By Alan Attwood
BIOGRAPHY
Naomi Osaka
Ben Rothenberg
Text, $36.99
Naomi Osaka can often look tranquil on a tennis court. This is the young woman who charmed spectators by rescuing a wayward butterfly midway through an Australian Open match early in 2021. So gentle. So Zen. But she has also been centre-stage for some of the biggest sporting dramas in recent years.
Will Naomi Osaka emulate Ash Barty and walk away from tennis?Credit:
It was Osaka on the other side of the net when Serena Williams launched a sustained tirade against an umpire during the 2018 US Open final, a match that ended with Osaka, then just 20, a victor in tears.
It was Osaka, so shy that her preferred mode of communication is social media, who publicly embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and wore masks with the names of victims of police brutality during the 2020 US Open, which she also won. Osaka rocked the tennis establishment by refusing to attend press conferences during the 2021 French Open, helping to put the issue of athletes’ mental health in the spotlight.
She is unique, and not only for her achievements in tennis: four grand slam victories (one more than Ash Barty) before she had turned 24; the first Asian number one in the world, male or female; an introvert whose responses to questions have included opaque references to Pokémon and rappers. She once introduced herself as “weird”, but that doesn’t begin to do her justice.
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On her website she is described as a “multicultural, multiracial Japanese-Haitian-American woman”. Ben Rothenberg, author of this hefty biography, likens her to Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe as one of those “important champions … who redrew lines outside the court”.
The book arrives at an intriguing stage of her career. Still only 26, her Australian summer represents a comeback. She is a new mum; one who, again like Barty, has taken an extended break from tennis. Her wealth, largely from endorsements, is mind-boggling. Having already ticked off her early goals (lighting the cauldron at the Tokyo Olympics was a bonus), motivation may be a challenge, especially when top-level tennis comes with intense scrutiny that she endures rather than embraces.
Rothenberg, an American sportswriter, describes an Instagram Live conversation Osaka had with reigning number one Iga Swiatek, in which she told the Polish star: “Honestly, I feel like I want to, in the end, not be known for being a tennis player.” That will be hard, Swiatek replied. Super hard, Osaka agreed. “But … tennis is such a short time in our lives.”
She is right. Already her interests extend far beyond tennis. And although her idol has always been Williams – her Haitian-born father, Leonard Francois, used Richard Williams’ technique for training Venus and Serena as a template for his own girls Mari and Naomi – Osaka has never shared Serena’s outsized persona or killer instinct. After defeating rising teen Coco Gauff at the 2019 US Open, she famously comforted the distraught teenager on court.
Sometimes she has been drawn into conflicts not of her making: Serena’s on-court explosion in New York in 2018 led to a Mark Knight cartoon in Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper that was widely criticised for what Rothenberg calls “racialized depictions” of both finalists.
Osaka has said: “As long as I can remember, people have struggled to define me. I’ve never really fit into one description.” Rothenberg strives mightily to explore the world of the young woman who represents Japan but resists speaking Japanese in public, the champion who discovered that success left her feeling sad, but it reads like an outsider’s view: big on detail but lacking the interior perspective that made Andre Agassi’s 2009 memoir, Open, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, writer of Prince Harry’s Spare, so memorable.
The writing can be clunky. Some painful alliteration (“a bruising behemoth who barked bellicosely”) and the use of “antipodally” represent double-faults while periodic detours into present-tense during descriptions of key stages of matches count as unforced errors.
Despite its breadth, there are surprising omissions. The butterfly in Melbourne, for starters. Osaka’s partner, the rapper Cordae, is barely present although he is father to her daughter, Shai, and seems to have supplanted older sister Mari as primary confidant. Her parents fade out of the narrative and for all the talk of sponsors there is little insight into the extent to which Osaka herself has input into the money-making side of the Naomi brand.
It is too early to tell whether this summer represents a new chapter in an already-successful tennis story. I wonder if a court will ever be her happy place. Perhaps Osaka will emulate Barty and just walk away. Why not? She has already seen it all, including the view from the court surface after winning her second US Open. She did this because of “all the times I’ve watched the great players sort of collapse onto the ground and look up at the sky. I’ve always wanted to see what they saw.”
Now she knows. We can only wish her well. Trouble is, once you’ve looked up it can be tough staying down.
Alan Attwood is a former tennis writer for The Age.
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