Tennis prodigy Coco Gauff has shed light on the mystery behind her nickname, admitting that her real name is rarely used.
The young star, who burst onto the scene at 15 with an incredible journey to the fourth round of Wimbledon, has since become a formidable presence in tennis.
She shot to fame after her remarkable victory over Venus Williams at Wimbledon in 2019, signaling the beginning of her ascent.
Gauff has not slowed down since, reaching her first Grand Slam quarter-final in 2021, advancing to a final the next year, and triumphing at the US Open just last season. As she gears up to defend her title at Flushing Meadows, Gauff divulged the origins of her famous alias – with her real name being Cori.
“My dad’s name is Corey,” she said. “And so I guess, you know, they didn’t want me to get my dad and me confused when my mom is like yelling at one of us in the house.”
She went on to describe the two conflicting tales about how ‘Coco’ came into existence: “With Coco there are two stories. My aunt says she came up with calling me Coco. But then my dad said, when he was younger, people used to call me Co. Then he was like, I’ll call my daughter Coco. I don’t know which story is actually true, but they both get pretty bad if I don’t say both of them. I just say that.”
Gauff opened up about the mix-ups her fame and nickname create, explaining: “Every time I check into hotels or people at the airport, they look at my ID, obviously the airport you book under your real name, but the person sometimes will recognize me and they’ll be like, ‘Wait, are you Coco?’, I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s just a nickname. I’m not somebody that looks like her.'”.
She elaborated on hotel check-in confusions: “In the hotel, sometimes, like, ‘Well, we don’t have your room’, I’m like, ‘It’s probably under Coco, not Cori’, and then they’ll do that.”
Gauff also breezed into the second round of the US Open with a formidable 6-2 6-0 victory over Varvara Gracheva in New York. Looking ahead, Gauff is poised to play Tatjana Maria next.
The third seed is approaching her matches at Flushing Meadows with ease, buoyed by advice from a TikTok comment: “Someone commented on my TikTok and was like, ‘You’ve won in life literally and figuratively. There’s no point in putting pressure on yourself during a victory lap.’ I’m just treating this tournament like this.”
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