Coco Gauff has been an MVP of the US Open interview room

NEW YORK—“Perspective,” Coco Gauff said when she was asked, after her first-round match at the US Open, why she looked and felt so much better on court than she had just a week earlier in Cincinnati.

Gauff said that the weeks leading into the Open, when she started to hear questions about whether she was up to the task of defending her title, were “tough.” She spent much of July and August losing to lower-ranked players, not knowing where her shots were going from one swing to the next, and leaving the Olympic Games medal-free.

Which led her to think that the best antidote to her slump, and the pressure of coming back to New York, was to shift her attention from short-term to long term, and from what’s outside her to what’s inside her.

“I was, like, ‘I have to do this and do that, but I don’t have to prove anything to anyone except myself,” Gauff said. “I have many more years coming back here, and I’m not going to win every year…Just having the belief that I can but not the expectation that I should.”

⬇️ PREVIEW: Coco Gauff vs. Emma Navarro in Sunday's fourth round ⬇️

Gauff is one of the great perspective-givers in tennis right now. Along with Daniil Medvedev on the men’s side, she’s an MVP of the interview room. Press conferences are often seen as chores by players and reporters alike, and they can be mind-numbingly repetitious. But that’s never the case with a thoughtful, gregarious, curious player like Gauff, someone who will try to give the fullest answer she can to virtually any question, and who enjoys letting her brain pinball from one thought and topic to the next, from the state of the presidential race to the state of her service toss to which fashion game she likes to play on Roblox.

Here are a few of the perspectives we’ve heard from Coco so far at the Open.

She wore Olympic jewelry on court as a “flex"

“Usually I try to wear a necklace during the whole tournament,” Gauff said after her first-round match. “Last year I think I wore a locket-type necklace. I was like, ‘I just came off the Olympics and was a flag bearer. So I was like I might as well flex that, so I wore the Olympic [necklace].”

She looks at Twitter for a very specific reason

“I’m on social media all the time…TikTok I’m on most of the time. Instagram, I’ll be on and give myself, like, 24 hours…Usually Twitter I’m not on as much. I only search one time after a match to see what people thought of my outfit,” Gauff said, laughing.

She has no time for trolls…

“I personally just block,” she says of how she deals with online harassers and haters. “I’m someone, I will literally spend 30 minutes blocking all the people. I really don’t care.”

“‘They are, like, ‘You say anything, and she blocks.’ Yes, I do,” Gauff adds with a laugh. “I don’t want to see it, so bye.”

…but she is open to suggestions from friendlier followers

Talking about the stresses of her US Open title defense, Gauff said, “A couple days ago somebody commented on my TikTok and the comment said…“You’ve won literally and figuratively. Why stress yourself out over a victory lap?”

“I was, like, that’s actually a good perspective. No one can take that from me so why stress myself over something that I already have.”

Novak is a one-in-a-generation type of player, and so is Carlos, and they’re playing each other on two different spectrums. I don’t know. I can talk about this all day. Coco Gauff

She takes an history-literate view of Kamala Harris presidential nomination

“I think it is really incredible,” Gauff said of Harris’ sudden rise. “No matter who you're voting for, who you stand for, it is really incredible to see how far this country has come and people of color, Black people in general.”

“Honestly, it takes the works of many others to pave the way. I’m excited that I’m able to see this in my lifetime, because I know many others didn’t get that chance to.”

There are a couple of stories about how her real first name, Cori, turned into Coco. But she has her own theory

“My Dad’s name is Corey, and so I guess, you know, they didn’t want to get my Dad and me confused when my Mom is, like, yelling at one of us in the house,” a smiling Gauff said.

We’ve also learned that Gauff reads the Bible every day. That she keeps two journals—“it just kind of holds you accountable for your feelings and your thoughts and the things that you want to do.” That she thinks “Ben Shelton is a pretty solid athlete name.” That she likes being called by her first name, because she thinks her last name is “weird” and “sounds like a sport.” She also seems to be a budding tennis-history nerd:

“It’s peak tennis,” Gauff says of the rivalry between Djokovic and Alcaraz. “I don’t know. It’s crazy. Novak is a one-in-a-generation type of player, and so is Carlos, and they’re playing each other on two different spectrums. I don’t know. I can talk about this all day. It’s really cool.”

We get all of this from a teenager who is ostensibly just answering questions about a tennis match. In the process, she reveals the breadth of the personality and the interests that are possible for a 19-year-old. Much of the time, Gauff sounds as if she’s having a conversation with herself. She brings up her issues and anxieties and negative thoughts, and then tells us, or tests out, the solutions she’s found for them.

Gauff may or may not defend her Open title, and she may or may not go on to be No. 1 and win many more Slams. Even if she doesn’t, she’s already on her to being a GOAT of the presser. She’s the rare athlete who is easy to root for, and even easier to listen to and learn from.