WTA World No. 3 Coco Gauff is unperturbed by social media harassment or hate and reckons critics and haters are her biggest motivators.
Gauff, 19, has enjoyed a jaw-dropping rise into the upper echelons of the sport, drawing comparisons to her childhood idol Serena Williams. She has downplayed being held in such a company and is just purely happy to be a 'product of her legacy'.
She may be very young, but her mentality and ambitious attitude caught the attention of her coach Pere Riba right from when their partnership came into being. Gauff's match-winning talents have also given tennis fans a dose of high expectations.
So on the occasional drop in form, some of Gauff's most fiercest critics have a hippodrome of making their voices heard. Even Gauff, who is 19, ranked in the world's Top 10 for over a year and now a Grand Slam champion is not immune to online hate.
But what particularly distinguishes the young American from most of her peers is her unflappable demeanor. Gauff doesn't mention whether this might be an innate ability as she doesn't recommend it, but she is inspired by negativity.
Speaking after her first-round win over Ekaterina Alexandrova at the China Open, she states that she likes to 'argue' and 'prove people wrong'. But on the advice of her team members, she refrains from engaging trolls on the internet. Instead, she prefers to respond with her racket on a match day,
"I feel like my brain just works differently. I used to not be on Twitter at all. I'm still really not on Twitter much. But sometimes you get caught up in the scroll. The way the page is, the accounts that you interact with, you see yourself. I interact with tennis a lot obviously, so those tweets come up. Obviously, I see about myself, positive and negative."
"I wouldn't say negativity is something that's welcome. It's more, I don't know, something that I draw inspiration from. I wouldn't recommend everybody to do that. Some of those comments can get out of hand."
"But for the most part, I don't know, it's weird, maybe I feed from negativity. That's weird. A lot of players don't like it. For me, I'm very stubborn. I like to argue. I like to prove people wrong. My agent and my team advise not to comment back, so I use my racquet to do it."
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