Boxing is a dangerous sport, Coco Gauff has discovered. “I broke a couple of nails,” laughs the tennis star, who spent her off-season learning from a real-life fighter. Since it was all pad and bag work, there was no chance of getting punched in the face, even by her 15-year-old brother, Codey, who was training alongside her. “I don’t see myself fighting anyone soon,” says Gauff, “because I don’t think I’d be able to take a hit.”
Still, it was good for her balance and footwork, and feeling attuned to her body. Her Rocky-style epiphany came when her trainer explained fights aren’t won by a single knockout punch – but all the moves that lead up to it. “You have to learn to be patient,” she says. “It taught me not to look for the finish line right away, but to enjoy the journey there.”
There is no better lesson for Gauff right now. At 19, she has been a professional tennis player for a scarcely credible five years. She is the second-highest-ranked US woman in the world behind her doubles partner Jessica Pegula, who is a decade older than her, and she has held the unofficial title of Next Big Thing since her explosive Wimbledon debut in 2019. As the youngest qualifier in the championships’ history, Gauff made it all the way to the fourth round, beating Venus Williams in her very first game.
Tennis had a case of Cocomania two years before the very first outbreak of Raducanu fever. But while Gauff has won three tournaments and reached a personal high of world No 4, a first major title is still to come, and reality has yet to live up to her own considerable ambitions. Last year she came closer than ever to a grand slam title, losing in the final of the French Open to current No 1, Iga Świątek. But the Pole beat her again in last month’s tournament, knocking her out in the fourth round, and has now won all seven of their meetings.
Those who should know – Martina Navratilova, Pam Shriver – are convinced the breakthrough will come soon. On court, Gauff’s counterpunching style of play combines intelligence with determination, and her backhand is one of the best in the business. Her maturity is as admired as her talent is, not least the boldness with which she has spoken out on causes that matter to her, from the George Floyd protests to climate change.
In a sport with a well-earned reputation for damaging its female protégés, Gauff rarely seems less than delighted to be at the party. Sitting today in the kind of anonymous function room that elite sport is so familiar with, she radiates charisma and enthusiasm. Her most recent defeat to Świątek may have left her “pretty devastated”, but it didn’t dim her enjoyment of a city that has long been her favourite. “I definitely enjoy being in Paris a lot,” beams Gauff, who has been familiar with it since she first went to training academy in France at the age of 10. “It’s the city in Europe where I feel most comfortable.”
This year’s highlights included a trip to the cinema to watch the new Spider-Man film, as well as to see her hero Beyoncé perform the Renaissance World Tour at Europe’s largest indoor arena. “She was amazing! She didn’t wave at me from the stage, but I’m going to say she did…” Paris was followed by four days back home in Florida – “you try to squeeze it in when you can” – where she got her hair done, spent time with her family and went to see Spider-Man again. Gauff is a self-confessed Marvel junkie and, anyway, her 10-year-old brother, Cameron, hadn’t seen it.
Before she knew it, it was time to go to Berlin for the German Open. The European leg of the season is particularly brutal, its clay- and grass-court tournaments overlapping like dominos. The constant travel, heavy workload, intense scrutiny and pressure to perform have brought some high-profile withdrawals from the sport: last year Ashleigh Barty stepped down at only 25, when she was still world No 1. Her surprise retirement followed the decision of another top-10 player, Naomi Osaka, to step away from the game for her mental health. It is, as Gauff says mildly, a lifestyle that doesn’t come naturally to anyone. “Some of the Australians leave in February and don’t get home until after the US Open [in September],” she points out. “You need the right support to be able to do that. I’m lucky I have my family and friends, so I have it as good as it’s going to get.”
She’s accompanied to tournaments by her father, Corey, and her mother, Candi (yes, every family member’s name begins with C), joins them for bigger events, like the grand slams. Being the youngest player on tour, as Gauff has been for so much of her career, has brought an enforced independence. “I actually spend a lot of time alone on the road, more than people think,” she says. “I don’t have many friends on tour – there are people I’m really cool with, but the age gap is still there.” And while she’s learning to relate more to the other players as she grows older – “I’m more understanding of adulting than I was at 15” – when she’s not practising or competing, she estimates that she spends 80% of her time alone.
Her TikTok channel is a public record of someone who knows how to have fun by herself, whether it’s lip-syncing to Jaden Smith, ranking Barbie movies, enjoying a sunset on the beach or sharing her night-time skincare routine from her hotel bathroom. “Sometimes it can get lonely,” she says, “but I think, compared to the average person, I’m used to it. Being homeschooled, playing an individual sport… I’m not someone who needs other people all the time.”
Her lowest moment on tour so far came when she lost to Osaka in the third round of the US Open in 2019 and broke down in tears on court. In the aftermath of her unexpected Wimbledon success, she suddenly felt she “had to win” and the burden of expectation – both her own, and other people’s – was too much to handle. In April 2020, just after turning 16, Gauff wrote in an extraordinarily perceptive essay: “Throughout my life, I was always the youngest to do things, which added hype that I didn’t want. It added this pressure that I needed to do well fast… Personally for me, I like playing for more than myself. I have girls now coming up to me, of all races, but mostly African Americans, saying they are picking up a racket for the first time because of me.”
Being a role model and using her voice for her community is clearly important to Gauff. Reliant on individual sponsorship, tennis players have traditionally shied away from overt political messaging, but Gauff comes from a generation determined to speak up. A week after George Floyd’s death, she gave an impromptu speech at a Black Lives Matter protest in her home town of Delray Beach, which ended with her encouraging the crowd to vote, because she was still too young to.
At last year’s French Open final, instead of autographing the camera in now traditional fashion, she wrote: “End gun violence.” In March, she used a tournament press conference to articulate her position on Florida’s attempts to ban black history books: “If we want to have good morals and hopefully a better history in the future, I think we have to teach even the dark parts of it.”
Family history has played a large part in Gauff’s understanding of her identity. Her parents competed at the top level of college sport, her father in basketball and mother in track. “I’ve never asked my mum whether she thought she would go pro, but I know my dad thought he would,” says Gauff. He stayed up on the night of the NBA draft, expecting a call from one of the teams. “He did not get a call.” But sport had paid for the couple’s education, taught them a good work ethic and made them many friends, so it was only natural they wanted the same for their children.
The oldest of her siblings, Gauff was “put in a bunch of stuff” and discovered she had a natural inclination for track, basketball and tennis. She kept up all three up until she was 13, although by then she had long known that she would pursue tennis. At eight, she won a “Little Mo” tournament, which brought together the best junior players in the US and beyond. “For me, the winning was the least of it,” she remembers. “It was the first time I was meeting girls from Europe and all over the world – hearing all their stories made me excited about a future in tennis.” Soon after, her father gave up his salary as a VP in a pharmaceutical corporation to coach his daughter, and her mother quit the teaching job she loved to home-school her.
Gauff is very aware of the sacrifices her parents made for her and the fact that they went from a two-income household to “pretty much none”. But there were benefits. “Dad much prefers the lifestyle he has now than his job in corporate America. We didn’t see him much before – he’d come home for weekends, then fly out again.”
The family sold their Atlanta home and moved to Florida, where they lived for a year with Gauff’s maternal grandparents. “It was only supposed to be a summer and we didn’t enjoy it much because we were all cramped in one house.” In addition to the six of them, there were two more children her grandparents housed for a local baseball camp. “There was a lot going on! But it helped me with the move to home schooling, because there was always people at the house.”
It also formed the bond with her grandmother that has inspired her own activism. In 1961, Yvonne Lee Odom was the first Black student to integrate the previously all-white Seacrest High School. But the segregationist atmosphere meant she was still asked by teachers to use a different bathroom and was unable to compete in their sports teams, despite being an excellent sprinter and basketball player.
“She would tell us that story and how times have changed,” recalls Gauff. “My grandmother could never have imagined the world as it is today. If that much could change in two generations, who knows how much it could change in another two?”
Gauff also learned about relatives who had fought in their country’s wars while still denied racial justice – her uncle’s “beautiful” funeral, held with the traditional military honours, triggered her interest in US history. Nor could the young girl entirely avoid the “culture shock” of swapping Atlanta, with its majority African American population, for a Florida neighbourhood where she was one of a tiny minority. “I was very lucky, the people I grew up around didn’t have any racial bias. But it’s definitely different, and you did come across some people who weren’t as nice.”
Both Venus and Serena Williams were sporting role models for her, and by her mid-teens she was encountering them on and off court. “And they’re complete opposites of how they present themselves. They’re goofy, fun people, that’s the coolest part. They taught me you could be yourself and still be intense on court.” Staying true to herself is balanced by the need to develop her “adulting skills”. Only 14 when she signed her first multi-year sponsorship deal – if it weren’t for her parents, she jokes, she would have probably signed for pennies – she has since accumulated prize money of more than $7m.
“Sometimes my dad will say, ‘You can afford to treat yourself.’ But I come from a middle-class family, so even the necessary things, like flights and hotel rooms, still seem a lot to me.” She still feels guilty about the pair of Prada sunglasses her mother recently persuaded her to buy in Paris, because she doesn’t trust herself not to lose something so expensive. At the moment she prefers to spend money on her parents rather than herself, and her social media feeds prove that she doesn’t need designer labels to make a fashion statement. She’s developed a signature style of cropped tops and cargo pants, accessorised by silver jewellery and the nail art that she has updated for every new tournament.
As for her friends back home, they still insist on splitting the bill, despite all being college students. “I really appreciate that nothing’s changed in our relationship since I turned pro,” she says. She would still like to go to college herself and often wonders what she will study. Business would make sense for her career, but it’s not where her heart lies. Politics, perhaps? “Running for office seems like way too much work for me,” she laughs. “The most important part is just to be involved, doing simple things like voting, keeping yourself informed.”
Gauff’s Florida home, of course, is a chief battleground in the US culture war, with its book-banning, gaybashing governor, Ron DeSantis, making his play for the presidency. “I think being from this state where a lot of controversial things are going on, I’m more aware and informed,” says Gauff. “It definitely forces me to be more involved, because it’s a very big state and matters a lot on the electoral map.” When people ask why she chooses to speak up on subjects that it might be more prudent to keep quiet about, she tells them it’s out of respect to the older generations of her family. “Me tweeting takes zero effort compared to what they had to do. It would be an injustice to them if I didn’t do something.”
Music is another passion. One of her recent TikTok videos called out unconscious bias at a record store she’d shopped at (Why was alt-rocker Steve Lacy’s indie-rock album Gemini Rights incorrectly shelved in the rap section? “I think we all know.”) Jaden Smith, SZA and Tyler, the Creator are among her favourite artists, and clips of her bopping round her house with the adorable Cameron, or teaching choreography to her parents, suggest she’s a better dancer than her modesty allows her to own.
The urban atmosphere of the US Open, with its defiantly unbothered attitude, remains her favourite. “New Yorkers don’t care who you are. You stay in the city and sometimes you forget you’re even in a tournament.” Wimbledon, whose cabinetful of tradition places it at the opposite end of the spectrum, can still make her nervous. “That walk to Centre Court is like you’re walking through a museum.”
This year’s Wimbledon will bring new challenges. For one thing, she is currently between coaches. Her immediate, stated goal is to have fun – “I’ll never take the chance to play in front of that crowd for granted” – although Gauff knows from experience that it’s the contest where anything can happen. “Dreams come true at a lot of tournaments,” she says, “but they’re a bit more special at Wimbledon.”
Whether Gauff makes it all the way to the final or not, the absence of Emma Raducanu is likely to push her, once again, into the spotlight. Chances are, she’ll use it well.
