
They appear to be making quick progress – and Osaka said her impression of him changed quickly.
“Honestly, I didn’t know him, I thought he was very scary, because he’s very tall and he didn’t smile,” she said. “Now that we’re working together, I see that he smiles often. He has a very friendly smile, and it’s very nice. That’s my little fun fact about Tomasz.”
VENUS WINS FIRST U.S. OPEN DOUBLES MATCH SINCE 2014
Venus Williams insists she is not a good doubles player. The 14 major championships she and Serena won together tell a different story.
Without her younger sister by her side, Williams showed she’s still got it. Williams won a women’s doubles match at the U.S. Open for the first time in more than a decade, teaming with Leylah Fernandez to defeat the sixth-seeded pair of Lyudmyla Kichenok and Ellen Perez, 7-6 (4), 6-3.
When it was over, the 45-year-old Williams did her signature twirl-and-wave and called Fernandez “the best partner I ever played with – outside of Serena.” The 22-year-old Canadian even reminded Venus of Serena.
“Our energy really matched each other in terms of determination, in terms of not giving up, in terms of really still just focused and dialed in in every single thing,” Williams said. “That felt amazing because I never really played with a partner – outside of Serena, obviously – who had that kind of mentality, so it was really fun.”
Williams and Fernandez, the 2021 singles runner-up at Flushing Meadows, were heavy fan favorites at a nearly-full Louis Armstrong Stadium, and the chair umpire had to ask the crowd multiple times to quiet down.
The spectators gave Williams and Fernandez a standing ovation after they claimed the opening tiebreaker despite trailing 5-2 in that set – and rose again to cheer after the match ended in 90 minutes.
“Leylah is a good player, (and) Venus is also a good doubles player,” Kichenok said. “They have played doubles many times. They know what it is. Maybe it took a bit of time to adjust at the beginning, but then they found their rhythm.”
Throughout the match, there were chants of “Here we go, Venus, here we go!” and a sign in the stands read, “Welcome to the Williams show.”
“Wow,” Williams said in her on-court interview. “Thank you, you guys. Thank you for showing up for us.”
Williams hadn’t won a women’s doubles match in New York since 2014, when she and Serena made it to the quarterfinals, or at any Grand Slam tournament since the 2018 French Open.
“It’s an area that I’m not that comfortable in, being on a doubles court, but I think you get to some point in the match where you stop thinking about it,” Williams said. “When push comes to shove, I’ll do what I have to, but I’m a singles player, so of course when I walk out there, I actually tell myself just to play singles and try that method. I try not to be something that I’m not.”
The older Williams won seven Grand Slam titles in singles and another two in mixed doubles. She had been off the tour for 16 months until returning to action by playing singles and doubles at Washington in July.
“With the amount of matches I’ve played, I’m progressing very quickly,” Williams said. “I didn’t have to come back to play tennis, but eventually I found my way back.”
At Flushing Meadows, Williams lost in the first round of mixed doubles and singles, then was awarded a wild card for women’s doubles. Fernandez described feeling “like a kid on Christmas Day” and jumping around with a smile on her face after getting the call that Williams wanted to play doubles with her.
She was shocked to hear the comparison to Serena.
“It’s probably the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten,” Fernandez said. “I feel like those are big shoes to fill.”
Back in doubles at the U.S. Open for the first time since 2022, Williams gets to keep going in New York after pushing 11th-seeded Karolina Muchova to three sets before bowing out of singles play Monday night. Ulrikke Eikeri and Eri Hozumi are up next in the second round of doubles.
“I actually feel great,” Williams said. “With some luck, we’ll stay, maybe win another round and just keep getting better.”
WHAT ELSE HAPPENED THURSDAY?
Wimbledon champions Swiatek and Jannik Sinner both won – his victory was much more straightforward than hers. Swiatek had some trouble before getting past Suzan Lamens, a Dutch player ranked 66th who had never appeared at a Grand Slam tournament until this year, by a 6-1, 4-6, 6-4 score. Sinner was just fine in a 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 win against Alexei Popyrin, who beat Novak Djokovic at the U.S. Open a year ago. In other early women’s singles matches, No. 11 Karolina Muchova, No. 13 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and No. 18 Beatriz Haddad Maia all won in straight sets. In prime time, third-seeded Alexander Zverev defeated Jacob Fearnley, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.
TOWNSEND-OSTAPENKO REMAINS HOT TOPIC
The post-match back-and-forth between Taylor Townsend and Jelena Ostapenko remained a topic of conversation at the U.S. Open 24 hours later on Thursday – but not for Ostapenko, who skipped speaking at a news conference, citing “medical reasons.”
Townsend, an American who is ranked No. 1 in doubles, and Ostapenko, a Latvian who won the 2017 French Open in singles, were back on court in separate doubles matches on Thursday. Townsend and her partner, Katerina Siniakova, won theirs; Ostapenko and Barbora Krejcikova, lost theirs.
On Wednesday, after Townsend’s straight-sets victory over Ostapenko in singles, they had an extended argument after shaking hands up at the net – and Townsend, who is Black, said Ostapenko called her “uneducated” while wagging a finger.
“Anyone and everyone that I’ve spoken to who saw anything, they obviously said that it was disrespectful,” Townsend said. “Even the mannerisms of her hand pointing at my face like I’m a child, and just the things that she was saying, everyone said that it was bad behavior.”
Ostapenko said afterward on social media that she was bothered by two things Townsend did: begin the warmup by volleying instead of hitting shots from the baseline and not apologizing after winning a point with help from the ball going off the net’s tape.
Townsend found those critiques “hypocritical,” she said Thursday.
“I mean, she’s not known to have sportsmanship and have the best code of conduct,” Townsend said, “so to try and call me out on something that you don’t even do yourself is crazy.”
When the subject of Townsend-Ostapenko initially was raised at Naomi Osaka’s news conference following her 6-3, 6-1 victory over Hailey Baptiste in the second round Thursday, the four-time Grand Slam champion said: “I saw that part, obviously. It’s been on the TV, like, every 15 minutes.”
“Obviously, it’s one of the worst things you can say to a Black tennis player in a majority white sport,” said Osaka, whose father is from Haiti and mother is from Japan. “And granted, I know Taylor, and I know how hard she’s worked, and I know how smart she is, so she’s the furthest thing from uneducated or anything like that.”
As for Ostapenko, in particular, who has gotten into kerfuffles with opponents before, Osaka said: “I don’t think that’s the craziest thing she’s said. I’m going to be honest. I think it’s ill timing and the worst person you could have ever said it to. And I don’t know if (Ostapenko) knows the history of it in America. But I know she’s never going to say that ever again in her life. … It was just terrible. Like, that’s just really bad.”
Townsend was asked Wednesday whether she thought there were racial undertones to Ostapenko’s comments.
“I didn’t take it in that way, but also, you know, that has been a stigma in our community of being ‘not educated’ and all of the things, when it’s the furthest thing from the truth,” Townsend responded.
“So whether it had racial undertones or not, that’s something she can speak on,” Townsend said. “The only thing that I’m worried about right now is continuing to move forward through this tournament.”
Looking back a day later, Townsend said she had received a lot of support in the aftermath.
“I felt like I handled the situation very gracefully, and I’m really proud of the way that I handled it,” Townsend said Thursday. “I didn’t allow the situation to take me out of my character or to lose my integrity as a person, and that’s what really matters.”
Ostapenko posted on social media Wednesday that she had received many messages “that I am a racist.”
“I was NEVER racist in my life and I respect all nations of people in the world. For me it doesn’t matter where you come from,” she wrote.
WHO PLAYS FRIDAY?
Carlos Alcaraz, the 2022 men’s champion, and Jessica Pegula, the 2024 women’s runner-up, play their third-round matches in Arthur Ashe Stadium during the day session. Djokovic, owner of 24 Grand Slam titles, meets Cam Norrie in Ashe at night, followed by Townsend against fifth-seeded Mirra Andreeva, an 18-year-old from Russia.
AP Sports Writer Stephen Whyno contributed to this report.
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