Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Early exit
Hyde: Local sends Serena packing at Miami Open.
KEY BISCAYNE — Serena Williams took aim at the final tennis ball Wednesday as it made a room-service bounce at the net and then delivered one final shot no one expected. She missed the easy winner. The ball soared long. The crowd groaned.
The biggest name was out of the Miami Open in the first round.
And the freshest story of tennis was still in.
“What did Serena say to you at the net,” Naomi Osaka of Fort Lauderdale was asked after her 6-3, 6-2 win against Williams. “She said, ‘Good job’ and stuff,” Osaka said. Not that she heard it all. “I kind of blanked out,” she said. She then laughed the kind of bubbly laugh someone makes when everything is new and fun and they’ve done something startling even to themselves for the first time. Like beating your girlhood hero.
“She’s the main reason why I started playing tennis,” Osaka, 20, said.
Williams was the only reason everyone watched Wednesday. She’s a new mom. She’s attempting a comeback after 14 months away. She’s 36 and a sports icon, and fans broke into cheers and chants to try to rally her out-of-shape game. Not that the cheers bothered Osaka. “If I was watching I’d be cheering for Serena, too,” she said.
She did, too. All her youth, since moving to Fort Lauderdale at age 8, this daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian father watched Serena play and studied her game. She still does, in fact. Even when
she really couldn’t, like Wednesday.
“This is going to be really bad, but sometimes when I am in a really hard position when I’m serving, I’m, like, ‘What would Serena do?’ Osaka said. “But I was playing her [Wednesday]. Yeah, I was literally just thinking out here, ‘What would Serena do?’ ”
She had one goal for the match. She wanted to make Williams notice her. She knew how that would show up, too. She knew Williams’ on-court personality enough to hope for one, minimalist moment in their match: Her hero to feel the need to coax herself with a, Come on!”
“You know, because, like, sometimes she plays matches where she doesn’t say, ‘Come on,’ at all, and that’s a little bit sad, because you think, ‘Do you think she’s trying?’ ” Osaka said. “So I just wanted her to say, ‘Come on,’ once, because I knew that maybe she would be trying a little bit.” And? “So, yeah, once I heard the first, ‘Come on,’ I was, like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ ”
This was the story of sports shrunk to a tennis court: Age trying to hold on while youth arrives. Not that Williams is in fighting shape from maternity leave just yet. Not that Osaka was an unknown in tennis by Wednesday, either.
She won her first tournament at the tour’s previous stop in Indian Hills, Calif. She’s ranked 22nd in the world. She’s put the tour on notice to the point no one in the tennis world considered Wednesday an upset.
And if Williams wasn’t Williams, if on her second match back she looked slow and missed easy shots, Osaka didn’t notice. No, really. She couldn’t even look across the court.
“I’m going to be really honest,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention if she was struggling or not. I was just trying to make my balls in and stuff. Like, if you’re playing against someone that’s, like, the greatest player, I’m not trying to look over on that side of the court too much, because I think I would freak myself out a little bit.”
“I just tried to, like, look on my side of the court and not think too much about what she was doing.
After the first three games, Osaka said her nerves calmed. Her game followed. The match wasn’t much in doubt after that.
Was Williams down? Was she angry? You can only guess. She didn’t talk to the media afterward. She picked up her racquets and signed a few autographs on her way off the court as the public-address announcer said, “Once a champion, always a champion.”
Before leaving, though, she did something that will linger with Osaka forever. They met at the net and, it was “kind of weird to see her — and not on TV,” Osaka said.
And then to shake hands?
The freshest voice in tennis smiled and said, “I thought it was pretty cool.”