Billie Jean King lauds Osaka, Biles for mental health conversations

SAN DIEGO — When 23-year-old tennis superstar Naomi Osaka cited mental health concerns as the reason for withdrawing from the French Open and Wimbledon, a reckoning arrived.

Was it OK for someone so accomplished and important to a sport to exit into the shadows, rather than play through things? America, after all, long prided itself on playing hurt as the ultimate measure of toughness.

Suck it up. Tape an aspirin to it. Fight through the pain, even if it takes root between the ears.

Then came Osaka, a winner of the U.S. and Australian opens, acknowledging that athletes can publicly share vulnerability and truths about the types of pressure that would cause most to crumple.

Is it the softening of America, in the generation of participation trophies? Or has the time come to prioritize mental health in the way athletes would deal with physical injuries and the daunting rehabilitation processes that followed, Twitter slings and arrows be damned?

Discussion and debate raged. But finally and fully, the previously thorny subject rushed into the daylight.

“I think it's important we talk about it,” tennis icon Billie Jean King said Tuesday, at the 16s and 18s girls national championships with her name on it at the Barnes Tennis Center. “I like the fact that we can talk about it. In the old days, you couldn't talk about it.”

King, the trailblazer for critical conversations ranging from gender equity to sexuality, has wrestled with her own frailties while simultaneously tapping the courage to become the face of fight after fight.

She initially hid the fact that she was gay, until it became clear she could wield a megaphone to amplify understanding. She could machete a path, swat away the stigma and make it easier for the next person — and thousands after that.