At the French Open, a reporter asked Gauff to talk about whatever perspective she had gained about her game over the years. “I put myself in a bubble to the point where it was, like, tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis,” Gauff replied, referencing the past. “My grandmother, she’s always like, ‘There’s more to life than this.’” She came to realize that her grandmother was right. “I can relax in these situations. It’s just a tennis match. It’s not the end of the world. There’s so many people going through so many, like, uncomfortable situations. For me to be — I mean, obviously being nervous is natural — but for me to think that winning a tennis match or losing a tennis match is the end of the world, I think just kind of shows what kind of privilege I have.” Having that mind-set, she said, “probably helped me.”
Gauff’s grandmother desegregated the main high school in Delray Beach; her grandfather founded a baseball league for Black youths in the 1970s, when access to the sport for Black children was still a challenge. When Corey Gauff was a basketball player at Georgia State, he told me, he and two of his teammates were pulled over by officers who forced them to the ground; one held a gun to Gauff’s head. It turned out to be a brutal case of mistaken identity. Coco’s family’s history clearly informed her words when she volunteered to speak at the Delray Beach Black Lives Matter rally on June 3, 2020. “I saw a Dr. King quote that said, The silence of the good people is worse than the brutality of the bad people,” she told the crowd. “So you need to not be silent, because if you are choosing silence, you’re choosing the side of the oppressor.”
The expectation that Gauff could have an impact beyond tennis is bound up with the pressure to win: It’s champions who generally take the microphone. But whatever Gauff’s current singles ranking, Tracy Austin says, Gauff is already considered a leader on the tour. “She was 16 — to give such a profound speech about social justice at that time, at that age?” Austin said. “She’s already a leader now. But what kind of leader can she become at 25?” Evert agreed with Austin’s assessment, tweeting in 2020: “I believe we have a future leader, role model and activist in .”
“You can change the world with your racket,” Gauff’s father always told her. That goal was not a perk of becoming a tennis star; it was a driving reason to become one in the Gauff household. “I always told her, ‘Play for that little girl who was watching through the fence,’” Corey Gauff recalled to me. “ ‘She’s the one looking at you. If you can’t play for you, play for her. And if you can’t play for her, then just don’t play.’” Being a role model for girls, especially girls of color, is a meaningful way that Gauff finds motivation in the sport, regardless of how much the Williams sisters have already changed tennis. “There’s always going to be work to be done,” Gauff said. “Long, long after I’ve finished tennis and long after I leave this earth.”
That sense of purpose suggests that Gauff is already becoming, to paraphrase what she told her agent, a young woman who plays tennis, as opposed to someone whose identity is inseparable from her ranking. At the close of a recent match Gauff played against Naomi Osaka, she thanked some fans in the front row who had been holding up a sign that Gauff called “probably the best” she’d ever seen. The sign, decorated with rainbows and both players’ first names, said nothing about tennis or winning. It read: “Thanks for being you.”
In late July, Gauff and her team flew to San Francisco several days before the start of the Mubadala Silicon Valley Classic, her first hard-court tournament of the summer. It was also her first tournament since Wimbledon, where she lost in the third round. An avid baseball fan, she took in a Giants game with her family and was thrilled to throw out the first pitch. The next day, Gauff, warming up on a practice court with Moyano, was clearly feeling good, laughing easily along with her dad when a stray ball plowed into him. All week, other players told her she was hitting well; compared with Florida, where she sweats so much that the racket sometimes flies out of her hand and across the court, San Jose was easy on the body. Heading into her first match, she decided she would try to summon the fun she had in Atlanta — she would aim for “being super hype and bringing on the drama,” like Serena, while also playing it cool, like Federer.

Source: New York Times

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