Jessica Pegula hands Iva Jović a Wimbledon lesson in match management to reach quarterfinals

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — At 32 years old, Jessica Pegula has figured something out about playing on grass, tennis’s most specialized surface that happens to host its most important Grand Slam.

She’s learned that it’s not about slicing every ball that comes her way or moving into net more than she’d like. She can do both of those things, as a clean hitter who spent a fair share of her career on the doubles court, but in years past, she’d been forcing herself to empty the toolbox simply because she had all the tools.

She’s become a bit more selective as her career has gone on.

On Sunday at Wimbledon, she was more than happy to impart that hard-earned wisdom upon 18-year-old compatriot Iva Jović.

She taught by example, handing the exciting up-and-comer a 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 loss in the fourth round to advance to the quarterfinals for the first time since 2023.

There, she will face either another American, her former doubles partner Coco Gauff, or Belinda Bencic, the No. 11 seed and a fellow veteran with plenty of grass-court savvy.

Pegula’s performance Sunday was a masterclass in both grass-court tennis and managing emotions and energy throughout a buzzy match. She is as steady a personality as they come, but it couldn’t have been easy keeping her cool during a match that had been hyped as an all-American generational clash.

Pegula said in the days leading up that she felt like she had turf to protect.

“Excited again to challenge myself against someone who is much younger who is playing with nothing to lose and no fear,” she said in a news conference Friday. “I know she’s going to come after me hard.”

Her pride aside, Pegula has personal goals at Wimbledon. At 32, she had made just one quarterfinal in six main draw appearances. That run three years ago was the only time she’d made it past the third round, before this year.

Those results don’t exactly jibe with Pegula’s impressive skill on grass — she’s won two grass-court titles in her carer and lost the final of another a fortnight ago — so she tried something different heading into Wimbledon this year.

Instead of playing a grass-court tournament the week before, she traded the chance to pick up another WTA title for a few extra days acclimating herself on Wimbledon’s match courts. She finds the grass here plays slower at the start of the tournament compared to grass courts elsewhere and wanted to give herself the best shot possible at a deep run.

Jović has considerably less grass in her CV, but credits her natural ease on the surface with her soccer childhood in LA. Her rise has been so swift that she’s playing her second main draw at Wimbledon this year as the No. 16 seed. That precocious talent combines with her naturally confident disposition to create one fiery competitor. She prefers to be the frontrunner in a match, rather than feeling the freedom and low stakes that come with being an underdog.

She’d rather have the pressure.

Pegula brought pressure of a different sort from the first ball. She said ahead of the match playing against her fellow Americans provides a special sort of motivation, and she played like she wanted to teach her younger compatriot a lesson. Pegula is known most for her clean ball striking and consistency from the baseline, but she can hammer her groundstrokes when she wants to.

She wanted to Sunday — maybe too much. She pushed Jovic back off the baseline with consistently deep balls, but then started to miss too often from neutral, where Jović made her mistakes in attack. Pegula lost her first service game to hand Jović a 2-0 lead, but in the opening set, they lost their serve four times each.

At 4-5, Jović won four straight points to break Pegula at love for the second time in a row and claim the first set.

But Pegula settled down in the second set and raised her serve, moving more comfortably around court and giving Jović different looks rather than a steady drumbeat of hard, fast, deep groundstrokes. Where Jović tightened as the match went on, after the energy of claiming an up-and-down first set, Pegula relaxed and trusted her game. Jović is still yet to figure out the sequences of games that require the same steadiness as potentially set-ending ones.

She was in cruise control for the third, dictating with ease. She mixed in slices, she came to net with confidence, her game didn’t look forced.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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