Naomi Osaka, the Most Thrilling Athlete of Her Generation, Wins the Australian Open

Naomi Osaka won her first tour-level women’s championship. I was there with my sons, who are just a few years older than Osaka—she was twenty at the time—and I tried, in my boomer-dad way, as the stadium court was readied for the awards presentation, to describe what Osaka might say, what she might be like, when she spoke. I’d been attending her post-match press conferences for a week. She might, I told them, get a little goofy—a little gnomic, even. It was clear, soon enough, that I hadn’t been getting it. She clutched her trophy awkwardly and laughed, and turned her back to the microphone once or twice. “This is probably going to be, like, the worst acceptance speech of all time,” she said. My sons were captivated. Totally. Which is to say that it was all there, already, on that March afternoon in the California desert: not only the ferocious power tennis that would earn her major trophies, but the oxymoronic admixtures of fretful calm and confident self-deprecation that are hallmarks of the sensibility of a generation. There was a rub between her on-court tenacity and her singular off-court persona—and the spark it created is what can be called aura.

That aura stands only to be enhanced by her victory, on Saturday, in the Australian Open final, even though the match was something of a letdown. Osaka prevailed over—a phrase that will get used often enough to describe Osaka’s matches in the coming years—the American Jennifer Brady, 6–4, 6–3, much as she prevailed over Serena Williams in their semifinal match on Thursday, and much as she prevailed over Brady more than five months ago, at the U.S. Open. That latter match was three sets of breathtaking, clean-hitting, baseline tennis: perhaps the best match of 2020. Saturday’s match in Melbourne was scratchier. Both Brady and Osaka have serves that can earn them free points, aces or service winners or shanked returns, when their first serves are hitting their spots. On Saturday, they weren’t putting first serves in even half the time, and they weren’t hitting their spots all that often when they did. Each player had her share of wincing unforced errors. Nerves? A stiff breeze inside Rod Laver Arena? It was hard to tell.

 

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