The New Yorker:

The tennis star has been fixing her flawed serve at the U.S. Open, subjecting herself to the exquisite torture of public scrutiny.

By Louisa Thomas

At the start of her first-round match in the U.S. Open, this past Tuesday, Coco Gauff—the winner of the U.S. Open two years ago, the reigning champion of the French Open, and the No. 3 player in the world—tossed up the ball as she began her service motion, and then, thinking better of it, let the ball fall. Ordinarily, no one would note this sort of thing. Tournaments don’t keep stats of caught tosses, which are perfectly legal. But this was not an ordinary situation.

Right before the Open started, Gauff’s home Grand Slam, she had fired her coach Matt Daly, and announced that she was now working with Gavin MacMillan, a serve specialist. The timing of the move, and the decision to reconstruct her serve while also playing her biggest tournament of the year, was unusual, if not unprecedented. Most players on this level don’t tinker much at all with their mechanics, let alone invite millions of people to watch them learn something new. Every toss would rise and fall in the spotlight. On Tuesday, after that first throw, she settled herself, launched the ball up again, and struck an eighty-two-mile-an-hour serve—around forty miles an hour slower than her usual first serves, when they’re flowing.

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