A new biography looks at how the star athlete challenged the media, the tennis world — and herself
A review by Ashley Brown for The Washington Post.
What happens when an athlete achieves her dream (or that of her parents) — a No. 1 ranking in her sport, titles in the most prestigious events, financial security for her family — only to find that none of it has brought her happiness?
Between 2018 and 2021, Naomi Osaka won four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and in January 2019, she reached the No. 1 ranking. She was the world’s highest-paid female athlete between 2020 and 2022, earning as much as $50 million a year for product endorsements. As Serena Williams’s career began winding down, commentators and fans thought they had found in Osaka — the younger daughter of a Haitian-born Black father and a Japanese mother — the cheerful new global face and dominant force of women’s tennis for years to come.
That’s not how things turned out.
As Ben Rothenberg notes in his new biography,Osaka became “a generational touchstone for reasons that had increasingly little to do with her tennis results.” She became a springboard for conversations about “race, gender, mental health, activism, multiculturalism, politics, business, and generational shifts.”
Both on and off the court, Osaka’s face was often streaked with tears — that is, when it was visible at all. Via social media posts and interviews, Osaka spoke of battling depression and self-doubt. Her behavior and choices confounded the staid tennis establishment and some of her fellow players.
Osaka led the sport to suspend tournament play for a day in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by police in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020. Days later, during her second successful U.S. Open title campaign, she wore masks emblazoned with the names of seven Black people killed during dubious surveillance and security encounters. At the 2021 French Open, Osaka further shocked tennis’s power brokers by announcing that she would not “do any press” during the tournament, citing her belief that some journalists were guilty of “kicking a person while they’re down” during post-match interviews. Her decision threatened to hurt the profits of news outlets, tournaments and corporate sponsors.
Osaka soon withdrew from the tournament, one of several withdrawals long before announcing her pregnancy in January 2023 and taking an extended leave from the tennis tour. She gave birth to a daughter, Shai, in July. Now ranked well below 800, Osaka, 26, is embarking on a comeback that has so far yielded losses in the early rounds of two tournaments, most recently the Australian Open, which she won in 2019 and 2021.
Rothenberg’s book is timed for its subject’s much-anticipated return. He devotes nearly half of this assiduously researched biography to explaining how Osaka’s unorthodox childhood and adolescence set her up paradoxically for fame and floundering in professional tennis. Rothenberg interviewed dozens of people, including Osaka, her family and coaches, to tell this story. The result is a book that is bolder than previous accounts of the star’s sometimes turbulent life — most notably Netflix’s highly stylized 2021 docuseries.
Inspired by the success of Venus and Serena Williams, Osaka’s parents, Tamaki and Leonard, decided in 1999 that their daughters, 2-year-old Mari and 17-month-old Naomi, would grow up to be tennis champions. Money was not Tamaki’s priority. “The way [the Williams sisters] flew around the world and influenced society blew my mind,” she later explained, an inspiration that perhaps informs Osaka’s social advocacy efforts, including inciting Japan to grapple constructively with its treatment of its mixed-race population.
By 2001, the family had left Japan for the United States, settling first in Elmont, N.Y. Years of isolation and hardships followed. Both Mari and Naomi admit that their parents forced them to play tennis. While Tamaki commuted to Manhattan to work grueling hours in an office, Leonard was a stay-at-home dad who coached the girls. He also fancied himself an independent filmmaker and cast Mari and Naomi in one of his productions, which required them to witness violent scenes. According to Tamaki’s 2022 autobiography, “Through the Tunnel,” a major source for Rothenberg, the girls found themselves involved in a drama worthy of one of their father’s films in November 2006: Without consulting Tamaki, Leonard pulled Mari and Naomi out of school, packed their belongings into the family’s van and moved to Florida, where the weather was better for tennis.
During telephone calls with Leonard, Tamaki, who likened her husband’s actions to kidnapping, heard her daughters pleading for her in the background. Tamaki joined the family three weeks later, “under pressure, and unable to bear the separation from her daughters,” after Leonard “grew impatient and began accusing her of infidelity and disloyalty.” Naomi drew a hard lesson from the experience. Leonard’s “really big gamble … shaped my mentality, made it the way it is, which is not to question things too much.”
Florida was hardly the sunshine state for the family, who sometimes failed to pay coaches and were once evicted from their home. Naomi and Mari did not belong to any of Florida’s many tennis academies. Like the Williams sisters, they did not play the junior tennis circuit either, further limiting them socially. “I grew up very — I don’t want to say ‘sheltered,’ but I knew five people in my whole life,” Naomi later said. Mari showed promise as an artist, but Naomi was not encouraged to express herself beyond playing tennis. The girls did online home schooling — “the internet has raised me,” Osaka told Rothenberg. That is, when she and her sister were not practicing and playing their sport.
All of this helps explain the shyness and awkwardness in news conferences as Naomi’s career began to take off in 2015. At first many people found Osaka’s unusual demeanor endearing and refreshing, but as the years passed, her halting and offbeat responses to questions and curious social media posts read as unfortunate consequences of her singular focus on tennis.
At its best, this biography is a meticulous interrogation of the price tennis players pay to pursue their dreams. Rothenberg, senior editor for Racquet magazine and a former New York Times reporter, weaves in stories of others who, overwhelmed by a variety of external pressures, have seen their careers sidetracked or even sabotaged. Some of the best passages are devoted to Mardy Fish, who took an extended leave from the game to seek treatment for severe anxiety disorder exacerbated by the multi-headed hydra that is tennis, with its constant, regimented demands of tournaments, daily workouts and practice sessions, global travel, media and business obligations, and extended periods away from family and friends. Osaka grinds through this — and is ground down by it — season after season. “Getting off the tennis tour, a carousel on which powerful centripetal forces of money, ranking points, and hope keep players hanging on, isn’t easy, even if the break is only meant to be temporary,” Rothenberg writes.
Other authors have made similar observations, perhaps no one more adeptly than Michael Mewshaw, in “Ladies of the Court,” his underappreciated behind-the-scenes account of the 1990-91 women’s tennis season. He astutely described the professional tennis tour as “a condition rather than a destination” and a “claustrophobic existence,” especially for young players, who are under intense pressure to achieve as much as possible as quickly as possible, yet often have few diversions and outlets for support and not much education. Rothenberg, in shedding further light on why Osaka frequently pushed herself to continue even as she suffered, suggests that, 30 years later, little has changed.
“A journey which I didn’t enjoy ultimately” is how Mari Osaka, who retired from tennis at age 24, describes her unsuccessful pursuit of what Rothenberg calls the “high-risk, high-reward dream of tennis glory.” Time will tell whether it’s a sentiment that Naomi will apply to her own career.
Ashley Brown is the Allan H. Selig chair in the history of sport and society and an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of “Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson.”
Naomi Osaka
Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice
By Ben Rothenberg
Dutton. 496 pp. $35
A new biography looks at how the star athlete challenged the media, the tennis world — and herself A review by Ashley Brown for The Washington Post. What happens when an athlete achieves her dream (or that of her parents) — a No. 1 ranking in her sport, titles in the most prestigious events, financial security
