The 19-year-old American found herself a step short in the first set before making the necessary adjustments to advance to the second round at Flushing Meadows.
NEW YORK — Some top athletes spend their careers chasing rigid perfection. For Coco Gauff, the successes started mounting when she learned good things still happened when she let go.
Monday’s match seemed an amalgamation of everything Gauff had been drilling since Wimbledon — she wasn’t playing her best tennis and the circumstances created pent-up frustration. She finally had a passionate conversation with chair umpire Marijana Veljovic in the third set while up a break.
Before that meeting, Gauff was not the same chill, lighthearted player who breezed through win after win past few weeks. But she corralled her frustration and prevailed anyway, raising her level of execution in the second set.That type of problem-solving is what Gauff has been working on all summer. It started with the difficult task of accepting that, sometimes, less than perfect is still good enough.
That’s a hefty block of pressure to place on someone naturally inclined to strive for perfection. But Gauff said she was relaxed heading into the year’s final Grand Slam.“The mind-set is different. Having like that first-round loss at Wimbledon shows that it wasn’t really [the worst thing that] could happen, so I’m not going into this tournament worried if I lose early or not,” Gauff said. “I can’t really control that result.
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