Serve With Everything You've Got

Coco Gauff built her game and her identity through the music her father handed her, the artists she discovered on tour, and the songs that turned doubt into fuel.

Coco Gauff

Tracklist

No Role Modelz — J. Cole
Before I Let Go — Maze, Frankie Beverly
Girl on Fire — Alicia Keys
Icon — Jaden
Good Days — SZA
Strange Fruit — Billie Holiday
Act Up — City Girls
Swim — Chase Atlantic
Blinding Lights — The Weeknd
Barbie World (with Aqua) [From Barbie The Album] — Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Aqua
ALIEN SUPERSTAR — Beyoncé
Up Down (Do This All Day) (feat. B.o.B) — T-Pain, B.o.B
Grinding All My Life — Nipsey Hussle
Love Me — Lil Wayne, Drake, Future
Pink + White — Frank Ocean
Not Like Us — Kendrick Lamar
Sticky (feat. GloRilla, Sexyy Red & Lil Wayne) — Tyler, The Creator, GloRilla, Sexyy Red, Lil Wayne
Thought I Was Dead (feat. ScHoolboy Q & Santigold) — Tyler, The Creator, ScHoolboy Q, Santigold
Mood Swings — Little Simz
TEXAS HOLD 'EM — Beyoncé
Superstition - Single Version — Stevie Wonder
Feels Like Summer — Childish Gambino
Spice Girl — Aminé
Les — Childish Gambino
Vacay — Aminé

Transcript

Dad's Playlist (2004-2015)

The windows of the family car were always up against the Florida heat, the air conditioning humming alongside whatever Corey Gauff had queued on the stereo. The drives between their Delray Beach home and the tennis courts could take fifteen minutes or forty-five, depending on traffic along Atlantic Avenue, but the soundtrack never stopped. Cori Gauff—born March 13, 2004, in Atlanta, Georgia, before the family relocated south to chase a tennis dream—was still years away from the name the world would know her by. For now she was just a kid in the backseat, absorbing every beat her father put into the air.

Corey Gauff had grown up on the soul and R&B that saturated Black households across the South—the kind of music that turned a backyard cookout into a reunion. You couldn't pass through a family gathering in Atlanta or Delray Beach in those years without hearing Frankie Beverly & Maze's "Before I Let Go" spilling out of a Bluetooth speaker, the song's bassline as dependable as the potato salad. It was the sound of aunties two-stepping on the patio, of uncles arguing over the grill, of a little girl learning that music was communal before it was ever personal. In a Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" feature, Gauff would later name that song as a fixture of her childhood gatherings—a detail that says less about her individual taste and more about the culture that raised her.

But Corey's playlist wasn't frozen in nostalgia. He was deliberate about what filled the car. According to research into Gauff's early musical formation, her father introduced her to artists like J. Cole and Alicia Keys during those formative Delray Beach years, building a library that blended lyrical hip-hop with empowering R&B. In 2012, when Alicia Keys released "Girl on Fire," the song was inescapable—climbing to number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100, soundtracking every montage of female ambition on television. It was the kind of anthem that likely found its way into gyms, locker rooms, and, given Corey's musical sensibility, possibly the Gauff family car, where an eight-year-old was beginning to understand that she might be exceptional at something.

By 2014, that something had become undeniable. At ten years old, Coco began training at the Mouratoglou Academy in France under Patrick Mouratoglou, the coach who had guided Serena Williams to multiple Grand Slam titles. It was a staggering commitment for a child—leaving Delray Beach for the south of France, trading familiar courts and familiar sounds for a world where she was the youngest and the furthest from home. The isolation of elite junior tennis is difficult to overstate. Days were regimented: drills at dawn, fitness sessions, match play, recovery. What filled the gaps mattered. And what filled Coco's gaps, increasingly, was the music her father had planted in her.

J. Cole's "No Role Modelz" dropped in December 2014 on his album 2014 Forest Hills Drive, and it became a phenomenon—eventually certified diamond, one of the best-selling hip-hop tracks of the decade. In a 2021 Eurosport interview, Gauff confirmed that her dad introduced her to this song when she was around twelve or thirteen. The timing aligns with a girl straddling two worlds: the structured European academy life and the Black American culture she carried with her. "No Role Modelz" is, at its core, a song about navigating the world without a blueprint—about ambition in the absence of a clear path. Cole raps about wanting more than his surroundings offered, about the gap between where you are and where you intend to be. For a preteen training in the south of France, far from anyone who looked like her or shared her story, the song's themes would have offered a particular kind of mirror—whether or not Gauff consciously registered it that way. It wasn't just a banger on her dad's playlist. It was a philosophy she was already living.

What Corey gave his daughter wasn't just a collection of songs. It was a vocabulary. The confidence of Keys, the storytelling of Cole, the communal joy of Beverly and Maze—these weren't random selections. They were the building blocks of an identity that would have to withstand the pressures of a sport that had historically made Black girls feel like guests in someone else's house. Before Coco Gauff ever walked onto a professional court, before the world learned her name, the playlist was already doing its work—teaching her that she belonged to something larger than any single match, any single moment, any single doubt.

The Fifteen-Year-Old Who Beat Venus (2019-2020)

The grass at the All England Club was still impossibly green on the afternoon of July 1, 2019. Court No. 1 buzzed with the particular electricity that comes when a crowd senses it might witness something unreasonable. On one side of the net stood Venus Williams—five-time Wimbledon champion, a woman who had been winning Grand Slams before her opponent was born. On the other stood Cori "Coco" Gauff, fifteen years old, ranked 313th in the world, the youngest player to qualify for the tournament in the Open Era. Somewhere in the tunnel before the match, before the world learned her name, there were earbuds in. There was a song.

In a 2023 BBC Sport column, Gauff described the ritual that carried her through this era: Jaden Smith's "Icon" was the track she pumped before stepping onto the court. She confirmed it again in a Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" interview and at an Indian Wells press conference, naming it as her primary pre-match hype song during her breakout years. The choice was almost too perfect—a teenager's anthem built on the unshakeable declaration that you already are what everyone else is still deciding about you. "Icon" opens with a line about being the youngest flexing, and in the summer of 2019, that wasn't metaphor for Gauff. It was biography.

The song mattered because of what it had to do: drown out the noise of impossibility. Gauff was a qualifier playing a legend on the sport's most storied grass. She had no business winning, and she knew it, and she won anyway—6-4, 6-4, in barely over an hour. The match was over before most of the British tabloids had finished writing their preview copy about Venus's draw. When the final point landed, Gauff covered her face with both hands and cried. Her father, Corey, wept in the stands. The moment was so cinematic it almost didn't feel real, but it was—a fifteen-year-old from Delray Beach, Florida, had just beaten one of the greatest players in history in straight sets at Wimbledon. "Icon" had done its job in the tunnel. Now the world was doing the rest.

What followed was a summer that moved at warp speed. Gauff didn't just win one match at Wimbledon; she won three before falling to eventual champion Simona Halep in the fourth round. By August 2019, she had cracked the WTA top 100 at number 68, the youngest player to do so at the time. She was suddenly everywhere—talk shows, magazine covers, the kind of fame that arrives not gradually but all at once, like a door blown open. Her playlist during this stretch reflected the duality of the moment: the hype of competition and the need for something quieter underneath it. In a 2021 Eurosport interview, Gauff said she had SZA's "Good Days" on repeat during this period, a song built on the ache of wanting peace when the world keeps spinning too fast. For a teenager whose life had just detonated into global celebrity, the yearning in SZA's voice—the wish for a version of tomorrow that feels manageable—was less a vibe than a survival strategy.

The music Gauff gravitated toward in these years also hinted at a depth that the sports media machine rarely paused to explore. In her Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" feature, she reportedly named Billie Holiday as an artist she loves that people wouldn't expect. You couldn't move through the history of Black American music without encountering Holiday's shadow, and "Strange Fruit" remained one of the most devastating recordings ever made—a song about lynching that still landed like a blow nearly a century later. For Gauff, who would later become one of tennis's most outspoken voices on racial justice, the connection wasn't casual. It was a thread that ran deeper than any pre-match playlist.

But in the summer of 2019, the foreground was still pure adrenaline. "Icon" was the engine. Jaden Smith's track, released as part of his SYRE project, carried a booming, chest-thumping energy that was tailor-made for a teenager who needed to believe she belonged on the biggest stage in the sport. "I love Little Simz. I love [her song] 'Mood Swings.' I love that, the hypeness of the song," Gauff later told Bose, describing the quality she craved in her pre-match music—that hypeness, that surge of manufactured certainty you pump into your bloodstream before walking into a situation where doubt could destroy you. "Icon" delivered exactly that. It was the last thing she heard before the impossible became real.

By the time the 2020 season arrived—truncated and strange, warped by a pandemic that shut down the tour for months—Gauff was no longer a qualifier. She was a ranked professional, a known commodity, a teenager carrying expectations that would have buckled most adults. The earbuds stayed in. The songs kept changing. But the girl who walked onto Court No. 1 at Wimbledon with Jaden Smith in her ears had already proven the thesis of the track: you don't wait for the world to call you an icon. You walk in like one and let the scoreboard catch up.

City Girls Summer (2021-2022)

The afternoon sun hung low over Flushing Meadows on September 5, 2022, baking the blue hardcourt of Arthur Ashe Stadium and the eighteen-year-old standing at its center. Coco Gauff had just dismantled a former top-ten opponent to reach the quarterfinals of the US Open—the youngest woman to do so at the tournament since 2009. In the press room afterward, reporters asked the usual questions about strategy and nerves. Gauff gave them something else entirely. She called it a "City Girls summer."

The phrase landed like a serve down the T. By invoking JT and Yung Miami—the Miami rap duo whose music had soundtracked pool parties and pregames across the country since 2018—Gauff was doing more than naming a playlist. She was declaring an identity. She was eighteen, she was from South Florida, and she was done being treated as a prodigy in progress. Teammates and those in her circle remembered City Girls tracks on heavy rotation during that stretch of the tour, the bass-heavy production leaking from earbuds in hotel lobbies and player lounges from Paris to New York.

The road to that press conference had been paved three months earlier, on the red clay of Roland Garros. On June 4, 2022, Gauff walked onto Court Philippe-Chatrier for her first Grand Slam final. She was eighteen years old and facing Iga Swiatek, the most dominant force in women's tennis. The result—a 6-1, 6-3 loss—was lopsided on paper, but the fact of being there at all reshaped the conversation around her career. She was no longer the girl who had beaten Venus Williams at fifteen. She was a Grand Slam finalist, a player whose ceiling suddenly looked limitless. The defeat stung, but it clarified something. In the weeks that followed, as the grass-court season gave way to the American hard-court swing, Gauff's energy shifted. There was a looseness to her, a swagger that hadn't been there before.

That swagger had a soundtrack, and City Girls' "Act Up"—with its unapologetic hook and trunk-rattling 808s—circulated through the cultural moment of her summer. The track was already a cultural staple by 2022, and Gauff gravitated toward the kind of music that matched her intensity, the tracks that bridged the gap between the quiet focus of warm-ups and the controlled aggression she brought to the baseline. When she shouted out JT and Yung Miami in that post-match presser at the US Open, it wasn't a casual reference. It was a public acknowledgment of the energy she'd been channeling all summer—a City Girls summer, as she put it, where acting up meant refusing to shrink on the biggest stages in the sport. The song's defiant, self-assured spirit mirrored the version of Gauff that was emerging: less deferential, more dangerous.

Off the court, her listening habits during this period painted a fuller picture. Her 2022 Spotify Wrapped stats revealed The Weeknd as her most-listened-to artist, with nearly 20,000 minutes logged over the year—a staggering number that suggested his music was less a preference than a constant companion, filling the dead hours between matches, flights, and practice sessions. Somewhere in that same data sat the moody, genre-blurring sounds of artists like Chase Atlantic, whose hazy blend of alt-R&B and synth-pop circulated through Gen Z athlete playlists in 2022—the sound of late nights and restless energy, the kind of music that fills a hotel room in a foreign city when sleep won't come.

But the public story of Gauff's 2022 belonged to the City Girls. The French Open final had proven she could get to the biggest moments. The US Open quarterfinal run—where she became the youngest woman to reach that stage in over a decade—proved she could sustain it. And the music she chose to represent that journey told you everything about where her head was. She wasn't listening to meditation apps or classical piano. She was listening to Miami rap that told her she was that girl, and then she went out and proved it on national television.

As she noted in a later conversation with Bose about the role music plays in her competitive life, "I love Little Simz. I love [her song] 'Mood Swings.' I love that, the hypeness of the song." The thread was consistent: Gauff gravitated toward music that matched her intensity, that met her where she was emotionally and pushed her forward. In the summer of 2022, that meant City Girls on repeat, a Roland Garros final under her belt, and a quarterfinal run at the US Open that announced to the world she was just getting started.

This Barbie Wins the US Open (2023)

The roof was open at Arthur Ashe Stadium on the night of September 9, 2023, and twenty-three thousand people were on their feet. Coco Gauff had just dropped the first set to Aryna Sabalenka 2-6, looking rattled under the lights of the biggest tennis arena on Earth. The Belarusian's serve was a wrecking ball. The New York crowd, desperate for an American champion, was holding its collective breath. And then something shifted — the way it does when a nineteen-year-old decides she is done being nervous. Gauff broke Sabalenka in the second set, then again, then again in the third, storming back 6-3, 6-2 to become the youngest US Open women's champion since Serena Williams lifted the trophy in 1999. When the final forehand landed in, Gauff dropped to her knees and sobbed into her hands. The stadium shook.

The tears were still fresh when the celebrations began, and Gauff — always fluent in the language of her generation — took them straight to social media. But before the trophy TikTok, there had been a quieter moment earlier that summer that set the tone for the year. In May 2023, weeks before the French Open, Gauff and fellow American player Frances Tiafoe attended Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour stop in Paris. By all accounts, the concert was a revelation — Gauff thanked Beyoncé on social media for an unforgettable night, and teammates recalled her buzzing about the show for days afterward. The Renaissance Tour was the cultural event of the year, and Beyoncé's "ALIEN SUPERSTAR" — its chest-thumping declaration of singular greatness — was the kind of anthem that settled into Gauff's world at exactly the right time, a summer where she was learning to believe she belonged among the sport's elite.

That belief crystallized on the hard courts of Flushing Meadows. And when the trophy was finally in her hands, Gauff knew exactly how to celebrate. Within hours of her victory, she uploaded a TikTok that would become one of the most replayed sports moments of the year: dressed in pink, the gleaming US Open trophy cradled against her hip, she lip-synced to "Barbie World" by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice with the gleeful confidence of someone who had just conquered New York City. The track — released that June as part of the Barbie movie soundtrack — had already dominated the summer. Nicki's bratty, pitch-shifted hook and Ice Spice's deadpan cool made it inescapable from Brooklyn block parties to Beverly Hills premieres. But in Gauff's hands, the song became something more: a coronation anthem. The pink outfit was deliberate. The trophy placement was deliberate. The song choice was deliberate. This was not a tennis player awkwardly participating in a trend. This was a nineteen-year-old from Delray Beach, Florida, claiming her moment with the exact cultural vocabulary of her peers. The video went viral almost instantly — millions of views, thousands of stitches, a flood of pink-heart emojis from fans who saw in Gauff something tennis had rarely produced: a champion who felt like them.

"Barbie World" was the obvious public celebration, but the private one told a different story. Later that same night, Gauff posted a second TikTok — this one from an undisclosed location away from the cameras and the press. In it, her family and closest friends crowded together, lip-syncing to T-Pain's "Up Down (Do This All Day)" with the loose, joyful energy of people who had been waiting for this night for a very long time. Her father, Corey — the man who had shaped her musical ear from childhood — was in the frame. Her mother, Candi, was there. The song choice was pitch-perfect: T-Pain's anthem of relentless celebration, of doing this all day, captured the exhausted euphoria of a family that had driven to junior tournaments in rented vans and now stood in the glow of a Grand Slam title.

The two TikToks together formed a kind of diptych — one for the world, one for the family. "Barbie World" was the flex, the statement, the moment Gauff announced herself to a global audience that extended far beyond tennis. "Up Down" was the exhale, the private joy, the reminder that behind every champion is a circle of people who believed first. In the Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" interview she would give later, Gauff spoke about music's role in her competitive life, naming artists and songs with the specificity of a true fan — including Little Simz's "Mood Swings," which she described as having "the hypeness of the song." Music was never background noise for Gauff. It was preparation, celebration, and identity — all at once.

By the time the sun rose over Manhattan on September 10, the narrative had been written. Coco Gauff was not just a tennis champion. She was a cultural force — a Gen Z icon who could rally from a set down in a Grand Slam final and then turn the celebration into the most shared sports clip of the week. The pink outfit, the trophy, the Nicki hook — it all fused into a single image that transcended the sport. Arthur Ashe Stadium had seen legends crowned before, but it had never seen anything quite like this.

Team Kendrick and the Walkout That Wasn't (2023-2024)

The desert air in Indian Wells shimmered in early March 2023, and Coco Gauff was sitting behind a press conference microphone, fielding the kind of question she actually enjoyed: not about her forehand, not about rankings, but about music. A reporter had asked what she'd been listening to during the tournament, and the answer came easy. She'd been bumping Lil Wayne and Drake — specifically "Love Me" — but she quickly shut down any notion of it blasting through stadium speakers. Too inappropriate for a walkout song, she said with a grin. The exchange opened a door to a bigger thought, one she'd clearly been turning over for a while. As reported by Tennis Up To Date, Gauff told the assembled press: "I wish players could choose their walkout song." It was a small rebellion dressed in charm — the reigning teen star of American tennis imagining a world where the WTA let its athletes curate their own entrances the way the NBA and NFL did.

The song she named as her ideal walkout wasn't a chart-topping banger or a viral TikTok hit. It was "Grinding All My Life" by Nipsey Hussle — a track released in 2018, a year before the Eritrean-American rapper was murdered outside his Marathon Clothing store in Los Angeles. The choice said everything about where Gauff's head was at nineteen. She wasn't picking a song to flex or to flirt with the crowd. She was picking a mantra. Nipsey's hook — "Grinding all my life / and I ain't done yet" — is less a lyric than a declaration of endurance, a refusal to rest on any single achievement. For a player who had already won a Grand Slam and was being asked daily whether she could win another, the song functioned as a personal creed. It was the sound of someone who understood that the work doesn't stop after the trophy.

Nipsey Hussle occupied a particular space in hip-hop's pantheon by then — not just a rapper but a symbol of community investment, self-determination, and relentless hustle. His Marathon Continues ethos had been adopted across sports, from LeBron James to Nipsey's beloved hometown Rams. For Gauff to name "Grinding All My Life" as her walkout wasn't just about the beat; it was about aligning herself with a philosophy. The grind was the point. Not the destination, not the ranking, not the sponsorship deals — the daily, unglamorous process of getting better. At Indian Wells, she was still months away from her biggest title. The song was a promise she was making to herself in public.

The months that followed would test that promise. By mid-2024, Gauff had established herself as one of the most consistent players on tour, but consistency doesn't inoculate you from heartbreak. On September 1, 2024, she walked onto Arthur Ashe Stadium as the defending US Open champion and walked off after a fourth-round loss to Emma Navarro. The defeat stung — not just because of the stage, but because of the expectation she'd placed on herself. It was a rare stumble in what had otherwise been a dominant year, and it forced a reckoning with the gap between who she was and who she wanted to become.

Off the court, Gauff found her voice on matters beyond tennis. When the Kendrick Lamar–Drake beef erupted across hip-hop in the spring and summer of 2024, observers noted that the cultural war between the two rappers had become a referendum on authenticity versus calculation — the kind of moment that invited public figures to take sides. In a sport that often rewards diplomatic silence, Gauff's musical tastes and public statements suggested someone unafraid to engage with hip-hop's deeper currents and complexities.

As 2024 wound down, she offered another window into her inner world. In December, she shared her Apple Music Replay stats publicly, revealing that Frank Ocean was her most-played artist of the year. Songs like "Pink + White" — dreamy, introspective, suspended between melancholy and wonder — had soundtracked a season of growth and setback. When some fans questioned why she used Apple Music instead of Spotify, she fired back with the kind of unbothered confidence that was becoming her signature. In a Bose partnership interview, she also revealed a broader palette, discussing artists and songs that resonated with her across genres and moods. The range was the point — from Nipsey's grind to Frank's reverie to the hypeness of tracks that fueled her competitive fire, her playlist was a map of a young woman refusing to be one thing.

She still couldn't pick her own walkout song. But by now, the WTA's generic entrance music barely mattered. Everyone who paid attention already knew what was playing in her headphones.

Tyler Said My Name (2024-2025)

October 2024. Coco Gauff was somewhere between tournaments when her phone lit up. Tyler, The Creator had just dropped CHROMAKOPIA, and buried in the album's tracklist was a song called "Thought I Was Dead" — and buried in that song was a line about her. "B*tch, you ain't Coco Gauff, you can't serve me." She'd had no warning. As she later told Complex, the whole thing started innocuously enough: "It was crazy because he DM'd me congratulations over China Open. We never talked or anything before. He liked my photo or something when I won US Open. Then my boyfriend is like, 'Watch, he's going to drop you in a song.' I was like, 'Yeah, that would be insane. That's never going to happen.' Three weeks later it happened. I was like, 'Can he see into the future or what?'"

The name-drop was more than a novelty. In hip-hop's ecosystem, being referenced by Tyler, The Creator — a Grammy-winning artist who curates every syllable of his albums with obsessive intention — is a statement about cultural relevance. He wasn't comparing someone to a tennis player. He was using Gauff's name as a synonym for untouchable skill, the kind of serve you can't return. For a twenty-year-old athlete who, by her own account, had built her pre-match rituals around carefully selected music, hearing her name come out of her earbuds on a Tyler track was a collision of two worlds she'd always kept parallel. Now they'd merged.

By her own account in a Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" interview, "Thought I Was Dead" became her pre-match hype track — not because it was the hardest song on the album, but because hearing Tyler say her name before she walked onto court rewired something in her head. It was external validation folded into her most private ritual. She'd slip on her Bose earbuds, let the beat build, and by the time her name echoed through the stadium speakers, she'd already heard it once — in Tyler's voice, wrapped in bass.

But the song that would matter most from CHROMAKOPIA wasn't the one with her name in it. It was "St. Chroma," the album's opening statement, a track built on a single unshakeable declaration: "If I ever told you I had a doubt inside me, I must be lying." Gauff carried that line with her through the clay-court season of 2025 like a mantra stitched into her racket bag. She carried it through early-round wobbles and the suffocating pressure of being the defending US Open champion chasing a title on a surface that had never been kind to her. She carried it all the way to Roland Garros.

On June 7, 2025, Gauff stood on Philippe Chatrier Court after defeating Aryna Sabalenka 6-7(5), 6-2, 6-4 to claim her first French Open title — her second Grand Slam crown. The match had nearly slipped away in that first-set tiebreak, but something held. In her victory speech, broadcast live to millions, she told the Paris crowd exactly what it was. "I didn't think honestly that I could do it," she said, her voice catching. "But I'm gonna quote Tyler, The Creator right here. He said, 'If I ever told you I had a doubt inside me, I must be lying.' I'd like to leave that with you guys. I think I was lying to myself and I definitely could do it. Shout out to Tyler." The quote, reported by both Olympics.com and Complex, became the defining moment of the 2025 French Open — not a forehand winner, not a break point saved, but a twenty-one-year-old champion crediting a rapper's lyric for helping her believe she belonged on clay.

The connection between Gauff and the music she consumed during this stretch wasn't limited to Tyler. In the same Bose interview where she revealed her pre-match ritual, she spoke about another artist who fueled her energy: "I love Little Simz. I love 'Mood Swings.' I love that, the hypeness of the song." Little Simz's relentless, percussive flow served a different purpose than Tyler's philosophical declarations — it was adrenaline, pure and simple, the kind of track that makes your heartbeat sync to the kick drum.

But it was "St. Chroma" that transcended the playlist. When Gauff quoted Tyler on the biggest stage of her career, she wasn't just sharing a favorite lyric. She was completing a circuit that began with a DM after the China Open, ran through a boyfriend's half-joking prophecy, detoured through a name-drop on wax, and ended with a champion standing under Parisian skies, telling the world that the voice in her earbuds had become the voice in her head. Tyler said her name first. On June 7, she said his back.

Cowboy Carter Came to Atlanta (2025)

By mid-July 2025, Coco Gauff had already done the impossible twice in a single summer. The French Open trophy was barely a month old, and Wimbledon's grass had only just released her from its spell. Now she was home—truly home—in Atlanta, the city where she was born, where her parents met, where the air in July sits thick and sweet as peach syrup. On the evening of July 18, she walked into Mercedes-Benz Stadium not as the world's most dominant young tennis player but as something rarer: a twenty-one-year-old on a date night, dressed as a bejeweled cowgirl, boyfriend Jalen Sera beside her, ready to lose herself in someone else's show.

The summer of 2025 belonged to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter Tour in the same way certain summers belong to certain forces of nature. The album had already reshaped conversations about genre, ownership, and Black artistry in country music, and the stadium tour was its coronation lap. Atlanta was a homecoming stop for Beyoncé too—her mother Tina Knowles had deep roots in the region, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium crackled with a particular Southern electricity that night. You couldn't move through Atlanta that week without hearing somebody's car stereo thumping the album's lead single, and the stadium's atmosphere hummed with the lazy, golden energy of summer—a sonic equivalent of the Georgia heat outside. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" snuck through the PA during the pre-show warmup, a nod to the classic soul lineage that Beyoncé's country reinvention was always in conversation with.

Gauff and Sera were seated in the VIP section, close enough to feel the bass in their ribs. By all accounts from social media posts and fan footage, the couple was spotted singing along, dancing, fully absorbed. But the night's defining moment came in two acts. First, Tina Knowles appeared in the VIP area. Gauff met her—an encounter she would later document on social media with the barely-contained giddiness of someone who understood exactly whose mother she was shaking hands with. Then came the moment that collapsed the distance between fan and icon entirely: mid-performance, Beyoncé looked toward the VIP section and gave Gauff a personal wave of acknowledgment.

The anchor of the entire Cowboy Carter Tour was "TEXAS HOLD 'EM," the record that had announced Beyoncé's country pivot with a line-dance groove and a banjo lick that lodged itself permanently in the American subconscious. When it hit that night in Atlanta, Mercedes-Benz Stadium became a single organism—70,000 people two-stepping in unison. For Gauff, who had maintained what friends described as a dedicated "Beyoncé group chat" and who had attended the Renaissance World Tour in Paris back in 2023, this was the culmination of years of fandom meeting a moment of personal recognition. She had gone from screaming along in the nosebleeds to being seen—literally seen—by the woman on stage. "Cannot believe my life," she posted afterward, a five-word sentence that carried the weight of everything: the French Open speech weeks earlier where she'd quoted Tyler, The Creator, the Wimbledon run, and now this, Beyoncé's eyes finding hers in a stadium full of thousands.

What made the moment resonate beyond celebrity sighting was its context. Gauff had spent the first half of 2025 proving she could win on any surface, in any weather, against any opponent. In her Bose "Soundtrack to My Life" interview around this same period, she revealed the eclecticism that powered her, citing artists like Little Simz and the raw energy their music provided. Her taste had always been omnivorous—Tyler, The Creator for the competitive fire, Frank Ocean for the quiet moments, emerging artists for the raw energy. But Beyoncé occupied a different category. Beyoncé was aspiration made flesh, the blueprint for what it looked like when a Black woman commanded every room she entered and redefined every genre she touched.

Gauff left Mercedes-Benz Stadium that night still in her cowgirl outfit, still buzzing. The French Open trophy was in a case somewhere. Wimbledon was behind her. The second half of the season loomed. But for one Atlanta evening, she was just Coco from the A, a girl whose hero had waved at her, and the whole stadium had felt like it was spinning on an axis made of banjo strings and bass drops. She posted the photos. She texted the group chat. And then, as she always did, she started thinking about the next match.

Backstage in Melbourne (2026)

The January heat in Melbourne is a different animal. It rises off the pavement in waves, bends the air above the tramlines, and drives everyone indoors by midafternoon. By evening, though, the city exhales. On a night in late January 2026, the world's No. 3-ranked women's tennis player slipped out of the tournament bubble and into the low-lit backstage corridor of Forum Melbourne, a heritage venue on Flinders Street whose arched ceilings have absorbed decades of rock, punk, and hip-hop. Coco Gauff was still deep in her Australian Open campaign—matches ahead of her, a body she needed to protect—but she had somewhere to be.

The connection started earlier that week at a New Balance pop-up event across town. Aminé, the Portland-raised rapper whose playful cadences and left-field references had earned him a devoted following, was in Melbourne for a show on his tour. New Balance, a brand both he and Gauff had ties to, brought them into the same room. By all accounts, the meeting was easy and immediate—two young Black creatives operating at high levels in wildly different arenas, finding common ground over sneakers and music. The concert invitation followed naturally. On the night of the show, Gauff arrived at Forum Melbourne with German tennis player Eva Lys in tow, the two of them navigating VIP as Aminé's set rattled the old theater's bones.

The setlist that night leaned heavily on Aminé's catalog of infectious, genre-blurring cuts. "Vacay," his breezy anthem about escaping the noise, filled the room with the kind of energy that makes you forget you have a third-round match in forty-eight hours. But it was "Spice Girl" that owned the evening—Aminé's breakout track, the one that put his name on the map back in 2017 with its interpolation of the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" and its irresistible hook about a woman who commands every room she enters. Gauff was spotted backstage with Aminé during and after the performance, the kind of candid, unscripted moment that her generation of athletes treats as essential rather than extracurricular. She wasn't hiding from the tournament. She was feeding something the tournament couldn't give her.

There is a reason "Spice Girl" resonated beyond its novelty. Aminé wrote it as a celebration of confidence that doesn't need permission—a woman so magnetic that the narrator can barely keep up. For Gauff, who by twenty-one had already won a US Open, quoted Tyler, The Creator in a French Open victory speech, and sat in Beyoncé's VIP section in Atlanta, the song's energy mirrored the persona she had been building in public for years: joyful, unguarded, unapologetically herself. Backstage at Forum Melbourne, surrounded by tour crew and a fellow competitor who understood the grind, she wasn't performing that persona. She was living it. The moment captured something about where Gauff had arrived—not just as a tennis player but as a cultural figure who moved fluidly between worlds, who understood that music wasn't a distraction from competition but a fuel source for it.

This Australian Open campaign carried weight beyond the draw sheet. Gauff entered the tournament as world No. 3, a ranking that reflected sustained excellence rather than a single hot streak. Off the court, she announced a $150,000 donation to support HBCU student-athletes, a cause that connected her success back to the broader ecosystem of Black excellence in American sports. The gesture was quiet, deliberate, and entirely consistent with the young woman who, in a Bose interview, had revealed her eclectic inner world: "I love Little Simz. I love [her song] 'Mood Swings.' I love that, the hypeness of the song." Her taste was never monolithic. It stretched from Little Simz's London grime to Aminé's Portland bounce to the kind of Childish Gambino deep cuts that teammates and friends remembered her gravitating toward, songs that made her feel, as she once told Bose, like "the baddest girl" in whatever room she occupied.

The Forum Melbourne night didn't produce a trophy or a headline-grabbing victory speech. It produced something rarer: a snapshot of an athlete in full bloom, comfortable enough in her own skin to chase music across a foreign city in the middle of a Grand Slam. Gauff had spent years building a soundtrack that tracked her evolution—from her father's playlists in Delray Beach to the stages and arenas she now walked into as a peer, not a fan. In Melbourne, backstage with Aminé and Eva Lys, the bass still humming through the old theater walls, she wasn't chasing anything at all. She was already there.