DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — It’s a breezy Tuesday evening in South Florida and Coco Gauff is hanging out in the Delray Beach park where she probably spent more waking hours of her childhood than anywhere except her family home.
Her dad, Corey, is here in Pompey Park. So is her grandfather, Eddie ‘Red’ Odom. The baseball field on the other side of the trees is named for him. An aunt is here. Seemingly every other person says they are a cousin.
A bunch of little kids who look like Gauff once did are whacking tennis balls on a couple of free public courts tucked into the corner of the park. Gauff hits with them for a bit. Her youngest brother, Cameron, is messing around on a mini-basketball hoop and rolling around on the grass.
Her grandmother, Yvonne, who goes by ‘G-Mom,’ is holding court. She’s lived here just about all her life. She taught in local schools for 45 years, volunteered in too many ways to name and helped her husband run the baseball league for Black kids in this part of town that he founded in 1971. The other league in town hadn’t allowed Black kids to play. They’ll both be back here for the Opening Day ceremonies, as they are every year.
Pretty soon the family is going to be sitting around some tables on the grass eating barbecue chicken and macaroni and cheese. Gauff and her family still live close by and spend plenty of time here. It’s not all that different from so many other nights that have happened in this family going back decades, to the time when Gauff’s mother and father were growing up here and Odom was coaching him on a baseball team.
But it is different. There are television cameras and a stage for what is ostensibly a weeknight town picnic. It’s set up to promote another of Gauff’s signature tennis shoes with New Balance. This one is the Coco Delray, which retails for $110 (£85) compared with the CG2 shoe ($159.99) that she wears when she competes. Josh Wilder, a product manager at New Balance, said the company realized that a name tied to Gauff’s formative environment was staring it in the face when it started batting around different ideas for a more accessible shoe nearly two years ago.
It’s all happening just days before Gauff plays her first match down the road at this season’s Miami Open, at the time of year that juxtaposes Gauff’s dual existences in the most clear and fascinating way. She can still be the girl who passes afternoons and evenings in Pompey Park because here she’s as much “Ms. Odom’s granddaughter” as she is “Coco.” But she’s also the world’s highest-paid female athlete, according to Forbes, a couple of weeks removed from walking the red carpet at the Oscars with a Rolex watch on her wrist.
That can be a tricky balancing act. These people and this place — whose latitude and longitude coordinates are etched into her shoes — can help with recentering. To come home, to get the familiar feels and the perspective that has always come with growing-up-Gauff in this park where a small sign on the two tennis courts tells visitors that they are the courts that made her; that the grass and trees and fields were always at the center of her life.
“This is who I am,” she said in an interview in the park. “My first commercial with New Balance was filmed here, two people with a camera, very low budget. They knew it was a part of me and instead of hiding it or trying to make up whoever I am, why not embrace it?”
It’s a good time to be back here. Gauff is making some significant renovations to her serve and forehand, the two most important strokes in the sport. It’s all aimed at playing a more consistent and aggressive brand of tennis and taking away the sequences of forehand errors and double faults that have marred her losses since around Wimbledon last year.
It’s a work in progress. Before her opening match at the Miami Open, against 2020 Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin, she had gone 2-4 since late January. She had double-faulted 34 times in three matches at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells. Against Kenin, as testing a first opponent as they come, she won 6-0, 6-0. When it works, it’s easy. When it doesn’t, it’s not.
“Short-term pain for long-term gain,” her father Corey said Tuesday evening, as he stood next to the courts where he molded his daughter into a junior champion. For him, Tiger Woods, who took apart and rebuilt his swing after he won his first Masters title when he was 21, serves an object lesson.
“He won a few more titles after that, didn’t he?” Corey said.
At 14, Gauff was far and away the best tennis player her age in the country, months away from beating Venus Williams on Centre Court at Wimbledon and making a run to the fourth round.
She’d spend much of the morning and the afternoon training with her dad on those courts in the corner of the park, dash home for a quick shower, then hustle back to work as the public address announcer for the Little League baseball games. She would tell mini stories about each kid as she announced them coming up to bat and would play their personalized walk-up music.
“I just saw people around me doing that volunteering. If you see everybody wearing red shoes, maybe you might want to wear red shoes,” she said in a quiet moment during the evening.
A collage dedicated to Coco Gauff at Pompey Park. (Ketchum Studios)
She’d organize the teams and sort the uniforms and the shirts. “My grandmother, my mom, my dad all helped out, so it’s just one of those things, like I want to help, too.” The locals could still find her practicing on those courts after that Wimbledon run.
There are glimpses of this spirit in the commercial for her new shoe that grandmother Yvonne Odom narrates, but only glimpses. There’s a lot more to the story.
Grandfather Eddie Odom was a talented baseball player who couldn’t play in many of the youth leagues in the area because of the color of his skin. He managed through and made it to college and then the minor leagues. When his run in baseball ended, he returned to Florida to work for the Parks Department and to do what he really wanted to do: create the Delray Beach American Little League.
That’s a big reason the town named the baseball field for him — a baseball field in a park named for an educator and civil rights activist, C. Spencer Pompey. Yvonne credits him with steering her husband into sports when he was a child and saving him from heading down a different path.
Gauff’s dad played in that league. Eddie, or Red, coached him, and even had to set him and his buddies straight one night when they wouldn’t settle down in the motel during a road trip.
“I wasn’t me, it was my friends,” said Corey Gauff, who was too young at the time to have any idea that this guy would turn out to be his father-in-law. Odom was just another coach in a community full of them.
The story of Yvonne, who would later become Eddie’s wife and ‘G-Mom’ to Coco, is its own tale. In 1961, local school officials approached her family and told them that she had been selected to move to a new high school. She was a student at the Black school in Delray Beach, George Washington Carver. She would become the first Black student at Seacrest High School, now known as Atlantic Community.
That was no small thing. The year before, U.S. Marshals had accompanied a third-grader named Ruby Bridges when she went to integrate her school in New Orleans. Two years later, white supremacists blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four young girls.
In an interview Tuesday, Yvonne Odom said she was told that administrators selected her because she was a standout student. They said they needed the first student to cross the color line to be “successful.”
“I didn’t think about it, I just went,” Odom said. “You learn a lot about the nature of people when you go through an experience like that, the only Black girl surrounded by hundreds of White kids.”
Gauff doesn’t remember when she first started hearing the stories about her grandparents and her family’s impact on the local community. It was always there, something she lived. It explained why she could go up to just about any adult in town, tell them she was Yvonne Odom’s granddaughter, and be taken care of. Rides, snacks, whatever she needed — they would be presented right away.
Growing up, those stories didn’t seem like that big a deal to Gauff because it was all she knew. As she grew older, she began to understand the weight of it. She remembers being around 14 when she asked her grandmother about what she had gone through, and began to realize that Yvonne had been downplaying its significance. Eventually, Gauff asked to hear the story, slowly and quietly.
She got it, Gauff said, but with her grandmother’s ever-present, glass-half-full flavoring mixed in.
“She truly maybe only looks at the positives from it, or just kind of blocks the negatives out. Listening to her tell that story in full detail, it didn’t feel heavy. She just made it: ‘Look at the world we live in today. We all get to go to school together, we all get to do everything together.’
“To her, it’s a small, little price to pay for this world, but for us … I don’t think I could have done something like that. But that’s what makes her special.”
At 16, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin, she stood in front of the Delray Beach City Hall at a Black Lives Matter rally and delivered a speech that went viral. Her grandmother was standing just a few feet away.
“I just spoke with my grandma,” she said that day, “and it’s sad that I’m here protesting the same thing that she did 50-plus years ago.”
Even though the Williams sisters were in full flight, Gauff said she showed up at plenty of junior tournaments where she was the only Black kid in the draw. She remembers traveling in central and eastern Europe, where people approached her to take her picture, because, it seemed to Gauff, they had never come face-to-face with a Black person.
The public courts at Pompey Park were a pivotal for Coco Gauff’s tennis development. (Ketchum Studios)
The way things are going in American tennis, Savvy and Gigi Gedeus and Cheyenne Johnson probably won’t have too many experiences like that. They are the next crop of Delray Beach girls already dedicating most of their waking hours to the sport, and they came out to see Gauff at Pompey Park on Tuesday. Savvy, eight, and Gigi, seven, are already being home-schooled to maximize time on the court.
“I recognize you from the commercial,” Gauff told Savvy as she grabbed her around the waist on the Pompey Park court that afternoon.
Their buddy Johnson, nine, will start home school next year for the same reason. All of them can rip a backhand in the style of their local hero. Johnson has some serious sports pedigree in her blood. Her father, Chad Johnson, better known as Ochocinco, was one of the top wide receivers in the NFL during the aughts.
Gauff desperately wants to win another Grand Slam and plenty of other titles; winning her quasi-hometown WTA 1,000 title in Miami would be sweeter than most. But what she really wants is one day to hear some athlete — could be a tennis player, could be someone in some other sport — say they went after their dream because she inspired them, because her success had made it all feel a little more accessible.
“It started with Althea Gibson most prominently and I guess most famously Serena and Venus Williams and now here I am,” Gauff said.
“It was super inspiring just today to see a lot of young girls, young Black girls, playing and picking up the racket.”
(Top photo of Coco Gauff and Yvonne Odom: Ketchum Studios)
