I recently had an eye exam where I had to peer into a device and press a button every single time a pinprick of light appeared anywhere in my field of vision. There were dozens and dozens of those lights flashing on and off, in rapid succession, each one easily identifiable in isolation. But the focus required to identify and respond to each of them, in a timely and accurate fashion, without any false alarms, was surprisingly taxing. I felt myself making the occasional error not because of my eyes—my eyes are working fine, it turned out—but because I was sleepy that day and struggling mightily to stay vigilant about every single pesky, tiny light peppering the field. It was frustrating. Even a little embarrassing. I now wonder if this is how No. 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka felt in her Roland-Garros final against No. 2 seed Coco Gauff on Saturday. 

One line you hear often in tennis commentary is the idea that the “ball is on her racquet.” It is used to identify the aggressor in the matchup. The main character, even. She is the proactive player, and the opponent is reactive. She is the one determining her own fate. Every time the ball is sitting on her strings, the question is whether that swing will produce a winner or an error. It’s as though this two-player game has been reduced to the will of a single player. To me the most “ball is on her racquet” matchup in all of tennis is Sabalenka vs. Gauff. It is a match of peerless offense against peerless defense. And this time, just as it did in the 2023 US Open final, defense survived an initial onslaught from offense and then slowly took control of the match. By the end, offense looked hopeless and dysfunctional.

Sabalenka ended the match with just 37 winners to go with her 70 unforced errors. Afterward she seemed to locate the reason for the loss entirely within her own tennis, as if Gauff were just an incidental feature of the match, like a passing cloud. To hear Sabalenka tell it, the wind was a more significant adversary during the final than the human who was the tournament’s No. 2 seed. Sabalenka described herself as “terrible.” She said that Gauff had won the match by “running and playing those high balls from the frame”—shanking the ball, in other words. She also said that Gauff didn’t play all that well: “I think she won the match not because she played incredible; just because I made all of those mistakes from—like, if you look from the outside, kind of like from easy balls.” A day later, she issued a written apology on Instagram. 

Personally I enjoy the occasional press conference delivered in the throes of post-match emotion, with plenty of self-flagellation and without much attention paid to etiquette, but these remarks sure did inspire a lot of Discourse. There was the age-old debate about the arbitrary line between “forced” and “unforced” errors; there was a lot of outrage on behalf of the Roland-Garros champion. Here, as always, Gauff has appeared several decades wiser and calmer than everyone doing said Discourse, calmly batting away the various comments from Aryna that were relayed to her. And to take it into pure tennis terms, if I were Coco, I’d be thrilled to learn that the adversary I’d beaten in two Slam finals still hadn’t quite pieced together how I’d done it. That means it could still work again.

In the 2023 US Open final I saw how Gauff’s scrambling defense seemed to shrink the court for Sabalenka. Challenged to keep hitting two or three extra shots in every rally, the mental fatigue accumulated. Sabalenka’s power tennis, which can be flighty even in the best of circumstances, went utterly haywire. It’s not an accident that the match played out this same way in Paris, too. It was by design. You could take my word for it, or you could listen to someone who once lost to a 15-year-old Gauff and has wonderfully articulated what makes her so dangerous. Here’s a bit from Andrea Petkovic’s lovely description of the way Gauff takes away time and space from her opponents: “The unforced errors hit by Coco’s opponents when she’s playing well are actually forced,” she writes. “Except, they are not forced by Coco’s previous shot (which is what usually goes into the forced error statistics) but they are forced by the entirety of her game and presence on the other side of the net and by choices she has made 20 minutes prior to the point of you netting a forehand.”

While I was watching Gauff force these dozens of errors with her consistency, I remembered that the longtime stereotype of American tennis is serve-and-forehand bashers who favor hard courts. And yet, the best American of this generation is a player whose serve and forehand are her most commonly discussed liabilities. And she was winning at the highest level on clay, with sheer court coverage and a sublime backhand. American tennis: not a monolith! Given Gauff’s athletic gifts, her speed and endurance, clay would seem the best surface for her. She might have gotten to this Roland-Garros title sooner were it not for the perennial dominance of Iga Swiatek, who ended her run at this tournament for the past three seasons in a row. Regardless, she finally made good on the prophecy she wrote into her Notes app in 2021: “I had a dream last night that I will win french open.”

Now Gauff moves toward Wimbledon, the one Slam where she has yet to advance past the fourth round, a stage she first reached as a 15-year-old, making her name for the first time. And though she would probably not self-identify as an enthusiast of grass courts, she does have the third-highest win rate on grass among current top 10 players, and the tour’s second-highest grass-specific Elo rating, according to Tennis Abstract. And Wimbledon has been a bit of a free-for-all in recent years. So why not Coco? Maybe she’ll pull it off and then reveal the Post-it note from 2015 predicting it would happen.