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MELBOURNE, Australia. — Coco Gauff acknowledges she tends to be in a bit of a hurry as she moves through life.
The 18-year-old Floridian doesn’t stick around in a city after a tennis tournament ends: “Even if it’s a nice place,” she said with a chuckle, “I like to leave.” When dinner’s finished, she’s not one to linger in a restaurant: “I don’t like to sit and talk after I’m done eating,” she said, eliciting more of her own laughter. “I like to go.”
Yes, generally, Gauff is ready to move on. Her philosophy, in a nutshell: Why wait?
“I’m pretty impatient, to be honest. I wouldn’t say I’m impatient with people and things, but when it comes to getting things done, I’d rather do it sooner than later,” Gauff said during an interview with The Associated Press. “I guess that relates to my career; I never realized it until this conversation. But you do want success to happen now.”
When the Australian Open begins the 2023 Grand Slam season on Monday morning, Gauff will be scheduled to start the action in Rod Laver Arena against Katerina Siniakova. Win that, and Gauff next could face Emma Raducanu, who won the 2021 US Open as a teenager. Keep going all the way to the semifinals, and the No. 7-seeded Gauff might just end up facing No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who won the 2020 French Open as a teenager and has since tacked on two more major titles. That would be a rematch of their French Open final last June, which Swiatek won.
Gauff is not the only youthful player making strides at the highest levels of her sport.
She is, however, someone who grew up under — and needed to grow accustomed to — an intense spotlight, having made her Grand Slam debut in 2019 by becoming the youngest qualifier in Wimbledon history, then drawing even more attention by beating Venus Williams en route to making it to the fourth round at the All England Club. — AP
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