Naomi Osaka’s Déjà Vu
A very familiar feeling for two players—and an author—at the Australian Open, and other Day 2 matches to watch.
MELBOURNE, Australia — A life of laps on the tennis circuit quickly starts to feel familiar.
Tennis players—and all the other folks who travel on the tour in various roles—hit the exact same spots at the exact same times of year, year after year after year. Sometimes I start to feel like I know Australia exceptionally well because I’ve now been here a whopping 12 times…then I catch myself and realize that I really only know—very well but very limitedly—what it’s like in a specific radius of Central Melbourne in late January.1
But even for this spin cycle lifestyle, Naomi Osaka must be feeling dizzy. For a second year in a row, she’s again set to face Caroline Garcia in the first round of the Australian Open. And yet again, it’s a match scheduled on the second night of the Australian Open. And yet again, it’s the second match of the night session on Rod Laver Arena.
Garcia won that 2024 match here 6-4, 7-6(2). Garcia, who was seeded 16th last year, dominated on that occasion with her serve: she only lost four points on her first serve, never faced a break point, and hit 13 aces to Osaka’s 11 (both Osaka and Garcia rank highly in categories of both acing and getting aced).
The battle left scars.
“My goal now, I think: to be seeded in Australia,” Osaka said back at the China Open in October. “I would really love that. I would love to avoid Caroline Garcia.”
50th-ranked Osaka isn’t seeded here in Melbourne, but neither is Garcia, whose ranking has slipped a bit behind Osaka’s to 58th.
Still, there was more than a 99 percent chance that Osaka would successfully avoid Garcia in the first round.
“I thought he was joking when he said that,” Osaka said of hearing her agent Stuart Duguid tell her who her first round opponent would be here.
Booking a Rematch
I have my own vivid memories of that match, and perhaps my own scars.
That first round encounter was the first match Osaka played after my biography of her, Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice, had come out days earlier (also now almost exactly a year ago).
After Naomi announced her pregnancy in early 2023, we delayed the publication date of the book from August 2023 (the typical window for American tennis books to get published during the lead-up to the U.S. Open) until January 2024, when she was targeting to return from maternity leave in Australia, in order to hopefully be timed around a triumphant comeback that would capture the world’s attention.
Though I rarely feel personally invested in tennis match results, I knew that a run by Osaka in Melbourne would help keep her story in the spotlight, and thus draw more readers to the book I’d spent more than a year writing, which I was—and am—very proud of, and wanted as many people as possible to find and enjoy.
I watched the entire match from court level inside Rod Laver Arena as I commentated on the match on BBC Radio 5 Live, helplessly behind the glass as Garcia bombed serve after serve past Osaka to end her tournament at the first hurdle.
My book didn’t get the momentum it would have from a deep Osaka run, sure, but it got lots of wonderful coverage all sorts of places, and it did—and is still doing—just fine. Naomi Osaka is still very available for those of you who haven’t yet checked it out, either in paper, E-book, or audiobook formats, from your favorite booksellers or—even better, perhaps—your local library.
But what was lost that night in possible momentum for both Naomi Osaka the player and Naomi Osaka the book was unexpectedly gained for Naomi Osaka the player in a relationship with Garcia, strengthened by repeated meetings in the early part of last season. After the loss in Melbourne, Osaka won a rematch in Doha a month later, only for Garcia again beat her in Miami a month after that.
“My relationship with her, it's definitely grown a lot,” Osaka said in her pre-tournament press conference a few days ago here when I asked her about Garcia. “I can’t say, like, we're BFFs. But I really respect her a lot, and I feel the same energy coming from her.”
Osaka said she also felt bonded to Garcia because they were both born on October 16th (Osaka in 1997; Garcia in 1993).
“I can’t ever have bad blood with a fellow Libra,” Osaka told me.
Before getting into how this connection was forged, I want folks to understand how far apart Osaka and Garcia were socially before last year, and how they first met. So in part to prepare for their rematch—and in part to celebrate the 1st birthday of Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice—I thought I’d use the occasion of this rematch to share a short segment from the book about when the celestially-aligned stars first crossed one another almost a decade ago.
Before Osaka had ever played in the main draw of a Grand Slam tournament, she faced Garcia in the final of the now-defunct WTA Rising Stars invitational in Singapore. Here, thus, is a brief excerpt from NAOMI OSAKA’s Chapter 10: “Rising Star.”
An Excerpt from Naomi Osaka
From "Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice" by Ben Rothenberg with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Ben Rothenberg
The promotional activities arranged for the quartet of “rising stars” gave 18-year-old Naomi her first significant occasion to spend time with other professional players beyond her sister. The other three players—Caroline Garcia, Ons Jabeur, and Zhu Lin—were all in their early twenties, and all had played the junior circuit. Naomi, who was three years younger than the rest and had skipped the junior circuit, arrived to Singapore as a complete unknown to them.
Jabeur, an effusive extrovert from Tunisia who had broken boundaries as the first Arab girl to win a major junior title when she won the 2011 French Open, made it her mission to “crack the code” with this quiet new person and her equally quiet father, who had accompanied her on the trip. “You know me, I like to joke with everyone, and when I see someone is shy, I kind of push a little bit, try to make her laugh or something,” Jabeur told me years later.
When Naomi was asked four years later about her memories of the Rising Stars event, it was Jabeur making the effort to get to know her that stood out. “To be honest, I just remember Ons—she was just talking to me nonstop,” Naomi said. “I’m really grateful for her because, like, the amount of shyness that I am right now, back then it was way worse. For me, Singapore is Ons.”
Caroline Garcia was, easily, the cream of the crop of the Rising Stars in Singapore and was almost certainly overqualified for the event. “The girl sharapova is playing is going to be number one in the world one day,” Andy Murray famously tweeted as a seventeen-year-old Garcia led Maria Sharapova in the second round of the 2011 French Open. “caroline garcia, what a player u heard it here first.” Garcia was twenty-two years old and ranked 35th in the world when she came to Singapore, down slightly from her career-high of No. 25. She had beaten Top 10 players seven times already in her career, had already won her first WTA singles title the year before in Bogotá, and had also qualified for the actual WTA Finals in doubles.
So when Garcia ran through the Rising Stars round-robin play undefeated, no one was surprised. Nor were they surprised when Garcia raced out to a 3–0 lead to start in the Rising Stars final against 202nd-ranked Naomi, which was the first match of the sidebar competition held in the main, twelve-thousand-seat Singapore Indoor Stadium, by far the biggest venue in which Naomi had ever played. “In the very beginning I was really nervous because it was really big,” Naomi said. “Like, I’ve never even practiced on that court before, so just being there, I was really nervous.”
But after a few games of one-way traffic against her, Naomi settled into the match. She leveled the first set at 3–3 before Garcia won it 5–3. In the second set, Garcia had four match points, but Naomi fended them each off, ultimately taking the second-set tiebreak 8-6 before running away with the third for a 3–5, 5–4(8– 6), 4–1 victory. Though the invitational tournament wasn’t official and didn’t count toward her ranking, it was, remarkably, the first professional singles event Naomi had ever won, and she had done it in something of a trance.
“One of the biggest days of your career,” emcee Andrew Krasny gushed during the trophy ceremony as he interviewed Naomi. “Four match points and you showed everybody today what a fighter you are!”
Naomi, who played nervously with her ponytail as Krasny spoke, looked surprised. “She had four match points?” Naomi asked, giggling. “Oh. Okay.”
“Maybe it’s better off that you didn’t know,” Krasny suggested, before asking Naomi how it felt to be included in the Rising Stars event.
“It’s really special because it’s, like, the tournament for the top people,” Naomi said. “Being here makes me feel like I’m a top person—even though I’m not, really.”
“Well I’ve got news for you, and I think everybody in the stadium will agree with me: you are one of the top people,” Krasny replied. “So let’s get that trophy over to you.”
Naomi received the large silver plate adorned with pink tiles and posed next to Garcia and new WTA chief executive Steve Simon, her face in a clear but closed-mouth smile. “She already had that huge power on forehand and serve—it was very impressive—but she was very shy and everything, kind of like a little bit afraid to show off,” Garcia told me years later. “I think at the ceremony, I lost, but I was almost the one smiling the most between the two of us. But it was definitely a good experience, and, yeah, she proved to everyone that she was definitely a rising star at that time.”
Naomi’s win over Garcia wound up being the last ever Rising Stars match; the event was discontinued by the WTA after two years despite accurately presaging future stardom with considerable success. Both Jabeur and Garcia would reach the Top 5 in the rankings. And Naomi Osaka would do all right for herself as well.
“Me from Europe, Ons from Tunisia, and Naomi from Japan—half-Japanese, American, whatever—it was a good mix, good different kinds of game style,” Garcia said. “Obviously fans made good choices.”
Years later, before a match against Garcia at the 2021 Australian Open, Naomi recalled Rising Stars as “one of the most stressful but fun things that I did” at that stage of her career. “To be surrounded by the Top 10 and see how everyone works was really fun for me, and inspiring,” Naomi said. “But I would say I kind of felt like I didn’t belong, like I was really trying to prove myself in a way. . . I was the lowest-ranked person there, but I felt like I really wanted to do well in order to fit in.”
[End of excerpt…Bounces article continues below]
Familiarity Breeds…Content?
Naomi won that 2021 Australian Open second round match with ease, beating Garcia 6-2, 6-3 in what stands as her last title, at a major or anywhere else.
When I interviewed Garcia about Osaka for the book about a year and a half after that match in Cincinnati, she had little interest in talking about Osaka and emphasized how little they knew each other.
That was a common theme in my interviews with Osaka’s peers during the research for the book: Osaka was so introverted and so walled off during her time on tour—with omnipresent headphones on to keep others from approaching her—that very few of her fellow players felt like they had any illuminating insights into her personality.
But while facing an opponent is often a way for a relationship to get fraught and frosty, Osaka has had a unique way of using her match-ups as icebreakers for players she’s often otherwise too shy to approach.
A few days after she played Ana Konjuh in Auckland in 2017, Osaka tweeted at Konjuh asking her for unlikely advice: “How do you have such perfect eyebrows?”
After Osaka faced then-little-known qualifier Iga Swiatek for the first time in Toronto in 2019, the two became friendly as well. Months later, the two ate dinner together in Melbourne, where Osaka says she gave Swiatek some key career advice.
“She was telling me like she might go to college,” Osaka recalled years later. “I was telling her, ‘Don’t do that!’
“You're welcome, Iga,” Osaka added with a grin.
After Osaka and Garcia met thrice on court in early 2024, there was a thaw between the two that quickly turned warm.
“It’s crazy,” Garcia told me days ago of their sudden inseparability, “because last year, even when I was not playing her, I was crossing [paths with her] like twenty times a day.”
Garcia is one of the growing number of tennis players who has started her own podcast, Tennis Insider Club, and after gaining more of Osaka’s trust she invited Osaka on to be a guest on the show at Wimbledon last year. Osaka accepted.
“From what we can see from outside, the person I can see now, I can see someone different and way more open,” Garcia told Osaka on the podcast. “It’s nice to see that you look like—I don’t know if it is—but [you’re] in a better place, and I think everyone is happy for you.”
Osaka agreed, and told Garcia that she found herself “being more open” after becoming a mother.
“I used to be extremely closed off,” Osaka admitted to Garcia. “I was very stressed out all the time, so I would wear headphones everywhere; you might have seen me wear headphones everywhere. I just feel like now I see things with different eyes. I see things in the way that I want the world to be amazing for my daughter when she grows up. And I want to learn as much as I can for her, whenever she starts asking questions.”
Osaka, the Open Book
Even as someone who read pretty much every public utterance Osaka ever made during my research on the book, I was struck by several of the vulnerable revelations Osaka felt comfortable making on Garcia’s show last year, so I thought I’d highlight a few of them here.
On Osaka’s Pain After the Controversial 2018 U.S. Open Final vs. Serena Williams
“After I won my first U.S. Open, I went on social media the night after I won. I was doing treatment, and I was just reading a lot of people saying that I didn’t deserve to win. And so—Oh God—I remember I started crying a lot. Sorry. Yeah. And I still think about it a lot.”
“Honestly now [social media] doesn’t bother me, and I barely see it anymore anyways. I try to not go on there. But when I think about the past, then it’s very painful. Because I remember the feelings that I had. And honestly, I never really processed it well. I just kind of ignored it, kept moving on with my life. And then that’s obviously the [2021] French Open stuff and everything.”
On How Close Osaka Came to Retiring After Tokyo 2022:
“When I played my last tournament in Tokyo before my break, I really thought that was going to be my last tournament. And I remember I played Gavrilova and she hurt herself. And then I was supposed to play my next match, and I was, like, kind of having a panic attack the night before. It was very weird to me, because I remembered the joy that I felt when I was younger and trying to win matches and trying to do my best. I eventually began to feel—instead of feeling happiness when I won—it was more like a relief, like I’m supposed to win the matches. I no longer felt joy anymore.
“So I didn’t think it was worth it to keep playing. Yeah, and then I became pregnant…
“I don’t really think I’m coming back to win. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I just know I want my daughter to see me play. Just because it’s such a big thing in my life, and I would love to see her see me play, at least one time.”
Osaka’s daughter, Shai, is still only about 18 months old, so she’s not yet old enough to understand watching her mom play tennis, including tomorrow night’s match against Garcia, but I hope lots of you Bounces readers can check it out.
Beyond the paywall here for Bounces subscribers, I’ve written up previews of seven more matches to watch on Day 2.
[To unlock these previews and all Bounces paywalls past and present, please consider becoming a paid subscriber!]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bounces to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.