Can Coco Gauff the Tennis Prodigy Become a Tennis Legend?

She followed two hours of practice with a 90-minute fitness workout, at which point she finally toweled off to head home for lunch. As Gauff packed up, Antista mentioned to her that she once enjoyed sitting near her father at a match. Oh, Gauff said, a hint of humor buried in her flat affect, was he telling you everything I was doing wrong? She deepened her voice a little: “ ‘Why is she hitting her forehand like that?’”

Her mother is not a hands-on coach, but she was just as invested during matches, Gauff told Antista. “She prays,” Gauff said. “She bows her head when I serve.” (Or at least she assumed that’s what her mother was doing, she later clarified; maybe she just got too nervous to watch.) The two spoke about a team habit that seemed grounded in superstition — everyone in the family box had to sit in the same place they sat when Coco won the previous match. It was her father’s preference, Gauff explained, but it was her mother who made the request because, when her father gets tense, “he doesn’t know how to talk to people,” she said. Corey Gauff’s demeanor in the box was a work in progress after all these years; his wife and daughter were both trying to break him of impulses like pounding a fist into his own thigh when a point didn’t go her way. “She had to tell him,” Candi Gauff said of her daughter, “ ‘When you do like that, I’m trying to see if you’re upset or not, and then I’m not thinking about my game.’”

Although Corey Gauff is forever trying to improve his tone of voice — he jokes that his natural instructional style is “command and control” — his coaching, from all accounts, has been consistently well-balanced. On the tour, he is known as Pops, a burly, middle-aged dad taking it upon himself to tell one player he needs a haircut or let another one know he needs to grow up and act like a man on the court. After Coco defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon, Serena Williams, at a news conference, wished the Gauffs well. “I just love Coco and her family,” she said. “They’re just really sweet. Her dad is just a good guy.” Naomi Osaka expressed similar sentiments. “You guys raised an amazing player,” she said, looking up at the stands at the Gauffs, during her on-court interview, shortly after she defeated Gauff in the U.S. Open in 2019. Corey and his daughter pray together before every match — not for a win but for the continued good health of both players. (It would be “stupid to waste a prayer on results,” Coco told me, laughing a little at the thought of it.) The family, which signed with the same management firm that represents Roger Federer, has been cautious about overloading Gauff with endorsements, leaving her more free to focus on her game and her life outside it. Even her deal with New Balance is relatively low stress, without penalties for skipping tournaments.

A camera once captured Corey Gauff talking to his daughter during a courtside coaching moment, when she was 15, and just a few points away from winning her first W.T.A. pro tournament in singles, in Linz, Austria. Although she was ahead, Coco was visibly agitated, overwhelmed by the stress of the moment. Her father leaned toward her, his eyes lit up, a smile just the right size on his face, offering her a confident patter of reassurance. “You’re not going to sprint to the finish line, we’re going to walk to the finish line,” he said, his voice gentle. “Take your mind to another place right now, OK? Remember we talked about that?” (Coco responded to this minute-long motivational speech in classic teenage mode: “What side do I need to hit to?” she asked as she stood up. “Just tell me something!”)

Any time a sports parent is so invested in his teenage child’s professional success, tensions around control will inevitably emerge. In the first round of the French Open this year, Gauff seemed to be working something out on court after the chair umpire told her to stop her father from making movements with his hands that could be mistaken for coaching signals, which were not allowed. “We don’t have any signals, so I don’t know what you want me to tell him,” she said, firm but unfailingly polite.