Hi, friends. So, the Australian Open is underway Down Under, which is thrilling news for me, your favorite tennis obsessive. This tournament is extra special because it marks the return of 26-year-old Naomi Osaka, a Power Plays favorite, to major tennis. The four-time Grand Slam champion returned to the WTA Tour this month following a 14-month hiatus which saw her give birth to her first child, daughter Shai.
Unfortunately, Osaka’s time in Melbourne didn’t last long; she lost in the first round to former top-five player Caroline Garcia 6-4, 7-6 on Monday. (That means that this newsletter is very poorly timed. Oops. Please keep reading, it’s worth it!!!) However, Osaka’s return to the hardcourt has provided a phenomenal opportunity to reflect on how special chapter one of her tennis journey was, and to get excited for all of the possibilities ahead in chapter two.
And by far the best way to do that is by reading Ben Rothenberg’s new book, “Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice.”
Rothenberg — a veteran tennis journalist who has written for the New York Times, among other publications — first heard about Osaka back in 2014, when the off-the-radar 16-year-old introduced herself to the tennis community by upsetting U.S. Open champion Sam Stosur at the Stanford Classic, a WTA event in California. It wasn’t just her power, shotmaking, and youth that stirred the interest of tennis reporters across the world; it was her charming candor in press.
In the years since, Rothenberg often had a front-row seat to Osaka’s ascension from a shy, awkward outsider who was literally playing for the ability to put food on her family’s table, to a global superstar who became the highest-paid female athlete in the world.
As he notes in the interview below, there are many books that could (and should!) be written about Osaka — ones that focus more on her heritage, what she means to Black women, what she means to the Japanese community, the impact of her advocacy and mental health, and eventually, her impact as a mother competing at the highest levels of sport.
Rothenberg’s book certainly gives weight to and carefully considers all of these topics. But I believe the strength of his book is that it tells her story through the lens of the tennis tour — the beats and the confines of the tournaments, the press conferences, and the day-to-day wins and losses. Understanding that world is essential to understanding Osaka, and nobody understands that world like Rothenberg, who is one of a dwindling number of journalists who has traveled the world following the sport over the past decade, and therefore really gotten to see Osaka grow up.
I’m admittedly biased as someone who has been friends with Rothenberg for a dozen years, but I highly recommend the book. (Click here to order it from independent bookstores.) I learned so much about Osaka’s story — particularly her childhood — that I didn’t know, and it really put into perspective how transformational of a force she has been, both in tennis and the culture at large, simply by being herself.
I spoke with Rothenberg about the process of writing this book, Osaka’s complicated relationship with press conferences, her unconventional childhood, the trappings of success, and so much more. I think you all are really going to love this conversation.
A conversation with Ben Rothenberg on “Naomi Osaka”
Power Plays: Hi, Ben! Let’s start with the basics: How did this project come about?
Ben Rothenberg: Naomi really came to me as an idea on the very day that she stopped play in New York during the Cincinnati tournament 2020. That summer she'd been vocal on social media about Black Lives Matter and she'd attended the George Floyd protests in Minnesota, and she put out a statement saying that she wasn't gonna play her semifinal match at the Cincy tournament after police in Wisconsin killed Jacob Blake. She was following in the lead of the Milwaukee Bucks, who were the first team to stop after the shooting of Blake, and it started to domino through sports to the NBA and WNBA. But Naomi was really the sole person in tennis speaking up, and that Naomi was the person to cause this disruption was really remarkable to me, given I'd known her for years as being this really profoundly shy person who was often very timid in a lot of social settings. The fact that she was able to find her voice in this way, for this cause was really remarkable to me.
Then she wound up using that motivation she had playing for this cause by wearing the [face masks featuring names of Black victims of racial injustice] and then winning the US Open two weeks later. Rather than being burdened by this pressure, that she really felt empowered by it was remarkable to me. So that was when the first real seeds of the idea got planted.
PP: When you’re writing a book about an athlete, there are a few directions you can go: There’s an authorized biography or ghostwriting an autobiography, which both involve working very closely with the athlete in question. Then there’s the unauthorized biography, which I guess is what your book is. Why did you take this route, and how close —if at all — did you work with Osaka and her team during the process?
BR: In terms of unauthorized vs. authorized, it's an interesting binary in biographies that I wasn't really aware of before I started this project. Honestly, I feel like my book is somewhere in the middle — it's definitely not authorized in that this was my idea, it was done independently, and Naomi did not have approval or veto rights over anything in the book. But a lot of times I think people associate “unauthorized” with biographies of like, Meghan Markel or some royal, where it's all gossipy and done without the person's knowledge and in a way that's antagonistic to them. And that's not this book, either. I mean, Naomi and her team were cooperative, for sure. Her agent was very responsive, and Naomi herself also was personally involved in the fact-checking process at the end, which was very helpful. So in that sense, it was really just kind-of journalistic more-so than authorized or unauthorized.
PP: Early on in her career in press conferences Osaka built this special relationship with media and established herself as such a unique and engaging personality. And then, of course, in more recent years, press conferences became such a point of anguish and of distress for her, and the issue became such a cultural touchstone. Why do you think that turned for her?
BR: Yeah, it's interesting. For much of her career — and I think she’s largely regained this, actually — Naomi had this really unique approach to and comfort with press conferences, where she was more open and more revealing and looser in press conferences than she was in those conversations off-the-record in the hallway, which is totally opposite to almost any athlete or public figure you cover. Something about the structure of press conferences, or just knowing familiar people, made her sort-of less socially hesitant, and made her really remarkably revealing. I mean, she's said so many really open, vulnerable, and sometimes profound things in press conferences, which so often can be just a complete din of cliches and empty answers and evasive answers and deflections.
Even some of her long-term coaches have said that they actually learned to start watching her press conferences, because she was more revealing in the press conferences than she was in her conversations with them one-on-one. That's not common at all among athletes, for sure.
But then during the pandemic, the push to remote press conferences caused her to feel less human connection with people in the room, and she began to feel uncomfortable. Also, at that time, more and more people were coming to her press conferences. Early in the pandemic she had started making more political stances, and that broadened the type of reporters who were interested in showing up to her press conferences and asking her questions. So it became a sort of a dehumanized experience with a bigger and less familiar crew.
And a lot of times, those new reporters who were there were much more, let's say. sensationalism-oriented people who really wanted her press conference to deliver a story, to deliver a headline. They were giving her questions that were a bit more pointed, or loaded, or tricky, knowing that whatever Naomi Osaka said would drive clicks at this time of her career. That, combined with feeling pressure about the Tokyo Olympics and being the face of that, and her growing amount of sponsors, and a win streak that stopped, and a bit of struggling results, all these things sort of combined to where she was just feeling uncomfortable on a lot of fronts, and she saw press conferences as something that she once enjoyed that had become a stressor for her. She tried to mitigate that with her stance at the French Open, and I think she really underestimated how much resistance she would get by taking what she thought was a potentially a minor step; she didn’t think it was gonna be nearly as disruptive as it turned out to be.
PP: There's a lot here about Osaka growing up. Was there anything that you found out about her childhood and her early tennis years that kind of surprised you?
BR: I didn't realize how total and how profound the family's commitment to chasing the tennis dream was. You know, they really uprooted their lives a couple of times, most notably when they moved to Florida very abruptly in pursuit of tennis, taking Naomi and her sister out of school and away from their friends and away from their community they had in New York to go down to Florida and live this very isolated existence that was tennis and not much else. Talking to Mari, Naomi's sister, and also reading back through things Naomi said and piecing together that part of the timeline, I was really struck by how stark that was and how much that definitely does inform a lot of how Naomi was socially as an adult.
PP: It also struck me how much they really struggled financially and how much those early earnings, those early bits of success completely fueled her. It’s easy to forget, for these tennis players that are successful young and not from wealthy families, how quickly money changes everything about their life.
BR: Yeah, your life can change very quickly. You’re suddenly the breadwinner for your family as a young person. Also, after Naomi won her first U.S. Open and retired her mother, she was still living at home with her parents in her childhood bedroom.
PP: In the latter parts of the book, there's two main themes — the first is her social activism and her standing up for Black Lives Matter and for Black people who have been murdered by police. We all lived through that in real time as it was happening, but going back and re-reporting that period, what stood out to you about Osaka's journey to activism?
BR: You could really see her finding her voice in real time. She had known about her shyness, obviously, and it was something that she was frustrated by in herself at times. She had been trying to shake off that shyness a bit already during the stoppage in 2020, even before the murder of George Floyd. That just happened to be an event that came at a time when she was already trying to embolden herself, and it just became this really animating moment for her, as it was for a lot of people. It was a big shift for her, and it was exhausting for her at the same time. As much as it was empowering and everything, it was still largely outside of her comfort zone. I was struck by that, and was also struck by how she saw it as a choice somewhat, but also, she couldn't imagine not doing it. She felt there was this call to action for what was going on in the world that she as a human, as a Black woman, felt obligated to respond to, and to and to take up as a cause.
PP: At the same time, she's dealing with her own mental health struggles. I had forgotten how early in her career that we saw signs of that. At a tournament in Charleston in 2018, she admitted to feeling “depressed” and “so sad right now” after an early loss. Reliving that episode, what struck you about that moment? To me, in hindsight, it was definitely a moment of foreshadowing.
BR: I think that's one of the things that I was most gratified by in this reporting process was the way I was able to lay out the chronology, and seeing how that moment really fit into the arc of her career and her life. The Charleston moment where she was really struggling came directly after two of the biggest successes in her life, which were winning Indian Wells in 2018, and then beating Serena in the first round of Miami a couple days later. She had experienced a lot of attention and highs in those two tournaments, and then was very depleted by it. And also because she'd accomplished this major goal of her mom's financial security, she didn't have the same motivation and drive and fire that she'd had previously.
That was one of a few signs that it was not always a happy or easy rise that I think were instructive for understanding what came later. Because so often you just see a 20-year-old winning a Grand Slam, then getting to No. 1 at 21, and then winning two more grand slams, and think it's all a success story and all fun, but there's a lot of contours in the ride beyond it just being a nonstop ascent.
PP: Yeah, and drawing on my own mental health journey, I must say it's relatable — well, I mean, it's not relatable to win a major tournament and retire your mother at the age of 20 — but I think it is relatable in the sense that success doesn't always feel the way you think it's gonna feel, and that success isn't a comfortable place to be.
Now, Ben, I’m going to state the obvious: You're a white man from America writing about a Black woman from Japan with Haitian ancestry. Some people might wonder what you have to add to the story and whether you’re going to be able to tackle these complex topics of gender and race that Naomi has to deal with. So to finish, I just wanted to ask you plainly, how you approach that?
BR: I was definitely conscious of that. It was something that I have had to learn about throughout my career. The most important player I covered the majority of my career was Serena Williams, and I’ve had to learn — sometimes the hard way — about what I didn't know, and about how people saw things or read things and saw layers that I didn't know existed. So I do think that years of covering Serena gave me some background and some understanding. Also, for this book, I talked to a lot of people, a lot of whom actually aren't in the final version of the book, from Japan about ethnicity in Japan, because obviously Naomi's multiculturalism in Japan is a specific thing for her and a big part of her story.
I tried to listen and talk to as many people as possible. I had help in the editing process as well from people who have lived experiences of being in different minorities, which I was very appreciative of, and very open to, and I hope that with the time I had to do this book, that I was able to do everything fairly. If people have objections to anything they think I got wrong or missed, I would be happy to listen to that.
You know, I think there's a bunch of different books that could be written about Naomi Osaka and a bunch of different approaches — there could be a Japanese book that was written about her from a Japanese perspective, that could look very different, in a lot of ways, than the book that I wrote, or a book from the Haitian perspective, or a book that maybe foregrounds, even more than I did, mental health. There's a lot of different lenses, and I think they would all be valid and fascinating ways to look at Naomi. And so this is mine. I hope I was able to make a book that won't feel discordant to people who have different identities or different lived experiences, whether they share them with Naomi or not.
Thanks for asking that last question. I’d heard Ben on HUAL last week and I was a little surprised they didn’t ask him about managing his white dudeness. How did you feel about his response?