Coco Gauff Robert Prange/Getty Images
Coco Gauff shouted out her mystery “boyfriend” while reacting to being name-dropped on Tyler, the Creator’s new album.
Gauff, 20, gets a shout-out in the lyrics to the rapper’s song “Thought I Was Dead,” released on October 26. “Bitch, you ain’t Coco Gauff, you can’t serve me,” Tyler, the Creator raps on the song, featured on his Chromakopia album.
“That was really cool. I was not expecting it,” Gauff told reporters at WTA Finals media day on Friday, November 1. “It was crazy because he DM’d me congratulations over China Open [which Gauff won October 6]. We never talked or anything before. He liked my photo or something when I won US Open.”
Gauff continued, “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?’”
Despite an increasingly public profile, tennis superstar Coco Gauff continues to hold serve when it comes to keeping the identity of her boyfriend a mystery. Gauff, the defending U.S. Open champion who won her first Grand Slam doubles’ title in June, has preached the importance of keeping her off-the-court life private. Still, that doesn’t mean […]
The tennis phenom has never publicly named her boyfriend, who she has been dating for at least a year-and-a-half.
Tyler the Creator Robert Kamau/GC Images
“He’s a very nice guy. He’s in school now,” Gauff told Vogue in March. “He’s about to apply for music school. He wants to be an actor and he plays the guitar.”
In April, Gauff told TIME magazine that her boyfriend represented her “first real relationship.”
“To just have someone to talk to who is not involved in tennis at all gives me a fresh perspective,” Gauff said.
When it came time to compete in the US Open women’s final in 2023, Gauff relied on her beau in the anxious hours leading up to her match.
“I just called my boyfriend, and I told him, ‘Let’s talk until it’s time to go to sleep,’” Gauff told reporters after emerging victorious, “So we spoke until 1 a.m. and then I went to sleep.”
Gauff defeated Aryna Sabalenka in the women’s final, earning her first and only major title.
At last November’s WTA Finals, Gauff showed off her partner’s gift-giving abilities while wearing a new necklace. “My boyfriend gave this to me,” she told reporters with a smile.
Gauff revealed she received the new bling after winning her milestone first major.
“I was playing with a locket for the U.S. Open and that meant nothing,” Gauff said. “It was just a necklace. And then one day I got tired of taking it off and just kept wearing it. I was like, OK, let me play with something that means something to to me.’”
Things between Gauff and her boyfriend have become serious enough for him to face the ultimate boyfriend test: meeting her parents — and he passed with flying colors.
“My mom always said, if they’re bad in school, they’re probably bad as adults,” Gauff’s mom, Candi, told TIME. “He’s always been a smart, nice kid.”
