In spite of the controversy and rage that tainted the 2018 U.S Open, it did not come as a surprise that Naomi Osaka beat Serena Williams to pick her first Grand Slam. Serena had lost to her at Indian Wells.
Her coach, Sascha Bajin, who used to be Serena’s hitting partner predicted that Osaka was capable of winning a Grand Slam this year. “Of course,” he says. “If she can keep her composure, yeah, I don’t see why not?”
At Indian Wells, Osaka looked like she could beat any tennis player in the world. She’d entered the tournament unseeded, having never won a WTA title before. But in the heat of the desert, she proceeded—efficiently and almost cruelly—to dismantle opponents at their own game. First, the 20-year-old stunned former no. 1 player Maria Sharapova in straight sets with her precise and powerful serve. (Sharapova would part ways with her coach after that match.) Later, she took out Karolína Plíšková, another former no. 1, with a unrelenting series of crushing forehands from the baseline.
And when defeating former no. 1’s wasn’t enough, she matched up against the current one, Simona Halep, and throttled her so badly that Halep didn’t win a single game in the second set. Her finals match against Daria Kasatkina was nearly as effortless. The victory speech she gave after that? A different kind of effortless.
“Hello, hi, I am—okay never mind,” she started, before meandering through a series of thank yous in a seemingly random order, giggling throughout. After a couple minutes, she closed by saying, “This is probably gonna be the worst acceptance speech of all time.”
On the court, Osaka appeared confident and fearless. But as soon as she was off of it, she returned to being a soft-spoken teen with a penchant for nerdy interests. At a press conference after the finals match, Naomi Osaka described the feeling of winning her first title the way any champion would: in reference to a meme. “Towards the end I didn’t know that I won the match point,” she said. “So then I was like Caveman SpongeBob.”
Four days later, in the first round of the Miami Open, Osaka faced her childhood hero and inarguably the greatest living tennis player—perhaps the greatest ever—Serena Williams, a woman with more Grand Slam titles than Osaka has years on Earth.
Were you nervous to play Serena?
“My whole life, I’ve always wanted to play her,” Osaka says. “So I had nothing to be nervous about.”
Osaka stomped Williams in straight sets.
To understand Naomi Osaka, the brightest young talent in tennis, you don’t have to understand the sport. You need to know Overwatch. It’s a popular video game, and it’s the first thing she mentions when we start talking at Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Florida, where she usually trains, just a five-minute bike ride from her home. (Osaka plays for Japan, even though she’s lived in the U.S. since the age of three.)
On practice days, Osaka is on the court for four hours. Then she goes home and plays four, sometimes five hours of video games—mostly Overwatch with her older sister Mari. The game, a shooter where two teams of six square off, is composed of colorful cartoon characters, each corresponding to a class. There are more offensive types with a plethora of sci-fi weaponry, it being a video game and all. But Osaka prefers the defensive characters—“healers,” who support their teammates with medical aid, and “tanks,” who absorb bullets like a human shield.
“Like, I’m not that great at attacking,” Osaka says. “My aim is not that amazing, so I’d just rather be a shield or something.”
That’s funny, because I think people would describe your tennis playing as fairly aggressive and more offensive.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot.”
So you are a very different Overwatch player than you are tennis player?
“Yeah, ummm…” A lot of our conversation is like this, Osaka’s sentences quietly trailing off into a void of polite laughs and ums.
Still, the gap between her self-assured on-court personality and her shyer off-court one doesn’t seem weird to her. She can compartmentalize those two modes. But explaining it, she still relates her tennis game to a video game: “I just feel like I know [tennis] is sort of my job and, like, if I were to say it, like, in a gaming term, then it’s sort of a mission that I have to complete. Um, so yeah. I just sort of tune everything out and just try my best to complete the mission.”
“She’s very honest and open,” Bajin says, “and I think that’s why people are drawn to her.”
But you don’t become the coolest kid in tennis without being a fire follow on Instagram. After she defeated Serena Williams in Miami, Osaka posted a pic of the two shaking hands at the net. The caption read: “Omg”
Now that she’s beaten Serena again to win her first Grand Slam, she does not even know who she feels. Happy and perhaps, sad, especially with all the controversy and the rage of her child idol.
“For me, I don’t feel sad because I wouldn’t even know what I’m expected to feel,” she said in Yokohama after she was treated to a heroic welcome at home.
“Because it was my first final and my first Grand Slam victory, overall I felt really happy and I know that I accomplished a lot. I don’t think I even thought about feeling sad because there’s no experience for me to draw on (from) any other Grand Slam final.”
