Delray Beach’s Coco Gauff will not get a chance to defend her U.S. Open title.
For the second consecutive time in a major tournament, Emma Navarro used her increasingly dangerous combination of steadiness, speed and power to beat Gauff, knocking her out in the fourth round of the U.S. Open, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3 on Sunday afternoon.
Navarro, 23, born in New York and raised in South Carolina, is fast becoming a major force in tennis. She smothered the defending champion in front of Serena Williams, Stephen Colbert, Michael Che and nearly 24,000 fans at Arthur Ashe Stadium, by playing the match on technical terms with which Gauff could not live.
Navarro, who has shot up the rankings in the last year, became NCAA champion with the Virginia Cavaliers. Now she is the No. 13 seed at her home Grand Slam and rising still, her weaknesses falling away with each passing month.
This was always going to be a rough match-up for Gauff, not least because of the inevitable scar tissue from the loss at Wimbledon in July. Gauff entered that match as favorite, not just to beat Navarro, but to get to the final, with so many of the other top players having already fallen. Then Navarro appeared across the net, doing what she has done pretty much all year. She ran down ball after ball, extending rallies and simply refusing to miss, hanging in there long enough for Gauff’s Achilles heels — the instability of her forehand and of her serve — to let her down.
Gauff wound up with more double-faults, 19, than winners, 14.
“I don’t want to lose matches like this anymore,” Gauff said, attributing her serving problems to a mix of mechanical issues and mental ones.
Gauff had 10-match winning streak at Flushing Meadows
The No. 3-seeded Gauff had won 10 matches in a row at Flushing Meadows, including the run to her her first Grand Slam title a year ago.
Four of those came after she dropped the opening set — including in the 2023 final and in her third-round victory on Friday — but she could not complete the comeback this time. That’s despite a mid-match, four-game run in which she claimed 14 of 17 points to steal the second set and get off to a good start in the third.
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“It’s pretty insane. I lost in the first round the last two years,” Navarro said in an on-court TV interview. “It’s the city I was born in, and it feels so special to be playing here.”
The 13th-seeded Navarro was 0-2 at the U.S. Open heading into this year’s tournament. “Had a little bit of a lull there, but I was able to regroup … and come into the third set with a fresher mindset.”
Navarro was a teammate of Gauff at the Paris Olympics. “Coco’s an amazing player, and I have a ton of respect for her and I know she’s going to come back and win this thing again one year.”
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This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Delray Beach’s Coco Gauff knocked out of US Open in fourth round
