Naomi Osaka, the girl who beat Serena
Naomi Osaka beat her idol to win her first Grand Slam title – and Serena has only good things to say about her
WHEN she was in Grade 3 she had to write a report on the person she most wanted to be like – and that person was Serena Williams. Naomi Osaka idolised Serena back then and that hasn’t changed now. Not even one of the most acrimonious tennis matches in recent history can tarnish the adoration she has for the multiple Grand Slam winner.
“I’m always going to remember the Serena I love,” Naomi said after she recently beat her idol to win the US Open.
The match was marred by Serena being penalised three times by umpire Carlos Ramos.
The 36-year-old athlete lashed out, calling him a liar and a thief, and the match ended with a booing crowd and both players in tears.
Naomi’s first Grand Slam win – she’s the first Japanese to take the title – was effectively ruined but she tried to smile through her misery as she took to the podium.
Afterwards the 20-year-old had nothing but praise for her competitor and said how much it meant to her to compete against her.
“When I step onto the court I feel like a different person, right? I’m not a Serena fan. I’m just a tennis player playing another tennis player.
“But then when I hugged her at the net I felt like a little kid again.”
In the days that followed many debates raged about whether Serena or the umpire behaved badly. She wouldn’t have been treated that way if she was a man, some said. She was a bad sport with a terrible temper, others argued.
But everyone could agree on Naomi’s reaction: she showed incredible humility and grace.
BACK in Japan, Naomi is hogging headlines for all the right reasons. The mixed-race athlete, the “new heroine Japan can be proud of ” as one local paper called her, is challenging long-held stereotypes in the country.
The dark-skinned beauty is the daughter of a Haitian father, Leonard François, and a Japanese mother, Tamaki.
She was born in Japan but her family moved to the US when she was three years old.
“Osaka’s rise is accompanied by a curious tension,” New York Times’ Christopher Griffith wrote after interviewing her earlier this year. “She’s half-Japanese, half-Haitian, representing a country whose obsession with racial purity has shaped her own family’s history.”
After finishing his studies in New York, Leonard moved to Japan, where he met Tamaki in 1990. The youngsters fell in love but hid their relationship from Tamaki’s conservative parents.
When Tamaki was in her early twenties her father brought up “omiai”, the matchmaking process for an arranged marriage, and Tamaki confessed she was dating Leonard – who wasn’t only foreign but black too.
Her father was furious with her for “bringing disgrace on the family”. But Tamaki and Leonard were determined to stay together and fled to Osaka, where Naomi and her sister Mari (22) were born.
When the girls were little the couple moved to New York to be closer to Leonard’s family. It was there that, when the
girls were just toddlers, their tennisloving dad watched a broadcast of the French Open in which Venus and Serena Williams, just 18 and 17 at the time, teamed up to win the doubles title.
Leonard learnt how Richard Williams trained his daughters to become tennis champions – and decided to do the same.
“The blueprint was already there,” he once said. “I just had to follow it.”
He did just that, moving the family to Florida in 2006 so the girls could focus on tennis full-time.
Mari and Naomi trained during the day and were home-schooled at night.
“I don’t remember liking to hit the ball,” Naomi says of her childhood.
“The main thing was that I wanted to beat my sister. For her it wasn’t a competition, but for me every day was a competition,” she said. “Every day I’d say, ‘I’m going to beat you tomorrow.’
“She beat me 6-0 until I was 15 and then I don’t know what happened but one day I beat her 6-2. I’m not sure if you call that a rivalry if someone beats you every day 6-0 for 15 years.”
These days there’s little doubt about which sister is the better of the two. Mari, who faced several injuries in her early career, played on the second-tier circuit in Switzerland just before Naomi’s US Open win. She’s now ranked No 350 in the world while Naomi – who turned pro at the age of 15 – is at No 7.
The sisters are close and Mari helped her sister with her nerves before the US Open.
“I couldn’t eat anything, I felt like I was going to throw up,” Naomi said. “I was just so stressed and I kept calling my sister. My poor sister. She was telling me to think of it as just another match and then I’d yell at her, ‘Are you crazy? This is a Grand Slam final.’
“Since she’s in Paris she was showing me these random croissants and baguettes to try to take my mind off of it, and it kind of worked.”
IT WASN’T the first time Serena had lost to Naomi – in March this year the two faced off and Naomi beat her idol 6-3, 6-2. She revealed how much she looked up to Serena after the match. “She’s the main reason I started playing tennis,” Naomi told sport reporters. “I just wanted her after the match to know who I am.”
There’s no doubt Serena now knows who Naomi is – and hopefully the younger athlete won’t allow the US Open drama to linger in her mind.
When she’s faced challenges in the past Serena served as inspiration, in fact. As Naomi pointed out earlier this year, “Sometimes when I’m in a really hard position when I’m serving, I’m like, ‘What would Serena do?’ ”
She may be pleased to know Serena
admired her game despite her fury with the umpire. “I feel like she was really, really consistent,” the tennis star said after the match. “I think her game’s always super-consistent. I felt she played really well. She was so focused.
“Honestly, there’s a lot I can learn from her from this match.”
Naomi meanwhile can hopefully chill a bit by playing Overwatch, her favourite game on her PlayStation 4 console. Or post on Insta where she showcases plenty of goofy moments in and among the action shots – a vid of her failing hilariously at pool, tumbling down a sand dune, or whacking the ball into the net while playing volleyball. According to her coach, Sascha Bajin, it’s this kind of thing that makes his young star so much more relatable than other sport stars.
“She’s honest and open. I think that’s why people are drawn to her,” he said.
“She’s just being herself and I think that’s refreshing to a lot of people.”
‘I couldn’t eat anything, I was just so stressed’