Coco Gauff became the youngest player to reach the US Open’s third round since 1996 — and set up a showdown against No. 1 seed and defending champion Naomi Osaka.
Gauff, a 15-year-old from Florida, edged Timea Babos of Hungary 6-2, 4-6, 6-4 Thursday night by breaking in the last game of the nearly 2½-hour match at Flushing Meadows in New York.
The partisan crowd at Louis Armstrong Stadium backed Gauff loudly, chanting, “Let’s go, Coco!” during the final changeover.
“This is just the beginning, I promise,” she told the crowd afterward.
“I’m just so happy that I was able to get through it,” Gauff said. “She played amazing.
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“It was the type of match that anyone could have won.”
Gauff, who advanced to the fourth round at Wimbledon last month in her Grand Slam debut, is scheduled to play Osaka on Saturday.
Another young American woman made waves at the Open on Thursday.
Taylor Townsend, a 23-year-old qualifier ranked 116th, pulled off the biggest victory of her up-and-down career with an entertaining, net-rushing, serve-and-volleying brand of lefty tennis on Thursday, surprising former No. 1 Simona Halep 2-6, 6-3, 7-6 (4) in the second round at Flushing Meadows.
“It’s been a long road. A lot of haters. A lot of people who weren’t sure. I mean, I’ve heard it for a really long time that I was never going to make it, that I wasn’t going to be able to break through or do this or do that,” Townsend said. “This was a huge, monumental moment. It was a very defining moment for me to realize that I belong here.”
Townsend was marked for greatness long ago: She was the singles and doubles junior champion at the 2012 Australian Open, turned pro later that year at age 16, then cracked the top 100 in the rankings while still a teen. But a drop out of the WTA’s top 300 followed and she went into Thursday 9-16 at Grand Slam tournaments and 0-10 against top-10 women.
Still, Townsend never let up and never gave up on herself over the years — or on Thursday, even though she knew full well she had lost all six sets the two women had contested previously.
She was able to put aside an early one-set deficit. And get over that she wasted a pair of match points, one via double-fault, while serving for the win at 5-4 in the third. And steady herself nearly 15 minutes later, when Halep, who won Wimbledon in July and was seeded No. 4 at the US Open, was a single point from winning this thing herself at 6-5.
“When I’ve played her before, I was just trying to make balls [in]. I think I played not to lose,” Townsend said. “And today I played to win.”
How did she do it?
By moving forward at every opportunity, something rarely seen these days on tour. She won the point on 64 of her 106 trips to the net; Halep went 6-for-10. And Townsend serve-and-volleyed 61 times; Halep did that once.
“Never played with someone coming so often to the net,” Halep said. “Didn’t miss much. It’s unbelievable.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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