Coco Gauff is enjoying a very different kind of Grand Slam

Coco Gauff walks onto the field in the middle of the day. If so, the stadium is half full.

So far, she usually manages her main activity in just over an hour. A few television interviews follow her warm-down. Not much more than that. Sometimes there are only two or three journalists at her press conferences. At night, she's barely noticed as she wanders the streets of Melbourne on her way to dinner, whether or not she's wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses.

“Definitely chiller,” Gauff recently said of her experience in this tournament compared to the last Grand Slam she played and won at the US Open in New York in September.

Remember those nights when Gauff started the evening sessions with exciting, nail-biting victories? Three of her first four matches went to three sets. She lost the first set twice. The crowd of nearly 24,000 at Arthur Ashe Stadium almost exploded every time she won a point that would push her to victory.

Whatever boldface tennis name conducted the on-court interview then handed over the microphone and let Gauff rile up the crowd with her version of the “stay tuned for Novak Djokovic” message. Hundreds of players had participated in the tournament. She owned it from start to finish, the 19-year-old debutante came out like never before and celebrities sat courtside for her matches. Jimmy Butler. The Obamas. Her name is on the lips of almost everyone on the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

Four months later, life for Gauff in Melbourne couldn't be more different, and not in the way you might expect. Sure, she's on some billboards. It's been that way for four years now, since her breakout performance at Wimbledon when she was just fifteen.

Her game hasn't changed much. Last month she modified her serve slightly with some help from Andy Roddick, shortening the motion slightly and throwing the ball from a higher position, although this is barely noticeable. “Maybe it's a little shorthanded,” said Pam Shriver, who has watched Gauff since she was a kid. “But not much difference.”

The big change is that Gauff, despite being one of the biggest stars in the sport, is going into the quarterfinals practically under the radar despite not dropping a set and barely allowing her opponents to be competitive.

“She is young but very experienced because she has been around for so long,” said Marta Kostyuk from Ukraine, who has had the difficult task of meeting her for the past eight Tuesdays.

She has replaced the neon tennis ball yellow outfit with a shade that more closely resembles the dull yellow of a traffic light. There are no hordes of Gen-Z girls following her around begging for selfies. Her doubles partner, Jessica Pegula, has withdrawn from that competition, so she isn't packing cross-country courts and smaller venues on her days off from singles.

Her matches, scheduled for prime time in the US, end so quickly, with so little energy expended, that she does cardio workouts or hitting sessions after they're done. With so little tension during the games, there is almost no back-and-forth with her coach, Brad Gilbert, which is quite a miracle considering it takes, shall we say, a lot to keep Gilbert quiet.

Then come the media obligations and then, by mid-afternoon, Gauff is trying to figure out how to fill the rest of her day.

“Go to the movies, I don't know, read a book or something,” she said on Sunday, a few hours after beating Poland's Magdalena Frech 6-1, 6-2 in 63 minutes. 'It's only fifteen o'clock. It's definitely a strange feeling.”

She saw Poor Things last week. She planned to watch The Iron Claw, a biopic about professional wrestler Kevin Von Erich, on Sunday night.

There are some very logical explanations for this dynamic.

Gauff has had a huge impact on all other Grand Slams. She had the British of that first victory over Venus Williams on Center Court at Wimbledon when she was 15. Very dangerous on clay, she was a finalist at the French Open in 2022. The US Open has been a happy place since she reached the final of the girls' tournament when she was 13.

As a professional, the Australian Open is the only Grand Slam in which Gauff has never played a major role. This is the first time she has reached the quarter-finals in singles and the Aussies spend the first part of the tournament obsessing over the afternoons and evenings of their own tournament while still competing. She plays while the crowds are still arriving at Melbourne Park, so her matches take place on American night, which ESPN is very happy about.

Fans here know her, like her and cheer for her. There are scattered cries of 'Let's go Coco', in quiet moments between points. She received the ultimate compliment on Sunday when Rod Laver took a front row seat in the arena named after him, just before she served at 4-1. She thanked him for coming and said it was an honor to play for him.

But she is not yet 'something' here, so to speak, which makes for a few quiet days. Not that she's complaining.

Gauff and her team have always urged her to embrace time off. They turn down dozens of sponsorship offers to minimize her obligations and keep her mind clear. Focus on the tennis and the money and opportunities will be there.

“Playing the long game,” her agent, Alessandro Barel Di Sant Albano of Team8, the agency Roger Federer co-launched, reiterated on Sunday.

Gauff has taken that approach to the field. She pays special attention to 30-all points when her opponent serves, even if she is already in the service break. She tries to shorten the matches wherever she can, not just for this tournament, but for years to come.

“II'm 19 now, but I won't always be able to recover physically or mentally as quickly,” Gauff said on Sunday.

Still, being a child prodigy can have its pitfalls.

Gauff said she has put enormous pressure on herself since the 2019 Wimbledon breakout to win a Grand Slam as a teenager. Last summer, with less than a year to go, she lost in the first round at Wimbledon to Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion. No shame, but she had a hard time with it.

“It sucked,” Gauff said. But, she added, “the world didn't end. The sun still shines. I still have my friends and family. I realized that losing isn't that bad at all and that I just had to focus on the struggle and the process and enjoy it. If it's 5-5 in the third set, enjoy that battle instead of thinking, “What if I lose?”

With only one Grand Slam left in 2023, she felt it was time to start making plans for 2024. She wanted to bring in a big-name coach. Gilbert was interested. He joined her team in mid-summer, an “OG,” as she calls him (“original gangster”), with strange taste in music (Tom Petty) and candy (Jolly Ranchers).

Gilbert helped her focus on her strengths – her backhand, her powerful serve, her unparalleled court coverage and endurance – rather than on her weakness, which was her forehand. He helped her learn how to disguise it, giving it more shape and depth, expanding points and turning matches into lane battles, which she had excelled at since childhood.

Six weeks later she had won her first Grand Slam, six months before she turned twenty.

Now she's the one who feels like the veteran and the 'OG'

“I look at the other girls on tour who are 16 and coming up now,” she said on Sunday. “Like, they just feel so young and I just feel so old.”

Then she caught herself.

“I know,” she said. “I'm not that old yet.”

(Top photo: Martin Keep/AFP via Getty Images)