Tennis sensation Coco Gauff embraces Michelle Obama’s advice for the U.S. Open and beyond – USA TODAY

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DELRAY BEACH, Fla. – A little over a mile in from the Atlantic Ocean, Cori (Coco) Gauff is back in her happy place, swimming in sweat, bashing tennis balls on a blue hardcourt in the South Florida swelter. It is a little before 9 a.m. at the Delray Beach Tennis Center. Across the net are Gauff’s hitting partner, Courtney Scott, and her coach, Jean-Christophe Faurel.

Six weeks after a historic run to the fourth round of Wimbledon that made her the biggest tennis sensation on the planet, days before she embarks for Flushing Meadows and her first senior U.S. Open, Coco Gauff, 15, has narrowed her focus, working on her game, channeling the wisdom she acquired from her new friend and role model, Michelle Obama, former First Lady and current bestselling author of Becoming.

Obama posted a congratulatory Tweet to Gauff not long after she began her Wimbledon with a stunning, straight-set victory over one of her tennis idols, Venus Williams. The youngest competitor at Wimbledon in the Open era, Gauff was thrilled not just because the Tweeter was, well, Michelle Obama, but because Gauff is reading, and loving, Becoming. Gauff had a chance to visit with the author – and get a signed copy – earlier this month when Gauff was in Washington for the Citi Open (Gauff and partner Caty McNally won the doubles title).

While it was “super cool” to meet Obama and she “is definitely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” Gauff had a much deeper takeaway, embracing Obama’s counsel, for this U.S. Open, and far beyond.

“She teaches young people not to feed into any negativity, to keep on your path and you will get there,” Gauff told USA TODAY Sports. “And that is (just what) I want to do. I’m excited (about playing in the Open). I’m not nervous. I don’t feel pressure. I know a lot of people are excited about me coming, but I just figure, ‘I’m 15. This is my second main-draw Slam.’ I’m just going to go in with a positive mindset and have fun.”

It’s almost hard to fathom how quickly life has changed for Gauff since Wimbledon, where she followed her victory over Williams with triumphs over Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia and 60th-ranked Polona Hercog of Slovenia, coming back from a 3-6, 0-3 deficit and fighting off two match points in the process. Simona Halep, the eventual champion, ended Gauff’s run in the round of 16, but by then Gauff had announced herself to the wider world. 

People inside tennis knew all about her, particularly after she won the junior French Open as a 14-year-old in 2018, and made the finals of U.S. Open juniors a year before that, falling to Amanda Anisimova, another ascendant U.S. talent who, at 17, is already ranked No. 24. 

Alessandro Barel Di Sant Albano, Gauff’s agent at Team8, the firm founded by Tony Godsick and longtime client, Roger Federer, said he has received nearly 1,000 media inquiries about Gauff since Wimbledon. Team8 has signed her to long-term endorsement deals with New Balance, Head and Barilla, and is actively engaged with several more companies.

From the moment she cried tears of joy after beating Williams, Gauff’s Instagram following has gone from 30,000 to almost 400,000. This whole concept of being recognized is taking some getting used to. In an airport bathroom recently, Gauff emerged from a stall when someone said, “Are you Coco Gauff? Can I get a picture with you?”

“Sure, but can I wash my hands first?” Gauff replied.

‘She competes in a huge way’

At 5-feet, 10-inches, with a long-limbed physique and ropes of muscle, Gauff has an abundance of power and athleticism, and comes by both honestly.

Father Corey, who has coached Coco since she started playing at age six and now works closely with Faurel, played basketball at Georgia State. Mother Candi, who home schools Coco to accommodate her training and travel schedule, was a two-time Florida prep heptathlon champion who went on to excel at Florida State as both a heptathlete and hurdler. Eddie Odom, Coco’s grandfather, played four years of pro baseball, once rooming with Dusty Baker in A ball, and may well have helped nurture his granddaughter’s striking mental fortitude, a quality notably on display at Wimbledon, with the way Gauff kept her poise even with her idol across the net, and again when she fell way behind against Hercog.

Not only did Odom integrate hotels when he played in the Appalachian League in the 1960s, he had to endure all manner of vile racist chants.

“It wasn’t easy,” Odom said. “You have to dig deep. You have to work hard and remember what you are there for.” Odom, who along with his wife Yvonne has devoted much of his life to establishing a youth baseball league in a predominantly African-American community here, is thrilled with Coco’s success, and even more with her makeup.

“She competes in a huge way. She does what she’s supposed to do,” Odom says. “The quicker you get your mind right and understand that it’s not going to be easy and you have to hustle and be determined and work hard, the better off you will be.”

OPINION: Coco Gauff looks special, but no one should rush her

As recently as a few years ago, Gauff was a standout middle-school basketball player whom her coach referred to as “the female Dennis Rodman.” She dominated the backboards and suffocated people with her defense, and could outrun everybody. One time she entered a 5K in nearby Boynton Beach to raise funds to fight poverty and wound up winning the whole thing, averaging just over six minutes per mile. Her basketball coach was fired up to see how good she could be, but then she made it to the junior Open final at age 13.

“That was pretty much it for basketball,” Corey Gauff said, smiling.

Coco Gauff told a reporter three years ago that her goals were to win a slew of Grand Slams and be the greatest player ever. That’s all. Somehow she manages to say this without coming off as cocky or entitled, no small achievement in itself. 

“I don’t think those goals will ever change, until I retire,” she said.

Gauff has a poster of the current greatest player, Serena Williams, on her bedroom wall, along with a painting of a cross and artwork with verses of Scripture. She is a young woman of strong faith, but knows an immense amount of work remains if she is going to fulfill her goal. Between tennis and fitness, she trains multiple times on a typical day, almost always under her father’s watchful eye.

“My old basketball coach used to say, ‘There are no miracles on game day,’ ” Corey Gauff said. “You play the way you practice. The enemy is stagnation. If you stay the same then you are getting worse.”

One of Corey Gauff’s peeves is that too many parents don’t encourage their kids to dream big. He has never understood that.

“I got limited,” he said. “I should’ve been thinking about the NBA, but I got pushed down, and told to just get a college scholarship. I always said I would never do that to my kids. It’s noble to dream. It’s morally correct. There’s nothing wrong with it.

“If you want to play tennis, why not try to be the best tennis player ever? Just understand the responsibility – the hard work, the discipline, the choices you have to make – that comes with it. My son wants to be a pro baseball player and be the No. 1 draft pick. My job as a parent is to create an environment with the resources I have to give our kids the best chance to reach their goals.”

Martin Blackman is the USTA’s general manager, player development. He has followed Coco Gauff’s career for years, and isn’t inclined to impose limits, either.

“I absolutely see her at the top of the sport,” Blackman said. “She is an off-the-charts athlete, but she is also an off-the-charts competitor and problem-solver. She’s got very fundamentally sound technique (as well). It was very exciting for all of us to see her breaking through at Wimbledon.”

For all of her grown-up potential, Gauff still seems to be a smart, grounded homebody – equal parts world-class athlete and girl-next-door. Her favorite dinner is her father’s macaroni and cheese. She rides her bike – no driver’s license yet – to the local shopping plaza. She confesses with a girlish giggle that she likes to shop, and relishes coming up with new pranks to pull on her younger brothers. Her YouTube channel tells of an elaborate ruse to convince six-year-old Cameron that there were monsters under his bed.

‘I love playing in front of crowds’

Gauff beat No.2-ranked Ashleigh Barty of Australia, the French Open champion, in a sold-out exhibition in Winston-Salem, N.C., Wednesday night (6-4, 2-6, 10-8), and then it was on to New York. She said her training has gone well and she believes she has improved a lot since Wimbledon. You ask her how she would feel if the USTA schedules her for a match in Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest tennis venue in the world.

“For me it would be a great experience,” she said. “I love playing in front of crowds.”

Coco Gauff finished last year ranked No. 875, and heads into the Open at No. 141, a number that would no doubt be considerably higher without WTA-mandated age restrictions on how many tournaments she can play. Gauff isn’t worried about her rank, or, it seems, much of anything else. It is, in so many ways, her summer of Becoming, not just as a reader, but as a young athlete testing herself in the biggest competitive cauldrons in her sport.

After finishing up a spirited morning session, Gauff changed clothes, got made up and did a photo shoot for her racquet sponsor. When that was done, she settled into a chair on a covered patio just as a sudden downpour arrived, rain rattling hard against the metal roof, pelting it like pebbles from the sky. Gauff talked about how she has no expectations, results-wise, at the Open, how she simply wants to play, and act, her best. You can’t always control how you play, or the outcome, she said, but then Coco Gauff offered one prediction.

She smiled.

“When the game is on the line, I like to go big,” she said. “That’s the way I am. I just want to go for it.”

Follow Wayne Coffey on Twitter @wr_coffey

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