By Chris Oddo | Sunday January 27, 2019
You don’t really need to do a massive statistical deep dive to figure out that Naomi Osaka has broken the mold here in 2019. You most certainly don’t need to talk about which flag she plays for (Japan, but she’s Japanese-Haitian and grew up in the U.S.), or even how old she is at the moment (21). You just need to look at her last 14 Grand Slam matches, how she’s played them, who she’s beaten and where she stands now.
Because in those 14 matches we’ve witnessed Osaka’s most incredible trait up close: her ability to deal with pressure on both a micro and macro level. On the macro level it’s been pretty much obscene what Osaka has had to process and overcome. Since she defeated Serena Williams in a controversial U.S. Open final last season she has been an absolute sensation in the tennis world. The tennis-mad market of Japan has made Osaka a media darling and she has reeled in endorsements from the like of Adidas, Nissan, Nissin Foods, Citizen Watches, Shiseido Beauty, Al Nippon Airlines and more. She’s not just popular in Japan. Her global stock is rising rapidly, and that’s a trend that will only continue.
Forbes, meet Naomi Osaka, the first Asian player to ever hold the No.1 ranking and the soon to be highest-paid female athlete in the world...
It would be foolish to think that a 21-year-old could seamlessly go from a relatively unknown talent to a full-blown megastar without encountering a few bumps in the road. And this is what makes Osaka's meteoric 12 months all the more remarkable. She has encountered bumps in the road, like last season when she went 14-12 after winning the prestigious title at Indian Wells and then got on Twitter near the end of the summer to tell the world she has been struggling to find motivation.
She wrote about the pressure she encountered after Indian Wells and the frustration she encountered during practices during a rough patch. "I started getting really frustrated and depressed during my practices," she said on Twitter.
Was it a warning sign? Was she using social media to artificially lower expectations about her future?
Not to worry: Three weeks later she won the U.S. Open.
Let’s be clear: the maelstrom of controversy that happened at last year’s U.S. Open could have been a real growth-crusher. How does a kid process all that strange and negative energy and come out the better for it?
This is the magic of Osaka. We witness it and never quite quantify it.
With the spotlight even brighter in the aftermath of that much-publicized US Open victory (This isn't just typical hype the talent talk either: there is ceaseless talk about her racial identity, and this week, as she tried to focus on winning matches in Australia there was controversy when a sponsor was accused of whitewashing Osaka in its ad campaign. The ad was pulled, apologies were made.) Osaka has reached the semifinals or better in five of the six events she has played since winning the title in New York, and on Saturday in Melbourne she added another major title to her résumé.
She became the first woman to win her first two major titles in succession since 2001, and the tenth player in history to win the U.S. Open and Australian Open back-to-back.
She was ranked No.72 in the world this time last year.
It’s not supposed to happen this way—not in this era. The media is supposed to chew you up and spit you out before you get there. The pressure is supposed to sabotage everything you are and can be.
In the past dominant players like Monica Seles, Steffi Graf, Martina Navratilova, Serena Williams have won consecutive majors and defied even the lofty expectations that the media so peremptorily sets for them. We’ve seen it before, but in the last 15 years, we have not seen it from young talents.
That’s what makes Osaka’s rise in these last six months so remarkable. Rather than look ahead, pointing to some future that may or may not come to fruition, it would be wise to simply put aside the speculation and set forth the appreciation for her present-tense accomplishments, which have come in the face of the type of pressure and expectations that have been crushing kids over the last decade-plus.
In general, in sports, we like to pump up future stars before they’ve actually proved their mettle, lauding them as the next big thing, the next dominant force, and the heir apparent, and then we throw our arms in the air when said future star falls miserably short of the Holy Grail.
That’s what was supposed to happen with Naomi Osaka, but it hasn’t.
Exhibit A: Before the Australian Open Time Magazine placed Osaka on their cover, called her the “Heir” with the following caption next to her photo: “Naomi Osaka defeated her idol Serena Williams. Now she just might succeed her.”
Pressure? Nah. Succeed Serena Williams? No prob.
That’s the macro pressure that Osaka faces, the heavy, gripping weight that not only metaphorically sits on her shoulders but also figuratively cuts away at her time, pushing her and pulling her, placing her at photo shots and press conferences and media meet and greets when she should be practicing her volleys, and serving tennis balls at tennis cans.
And layered into the macro-pressure that Osaka must deal with is the micro-pressure of being a professional tennis player—a very young one at that—in a field of women that is deeper and more bloodthirsty than ever. Managing a tennis match means peaking in sync with the key chokepoints of the contest. It's an art mastered by the chosen few. Crucial moments that can open the floodgates or kill momentum must be owned. Choking is not an option. Osaka has a great feel for swing points in matches, and the mental fortitude to summon her very best tennis.
How does she do it?
First there’s a required "presence" to recognize the magnitude. Then there’s the steely determination that comes after the subtle inner self-pep-talk that happens before the point. Blink and you missed it because this whole process goes down in a ten-second span between points. Osaka takes a moment to make a moment, and next comes the courage to execute the decisive strokes and create the fortune-favors-the-bold moment.
This is pressure in a tennis match, and it bubbles over in every contest, threatening to sabotage winning streaks and wreak havoc on the rising forces who seek to deflect it. The public sees two people battling on a tennis court but in reality the bigger battle is the self-against-self battle that every player must attempt to master in order to win the other battle that the public sees.
Just two weeks before this year’s Australian Open Osaka lost the battle within herself and fell victim to veteran Lesia Tsurenko at Brisbane a she suffered what she perceived to be an immature loss.
“Had the worst attitude on court today. Sorry to everyone that watched,” she wrote on Twitter, apparently taking not the loss but some weakness in her character, extremely hard.
Did it mean that Osaka had lost her way in the weeks before she was set to play the season’s first Grand Slam? So typical, right? A young player publicly broadcasting her frailty to the world—setting us all up for an inevitable fall. Another promising player that couldn’t keep it together long enough to make good on her promise.
Wrong.
That is the beauty of Osaka as current force, and it is, at least among the members of the WTA's generation next, unique to her. She can identify weaknesses in her game and in her character, and share her own feelings of inadequacy with her adoring public. For most this would be a perfect way to smear a hot streak with bad juju, but for Osaka it seems she’s tapped into a therapeutic salve of sorts. Her transparency is not a call for help as much as it is a call to battle. Osaka is daring herself to be the best, and she’s aware of the white-hot connection between see-ball, hit-ball and having a better attitude.
As she navigates these mine-fields on a tennis court, the link between positive affirmation and positive results lets Osaka know that she was right to chastise herself in the public eye, and as she wavered on the brink of a collapse on Saturday night in Melbourne, with Petra Kvitova angling in on a miraculous match-point saving masterclass, Osaka had the presence of mind to activate what she’d learned in her self-administered social media shamefest and put it to good use in the third set.
There she was, the incarnation Zen and power and poise, rolling to the title like...
Does she win that third set after stumbling so badly in the second if she wasn’t so refreshingly self-aware and eager to stare down her own demons? Does she get past the crafty and clever Hsieh Su-Wei in round three if she hadn’t been so willing to come face-to-face with her own shortcomings in the weeks and months prior?
Would we be talking about Osaka the two-time major champion and certain Hall of Famer if she had, at any moment over the last six months, allowed the pressure to fester and to take hold of her essence, perhaps reshaping it and spitting it out as something diluted, less worthy, less evolved?
These are the steps that Naomi Osaka had to take to get here. We should appreciate that she’s taken them and that she’s arrived at the pinnacle of the sport, rather than speculating on where she might be headed and what it all might mean for tennis over the decade to come.
If there’s anything we learned from Osaka’s brilliance over the last six months it is this: Focus on the here and now and let the other stuff wait.