WHEN COCO GAUFF WINS HER NO. 1 ONLY TWO YEARS PAST SERENA, SEE THE HINT

We needed more strength and evidence that she wants to be an all-time great, and after winning her first Grand Slam event at age 19, Gauff’s career also will be a perpetual inspection like Williams

     She may have won the U.S. Open, the first of many, when she instructed her new coach to “stop talking.” Or she won after telling the umpire to stop letting a player lollygag between points. Or she won when four environmental protestors, one with bare feet stuck to the floor, had her inquire why it felt “like a hostage situation.” Or maybe she won by watching animation before the Saturday final, at least four peeks at what she calls “My Hero Academia.”

     “Press. Treatment. Watch some anime,” Coco Gauff said.

     What we do know about this 19-year-old girl is that she’ll instantly be compared to Serena Williams, an irrepressible human who grew up in a radical America and did exactly what she did — winning a national championship before she can drink to it. There will be acclaim, a point to wonder if she’ll ever approach her idol’s 23 titles, an equanimity already expressed about triumphing as an African-American and beginning her idol’s sacred act. No one can ignore Gauff, only two years later, did what Williams achieved at 17 in 1999. And we must realize she won her land’s banner only a year after she retired from tennis at the same event.

     It’s too rich. It’s too intimate. It’s too racial. It’s too perfect. No wonder she dropped to her knees, inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, to mouth a prayer as the moment’s awe fell over her. She wept on center court, blew a personal heart to the New York fans who adored her, then went into the stands — halfway, it seemed — to greet her parents for a very long hug. The connection to the past is too obvious.

     “Serena is Serena. She’s the G.O.A.T. I hope to do half of what she did,” said Gauff, who understands history and the lessons. “I’m ready. I embrace it. I know how to keep my peace, but also embrace all of this around me.”

     At least she finally has No. 1, overcoming first-set doldrums to beat Aryna Sabalenka in three sets. Her ferocious attempts to return everything thrown at her suggests no one in the women’s game, without much giveback, can stop her from a boiling surge into the next decade. Nothing in her arsenal suggests she can do anything but become an all-timer, with one of them, Chris Evert, saying at one point in the broadcast, “This is a new level of women’s tennis.” All we needed to detect was more strength and evidence that she wants eminence. Wouldn’t Sabalenka’s 46 unforced errors say it all?

     “Honestly, thank you to the people who didn’t believe in me,” Gauff said on the court. “A month ago, I won a title, and people said I would stop at that. Two weeks ago, I won, and people said it was as big as it will get. Now here with this trophy? I tried my best to carry it with grace. But those who thought they were putting water in my fire, you’ve only added gas to it.”

     Now she has seen her father cry, for the first time, and moved away from a prodigy life with parents and now has the most professional cohorts. We often bemoan indulged athletes of her age. Gauff is as mature as anyone we’ve seen, pouring it into her drama when the crowd at Flushing Meadows was cheering with her intimidating performances. Of all the comments she made, this hit me.

     “At first I used to think negative things, like, why is there so much pressure, why is this so hard, blah, blah, blah. I realize in a way it's pressure, but it's not,” Gauff said. “I mean, there are people struggling to feed their families, people who don't know where their next meal is going to come from, people who have to pay their bills. That's real pressure, that's real hardship, that's real life. I’m in a very privileged position. I have a lucky life, and so I should enjoy it. I know there are millions of people who probably want to be in this position that I am now, so instead of saying why this, why that, I should just be, like, ‘Why not me? Why am I not enjoying this?’ I should. I'm having so much fun doing it. I should not think about the results and think about this. I'm living a lucky life and I'm so blessed. I don't want to take it for granted.”

     So did this. “In sports, it can be difficult sometimes because people forget you are a person. When you lose, they say all types of things about you. It’s important that you really know yourself, because it’s very easy to feed into what you should and shouldn’t do when everyone’s giving their opinions,” she said. “For the most part, I’ve done well with it because of my family. They’ve always kept me grounded and always set the importance of my self-worth. Sometimes you can lose your sense of self. They really help me embrace it instead of shy away from it. The amount of people I’ve met doing this and people who come up to me saying nice things and saying I helped them — it makes it all worth it. I’ll always continue to embrace the people, because the conversations I’ve had really make me feel like I’ve done well.”

     And all of that was before she won, thanking parents Candi and Corey for their love and grounded upbringing in the South Florida suburb of Delray Beach. Wasn’t long ago when Gauff, after losing in the opening round at Wimbledon in early July, didn’t know where it was going. She quickly hired a new coach, Pere Riba, and a new consultant, Brad Gilbert, who I sometimes see at a court outside Los Angeles. Gilbert tells her to listen to his rock bands, the Eagles and Tom Petty, and thought he had no problem until the other night. “Please stop,” Gauff told him when he was yapping. In the next game, she got louder: “Stop talking.”

     But it’s how she came through. It was her championship. Back in her infancy, at 16, she wasn’t sure how to handle the murder of George Floyd. She stood at a rally in her hometown and said, “No matter how big or small your platform is, you need to use your voice. I saw a Dr. King quote that said, ‘The silence of the good people is worse than the brutality of the bad people.’ We need to not be silent.”

     Pretty strong for 16. So is her new growth, which includes a lot of onlookers such as Miami Heat superstar Jimmy Butler, whose presence was felt at the Open, and the celebrity likes of Justin and Hailey Bieber. At 13, she reached the final of the U.S. Open junior tournament, and only two seasons later, she was beating Venus Williams at Wimbledon. She dealt with pressure.

     Now her heartbeat follows. "I don’t think I’m carrying American tennis. I don’t think I will,” Gauff said. “We have so many compatriots who are doing well. Serena is Serena. But I’m not gonna compare myself to her. She’s someone I look up to. Being in the same stat line as her means a lot to me. I’m still happy to just be a product of her legacy. She’s my idol. The only regret I’ll have for the rest of my life is not being able to play her.”

     Oh, that would have been fun. So will the future, I suspect.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.