Coco Gauffs Tennis Background, from her grandmother to Pompey Park, travels with her

Delray Beach, FLA. It is an airy Tuesday evening in Zuid -Florida and Coco Gauff hangs around in the Delray Beach Park, where she probably spent more awake hours of her childhood than anywhere, apart from her parental home.

Her father, Corey, is here in Pompeyy Park. This is how her grandfather, Eddie Red Odom. The baseball court on the other side of the trees is named after him. An aunt is here. Apparently every other person says they are a cousin.

A couple of small children who look like Gauff once did, tennis balls have stopped on a few free public courts in the corner of the park. Gauff is a bit with them. Her youngest brother, Cameron, rumbles around on a mini-basketball hoop and rolls around on the grass.

Her grandmother, Yvonne, who goes through G-Mom, holds the court. She lived here almost her entire life. She taught for 45 years at local schools, offered herself in too many ways to name her husband and helped her husband run the baseball competition for black children in this part of the city he founded in 1971. The other competition in the city had not allowed black children to play. They will both be back here for the opening day ceremonies, as they are every year.

Soon the family will sit on the grass around a few tables and eat with barbecue chicken and macaroni and cheese. Gauff and her family still live close and spend enough time here. It is not everything else than so many other nights that have happened in this family that goes back for decades, until the time that Gauff's mother and father grew up here and Oomdom coached him in a baseball team.

But it's different. There are television cameras and a stage for what apparently is a weekday city picnic. It is set up to promote a different characteristic tennis shoes from Gauffs with a new balance. This is the Coco Delray, which sells for $ 110 (85) compared to the CG2 shoe ($ 159.99) that she wears when it competes. Josh Wilder, a product manager at New Balance, said that the company realized that a name that was bound to Gauffs -formative environment stared in the face when it started to hit a more accessible shoe with a more accessible shoe almost two years ago.

It all happens just a few days before Gauff plays her first game on the road during these seasons Miami open, in the time of the year that in the clearest and fascinating way a gauffs -existing existence side by side. She can still be the girl who passes afternoons and evenings in Pompey Park, because there is so much Mrs. Oomes granddaughter when she is Coco. But she is also the world's best-paid female athlete, according to Forbes, a few weeks away from walking the red carpet at the Oscars with a Rolex watch on her wrist.

That can be a difficult balance. These people and this place whose latitude and longitude coordinates have been etched in her shoes can help with the recent. To get home, to get the familiar feeling and the perspective that has always come with growing up Gauff in this park where a small plate on the two tennis courts tells visitors that they are the courts who made her; That the grass and trees and fields were always in the middle 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, a very low budget. They knew it was part of me and instead of hiding or trying to come up with who I am, why don't embrace?

It's a good time to be back here. Gauff makes a number of important renovations to her Serve and Forehand, the two most important strokes in sport. It is all aimed at playing a more consistent and aggressive brand of tennis and removing the series of Forehand errors and double errors that have affected her losses around Wimbledon since last year.

It is a work in progress. Before her opening match on the Miami Open, by 2020 Australian Open Champion Sofia Kenin, she had gone 2-4 since the end of January. She had 34 times double mistakes in three games in the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells. Against Kenin, while she tested a first opponent when they come, she won 6-0, 6-0. If it works, it's easy. If it doesn't, it is not.

Short -term pain for a long -term win, her father Corey said Tuesday evening, standing next to the courts where he formed his daughter until a junior champion. For him, Tiger Woods, who took his swing apart and rebuilt after he won his first master's title when he was 21, an object lesson.

He then won a few more titles, right? Said Corey.

At the age of 14, Gauff was by far the best tennis player at her age, months away from beating Venus Williams at the center of the court in Wimbledon and a run to the fourth round.

Shed spent many of the morning and afternoon training with her father on those courts in the corner of the park, dash home for a quick shower and then almost back to work as the announcer of the public address for the Little League Baseball matches. She would tell mini stories about every child when she announced that they were coming to the BAT and play their personalized walk-up music.

I just saw people around me who do volunteer work. If you see everyone wearing red shoes, you might want to wear red shoes, she said in a quiet moment in the evening.

A collage dedicated to Coco Gauff in Pompey Park. (Ketchum Studios)

Shed organizes the teams and sort the uniforms and the shirts. My grandmother, my mother, my father has all helped, so it's just one of those things, as I want to help. The locals could still find her after that run of Wimbledon.

There are a glimpse of this spirit in the commercial for her new shoe that grandmother Yvonne Odom tells, but a glimpse of a glimpse of it. There is much more to the story.

Grandfather Eddie Odom was a talented baseball player who could not play in many of the youth competitions in the area because of the color of his skin. He succeeded in it and made the university and then the small competitions. When his run ended in baseball, he returned to Florida to work for the park department and to do what he really wanted to do: create the Delray Beach American Little League.

That is a big reason why the city called him the baseball court, a baseball court in a park named after an educator and civil rights activist, C. Spencer Pompey. Yvonne mentions him by sending her husband in sports when he was a child and saved him to go a different path.

Gauffs Dad played in that competition. Eddie, or Red, coached him and even had to straighten him and his friends one evening when they would not settle in the motel during a road trip.

I was not, it was my friends, said Corey Gauff, who at the time was too young to have some idea that this man 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 Eddies-Vrouw and G-Mom to Coco, is his own story. In 1961, local school officials approached her family and told them she was 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 not a small thing. The year before, American Marshals had accompanied a third-class player named Ruby Bridges when she started integrating her school in New Orleans. Two years later, white supremacists blew the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala on, killing four young girls.

In an interview on Tuesday, Yvonne Odom said that she was told that managers selected her because she was a striking student. They said they needed the first student to exceed the color line to be successful.

I didn't think so, I just went, Oddom said. You learn a lot about the nature of people when you experience such an experience, the only black girl surrounded by hundreds of white children.

Gauff does not remember when she first started hearing the stories about her grandparents and her families influence the local community. It was always there, something she lived. It explained why she could go to just about every adult in the city, to tell them that she was and is cared for Yvonne Odom's granddaughter. Rides, snacks, what she needed, they would be presented immediately.

Growing up, those stories didn't seem so much for Gauff because it was all she knew. As she got older, she started to understand the weight of it. She remembers that she was around 14 when she asked her grandmother about what she had experienced, and started to realize that Yvonne had the meaning of it. Eventually Gauff asked to hear the story, slowly and calmly.

She got it, Gauff said, but always with her grandmother's, glass half -full flavorings mixed.

She may only only look at the positive points, or just blocks the negatives. Listening to her tell that story in detail, it didn't feel heavy. She just made it: look at the world in which we live today. We can all go to school together, we can all do everything together.

For her it is a small, small price to pay for this world, but for us I don't think I could have done something like that. But that is what makes her special.

On 16, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin, she stood in front of the town hall of Delray Beach during a Black Lives Matter rally and gave a speech that went viral. Her grandmother was just a few meters away.

I just spoke with my grandmother, she said that day, and it is sad that I protested against the same thing that she did more than 50 years ago.

Although the Williams sisters were in full flight, Gauff said that she came to many Junior tournaments where she was the only black child in the draw. She remembers that she traveled in Central and Eastern Europe, where people approached her to take her photo, because it seemed to be at Gauff, they had never come face to face with a black person.

The public courts in Pompey Park were crucial for Coco Gauffs Tennis Development. (Ketchum Studios)

The way things go in the American tennis, Savvy and Gigi Gedeus and Cheyenne Johnson will probably have such experiences. They are the next harvest of Delray Beach -girls who dedicate the sport to the sport for most of their awake hours, and they came to Gauff in Pompey Park on Tuesday. Savvy, Acht and Gigi, Zeven, have already been trained at home to maximize the time on the field.

I recognize you from the commercial, Gauff told Savvy while she grabbed her around the waist at the Pompey Park Court that afternoon.

Their Buddy Johnson, nine, will start home school for the same reason next year. They can all tear a backhand in the style of their local hero. Johnson has a serious sports tribe in her blood. Her father, Chad Johnson, better known as Ochocinco, was one of the best broad recipients in the NFL during the Aughts.

Gauff desperately wants to win a Grand Slam and many other titles; Winning her almost-hometown wta 1,000 title in Miami would be sweeter than most. But what she really wants is one day to hear that an athlete could be a tennis player, someone in another sport could be that they went behind their dream because she inspired them, because her success had felt it all a little more accessible.

It started the most prominent with Althea Gibson and I think the most famous Serena and Venus Williams and now here I am, Gauff said.

Today it was super inspiring to see many young girls, young black girls, playing and picking up the racket.

(Top photo of Coco Gauff and Yvonne Odom: Ketchum Studios)