Opinion: Coco Gauff doesn’t dominate tennis, and that’s OK

It’s time for American sports fans – even American tennis fans – to stop taking Coco Gauff for granted. 

On some level, that’s a crazy sentence to write. For two straight years, she has been the highest-paid women’s athlete in the world, earning $21 million in endorsements alone in 2024, according to Sportico, even though she’s never been ranked No. 1 in the world. Nor has she ever been viewed like Caitlin Clark as a singular breakthrough figure taking her sport to new heights.

You could even argue Gauff has been a bit overvalued relative to her lone Grand Slam title at the 2023 US Open. If the theory behind Gauff’s marketability and potential to transcend her sport in American culture was that she could succeed the throne of Serena Williams, it’s a bet that has not – and may never – come close to paying off. 

And yet, shouldn’t it be a bigger deal that she’s going to play in yet another Grand Slam final on Saturday, trying to win the French Open at just 21 years old? 

The problem with being The Chosen One in sports is that there’s rarely much of a payoff that exceeds the intoxication of possibility. LeBron James and Tiger Woods may be the only two American athletes in history who have ever truly conquered the bar that was set for them as teenage prodigies.

When Gauff burst into the public eye in 2019, beating Venus Williams at Wimbledon as a 15-year-old, she was forced to carry that burden – even if she wasn’t really old enough at the time to fully understand what it would mean, and the rest of us didn’t fully appreciate how hard it would be to fulfill even a fraction of it. 

The truth is, someone like Serena Williams is a once-in-a-lifetime figure. Gauff is just a great but flawed athlete who happens to be a really cool person. 

Collectively, we all need to do a better job making sure that’s enough.

And that goes for Gauff’s hardcore fans, too.

If you ever dare to peruse the tennis-loving corner of social media during any of Gauff’s matches, the general vibe among her supporters is often one of disgust that she isn’t routinely dominating players who aren’t perceived to be as talented as her. She’s not this, she’s not that, she’s gotta fix that forehand, what’s wrong with her serve, it’s time for a new coach, how does her mother deal with the stress, etc., etc., etc. 

Maybe that’s just social media doing its thing, but I know it’s real because I’ve felt that way too. I’ve written columns about it. Outside of that incredible run in the summer of 2023 when she truly reached the peak of her powers, watching her navigate match after match has often felt more difficult than you think it should be. 

And yet, when you look up, here’s the résumé pending Saturday’s final at Roland Garros against No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka: 

• 1 Grand Slam title

• 3 Grand Slam finals and two more semifinals 

• 1 WTA year-end championship

• 2 WTA 1000-level titles and 9 WTA titles overall  

• A solid grip on the No. 2 ranking

• Finals this year in Paris, Rome and Madrid, the three biggest tournaments of the year on clay. 

If any other American athlete had accomplished this much at 21, every tournament they played would be an event. But Gauff does not get that privilege now and may never have it, even as well-liked and respected as she is, mostly because she is not going to be the best women’s tennis player of all time. 

And that’s too bad because it’s not only remarkable what she’s done at such a young age, the way she’s doing it is perhaps even more inspiring than most people understand. 

The mistake we made with Gauff at the very beginning was the assumption that she possessed this generational ability to win Grand Slams because she was beating grown women when she was 15. 

Now that Gauff has been around for so long, we need to accept a totally different construct for her career. Of course she’s a very talented tennis player, but not in the same way as other prodigies like the Williams sisters, Jennifer Capriati and Martina Hingis, who did the technical things at a level far beyond their years.

Gauff is more of a great athlete than a dominant hitter of tennis balls, and the skill that truly stands out is her ability to beat the person on the other side of the net no matter how many double faults she hits (still way too many) or how easily she loses confidence in her forehand (almost a daily occurrence). In so many matches, even this year during the French Open, you will watch her struggle and struggle trying to figure it all out, play what seems to be sub-standard tennis and look like she’s about to be dismissed from the tournament. But by the end, she somehow finds a way, most of the time, to play a little bit better than her opponent. 

That’s just who she is as a tennis player. It’s also an incredible element of athletic talent that not too many of her peers possess. The fact Gauff doesn’t make it look easy should not be a demerit. Instead, it should be the reason she sells out stadiums, causes TV ratings to spike when she plays and earns $20-plus million in endorsements.

Is that a harder bandwagon to sell a ticket for? Of course. American fans tend to reward dominance. It’s just how we’re wired. 

It would be a mistake, however, to undervalue what Gauff has already done and how she’s done it. She may not be a once-in-a-lifetime tennis player, but she is rare. And even if Gauff is not yet collecting big titles at the rate people might have once envisioned, the way she keeps putting herself in the mix despite very much being a work-in-progress is something we need to celebrate more than we have.