American tennis has spent this US Open crowning its next generation, and the two names attached to that title, Coco Gauff and Iva Jovic, keep growing louder by the round. Jessica Pegula, still chasing the No. 1 ranking herself, wasn’t interested in getting swept into that conversation.
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The moment came after Pegula’s fourth-round win over Sorana Cirstea, when The Tennis Letter posted a clip of her on-court interview on X. A fan replied that he considered Pegula part of that future group too, alongside Gauff, 22, and Jovic, 18. Pegula, commenting from her own account, was rather humorous.
“Why would I be the future of tennis, I’m 32 (laugh emoji),” Pegula wrote on the X thread.
It read as a joke, but it wasn’t a throwaway one. The 32-year-old has made a habit of laughing off the “future” tag while everyone around her keeps trying to hand it to her anyway, and her response fit a pattern she’s leaned into for months now.
On court, the numbers back up why she’s still very much part of the present tense. Pegula had a 6-3, 6-4 win over the veteran Cirstea in 84 minutes, taking their head-to-head to 4-1 and booking a quarterfinal against fellow American Emma Navarro.
It’s the kind of run that keeps her in the mix for the top ranking, not the kind that suggests she’s being handed off to the next crop. Meanwhile, Gauff is set to take on Jovic in the fourth round of the US Open.
That tension, between Pegula’s results and how she talks about her own timeline, isn’t new. Back in July, Pegula admitted the idea of still playing five years from now felt like a stretch.
“Five years, wow, that seems like a long time. I don’t know if I’m going to be playing in maybe five,” Pegula told the WTA, adding that she takes things “year by year.”
Even in February, while praising the wave of young Americans coming up behind her, she couldn’t resist a jab at her own age bracket, calling herself “way older” than players like Jovic, a veteran they look up to.
Gauff and Jovic, meanwhile, keep making the case for themselves on merit. Gauff, despite a double-fault rate that’s the highest among the WTA’s top 50, has already banked two Slam titles and 11 tour crowns.
Jovic was ranked No. 157 around this time last year and rose to a career-high No. 14 in August. The 18-year-old also reached her first Grand Slam quarterfinal at the Australian Open, becoming the youngest American woman to make the Melbourne quarterfinals since Venus Williams in 1998. Pegula herself has called Jovic her “mini me” for the way she takes the ball early and redirects it off the backhand. That’s a compliment and an acknowledgment of who’s coming next.
None of that changes what Pegula was really saying with her reply. She’s refusing to be quietly retired into the “future” category while she’s still fighting for No. 1 in the present.