“And I don’t want to be here,” Naomi Osaka said, almost six years ago, to Sascha Bajin, her coach at the time. “Here” was a tennis stadium in Charleston, South Carolina, in April, 2018, midmatch, during a changeover. Osaka was down a set and a break and she had had it, not just with the match. Maybe it was the attention, sudden and outsized, that had come with her winning the BNP Paribas Open, in Indian Wells, California, the previous month—her first title, and on one of the sport’s biggest stages. Maybe it was that the prize money and sponsor bonuses she’d earned with that victory allowed her to realize what she then considered one of her biggest goals as a player: to earn enough to allow her mother to retire. Maybe it was everything that it had taken, since she was three, to get her tennis to that level: the abrupt childhood moves, from Japan to Long Island to Florida; the daily grind of practice until evening and homeschooling at night; the lack of friends and the pressure to perform and her mother working long hours at whatever office jobs she could find so that Osaka’s father might make of her and her older sister what Richard Williams had made of Venus and Serena. Osaka would later say, about what happened on court in Charleston, “I just woke up . . . before one of my matches and I was just thinking, like, What is the point of my life?” She was twenty years old.
The 2024 Australian Open is getting under way, and it will mark Osaka’s return to Grand Slam tennis after she gave birth, last July, to a daughter named Shai, which is Hebrew for “gift.” Since she won the Australian Open for the second time, three years ago, Osaka has rarely played at a title-contending level; before her pregnancy, she was hampered by injuries and by strains to her mental health. Last year, she described her mood after that Australian Open win, her fourth victory at a major: “I’m, like, I need to do something about it because I don’t want to keep living this way.” At that moment, no female tennis player in the world had been creating more excitement or making more money than she.
Her struggles, along with her triumphs, are detailed in “Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice,” a thorough and deeply reported biography by Ben Rothenberg, a veteran tennis writer with a passion for the women’s game. He first met Osaka when she was a teen-ager still learning to control the power that would enable her to realize her father’s highest hopes, at least on hard courts. The book is most absorbing in the passages—and they are numerous—in which Rothenberg portrays a young woman who is made neither comfortable nor happy by doing what she was molded to do. Osaka was able to fend off her darkest turns, and jangly bouts of anxiety, long enough to play extraordinary tennis at Grand Slam tournaments, but how she did so is a mystery—to her, it would seem, and also to Rothenberg. Her frame of mind in Charleston six years ago lasted, on and off, for months, Rothenberg writes. But she rallied toward the end of that summer to win the U.S. Open, defeating Serena Williams in the most tempestuous major final in memory. Then came another bout of depression, and another, and another.
Whether Osaka can win a major again is anybody’s guess. Serena didn’t after she gave birth and returned to the game, but she was ten years older than Osaka was. Kim Clijsters retired at twenty-three, then got married and had a daughter; a year and a half later, in 2009, she won the U.S. Open in just her third tournament after returning to the game. She defended her title the following year, won the Australian Open in 2011, and, that February, became the first mother to reach No. 1 in the world. Champions have champions’ ways, and can be slow to shed them. But the women’s game has become even more athletic during Osaka’s time away, and speed and explosive movement were never her strengths.
Osaka played an Australian Open warmup tourney in Brisbane, and won her first-round match before losing her next. That’s not a lot of match play for someone who’s been away from the game. As for her motivation, she said recently, “I want to show Shai that she’s capable of everything, so that’s one of my main purposes and main reasons for why I want to be back out here.”
Osaka, of course, has been more than a tennis champion. By the time she won her first Australian Open, in 2019, she was on her way to becoming a global icon. Her social-media ease, high-low fashion sense, and you-do-you sensibility were emblematic of her generation. She described herself as shy and expressed discomfort with being interviewed, but when she was engaged, she could take an interviewer’s questions all sorts of delightful places: sincere, ironic, weirdly gnomic. Being multiracial—her mother is Japanese and her father, who was born in Haiti, is Black—added to her appeal. When she decided to make a home for herself, she settled not in Florida, where many tennis players go, but in Los Angeles, where the pop stars are. Unlike some players, she did not seem uneasy with celebrity.
Rothenberg uses a music-industry term, “imperial phase,” to describe the stretch of time—roughly, the first year of the COVID pandemic—when Osaka’s stardom reached mononymous heights. Based on her earnings in 2019, Naomi was named by Forbes as the highest-paid female athlete ever. When tennis was put on hold in the spring and much of the summer of 2020, she turned her attention to various business partnerships. She announced, on Twitter, to a shut-down world, “I’m done being shy.” After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, that May, she flew with her boyfriend, the rapper Cordae, on a private jet to Minnesota to join the protests.
When tennis resumed, two tournaments were scheduled in Flushing, Queens: not only the U.S. Open but its traditional lead-up tournament, the Western & Southern Open, normally held in Cincinnati. They would be played back to back with no spectators and limited media. During the cobbled-together event’s “Cincinnati” phase, a policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times, and Osaka announced she was withdrawing from the tournament. Tennis officials, in response, declared a day-long suspension of the tournament to protest racial inequality and social injustice. During the U.S. Open, Osaka arrived on court each day she played wearing a different face mask bearing the name of a Black victim of police violence. She won the title.
That moment has faded, but Osaka’s star power remains, and women’s tennis could use some of it right now. No current player transcends the sport as she does. And the game—the most prestigious and lucrative women’s sport in the world, at a time when women’s sports are garnering interest and recognition as never before—is foundering. Its finances have been undermined by COVID-era postponements and the decline of tournaments in China, where the Women’s Tennis Association previously imagined its future would be. The W.T.A. has yet to make an announcement about whether it will hold a tournament in Saudi Arabia, where there is reportedly interest, and where women’s rights rank among the most dismal on earth. A decision about the location of last year’s W.T.A. Finals was long delayed; the tournament was finally held in Cancún, on hastily built outdoor courts, where play was interrupted by rain and bedevilled by winds, leaving the top players in the world frustrated and angry. Steve Simon, the C.E.O. of the W.T.A., announced in December that he will step down. A search is under way for his replacement.
Osaka is in the business of attention: she founded her own media company, Hana Kuma, and she runs a sports-management agency, EVOLVE, with her longtime agent, Stuart Duguid. She has a keen sense of the global-entertainment firmament and a knack for attracting young people around the world to women’s tennis. One hopes the next W.T.A. C.E.O. will see her as an invaluable asset. Fostering the future health of women’s tennis is not one of Osaka’s stated goals, but her return to the game could not come at a better time. ♦
