No style points required: "Calm and composed" Coco Gauff wins anyway

“Just win, baby,” was the exceedingly simple and practical advice that Al Davis gave his NFL team, the Oakland Raiders, each Sunday. Throw out the style points, throw out the margin of victory, and in the Raiders case, sometimes you might throw out the rules, too. To Davis, the final score justified whatever it took for his team to get there.

By now the phrase is one of the most well-worn clichés in sports, but it’s hard to think of a better way to describe what Coco Gauff does on a tennis court. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a player who can appear to be losing a match for 70 to 80 percent of its duration, and yet still come out ahead in the end. It was true in her 7-5, 7-5 win over Caroline Dolehide in the first round in Lexington this week, and it was true again in her 7-6 (4), 4-6, 6-4 win over No. 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka on Wednesday. If you watched both of those matches in their entirety, you might come to the conclusion that all Coco Gauff does is win.

There weren’t many style points to be had, from either player, in her match with Sabalenka. We knew the rust would show at some point this week, and there was plenty of it to go around between the Floridian and the Belarusian. This was tennis at its most mind-rattlingly unpredictable state. There were 14 breaks of serve, and between them Gauff and Sabalenka double-faulted 24 times. The only thing you could count on was that, every six points or so, the momentum would turn 180 degrees and go completely in the other direction.

That last fact will not come as a surprise to fans of the famously powerful and famously erratic Sabalenka, but she was even more hit and miss than usual. Down 3-5 in the first set, she won three straight games and served for the set at 6-5. Then, just when she seemed to have established her superiority over Gauff, Sabalenka couldn’t put the ball in the court. After being broken for 6-6, she lost the first five points of the tiebreaker. The same thing happened at the end of the third set. After the two women alternated holds and breaks until it was 4-4, Sabalenka lost the plot again, and lost eight of the final nine points.

“I just tried to stay calm and composed,” Gauff said, “making her play a lot of balls.”

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Sounds simple, but it was the right strategy for the day, and eventually it worked. Gauff was hardly at her best. She was in double digits in double faults. She missed forehands long and backhands wide and, like Sabalenka, she couldn’t sustain a run of good form for longer than two games. But she showed again why, unlike so many of her opponents, she wins anyway.

Gauff wins with her speed and the accuracy of her passing shots; half a dozen times she tracked down a Sabalenka volley and fired a pinpoint forehand pass on the run. Gauff wins because she’s good at coming out on top in scrappy points, when both players are scrambling and out of position. Gauff wins because, even on a day filled with double faults, her second serve ins’t easy to attack, and she has a knack for surprising her opponents with her serve at the right times. Gauff wins because, even though she lets herself get frustrated and agitated, you never feel that her frustration bleeds over into her play.

The most telling moments of the match for me came when Gauff was down 5-6 in the first set. She had just lost three straight games, and the chair umpire had just warned her father, Corey, about his sideline coaching conversations. But instead of getting upset, Gauff smiled as her dad argued with the umpire. Then, with Sabalanka serving at 15-30, Coco hit a bad return and lost that crucial point. Again, instead of getting upset, she moved straight to the next point, which she won. From there, she stole the first set away.

Gauff now has three wins over Top 15 opponents, and she’s into the quarterfinals, where she’ll face Ons Jabeur on Friday. To quote another NFL legend, Vince Lombardi, winning isn’t everything for Coco, it’s the only thing.