What Really Happened When Naomi Osaka Beat Serena and Sacked Her Coach

The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a biography on tennis superstar Naomi Osaka. After a break starting in September 2022 and the birth of a daughter, the reinvigorated 26-year-old returned for her first tournament at the elite level this past week. Unfortunately, her big comeback ended in a second-round loss to three-time champion Karolína Plíšková in the Brisbane International, but Naomi was unfazed: “Ngl that was really fun though,” she wrote after the match.

Shrugging off a loss might not seem like a big deal for a top-tier athlete who is used to performing in high-pressure situations, but for Naomi, it’s notable—this is the woman whose mental health became an international conversation after her 2021 French Open withdrawal and her many public spats with reporters, hecklers, and critics.

All of that and more is recounted in journalist Ben Rothenberg’s new book, Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice (Jan. 9). The deeply reported bio traces the athlete’s roots as a “super-shy” Serena Williams wannabe to a four-time Grand Slam singles champion. Below, see some of the book’s best bits and revelations.

As a kid, her dad was so consumed with his daughters’ tennis careers that people called the police on him.

Rothenberg writes extensively about how Naomi’s parents, Leonard and Tamaki, used Serena and Venus Williams’ careers as blueprints for their two daughters, Naomi and Mari. For Leonard, that included taking a page from Richard Williams’ playbook and coaching his kids with an iron fist.

“Tamaki has said onlookers and park administrators repeatedly called police on the family to interrupt the long hours Leonard spent training his daughters on the courts,” the author writes, adding that Tamaki chalked that up to discrimination, since tennis was, and still is, a predominantly white sport. But it also speaks to Leonard’s obsession; he had no full-time job, and instead spent all his time on the tennis court with Naomi and Mari (along with making a few independent short films in his spare time).

Naomi’s tennis success became her family’s financial lifeline.

In 2014, Naomi’s parents were given an eviction notice from their condominium in Florida and were told they had a month to move out. Tamaki was working long hours at multiple jobs to continue earning for the family and subsidizing her daughters’ tennis dreams, but their earnings weren’t enough to cover the expenses of traveling to tournaments. Naomi didn’t have any paying sponsors at the time, and had made only $6,000 through the first six months of the year.

Just four years later, though, Osaka won her first WTA title at Indian Wells and used the $1.34 million prize money to help her mom retire.

Money probably factored into Naomi’s decision to play for Japan over the United States.

Naomi was born in Japan and moved with her family to New York when she was 3 years old. Despite being raised in the U.S., beginning her tennis career there, and even holding American citizenship, she has always represented Japan as a professional player. She and her parents (her mom is Japanese, her dad is Haitian) have long maintained that they made that decision when Naomi was still young out of a desire to respect her roots. But Rothenberg cites a source—Harold Solomon, who coached Naomi in 2014, and who helped liaise with the USTA on the Osakas’ behalf when they were making the Japan vs. U.S. decision—who says money was a big factor.

“Solomon told me he thought the USTA offered too little too late,” Rothenberg writes, “and that the support the Japanese Tennis Association was offering proved pivotal at a time when the family was struggling financially. ‘Japan was willing to do more things for her at the time: get her wild cards into the tournaments and help them finance a little bit. They didn’t have any money… It might have been the thing that pushed them to Japan.’”

Solomon also told Rothenberg: “I think if the United States possibly had stepped up at the time and said, ‘Look, we’re willing to make this investment, we’re willing to do this or send a coach with her and help pay for her expenses,’ I mean, there’s as good a chance as not that they would have done the U.S. thing.”

Serena Williams blew up more than once after losing to Naomi.

The first time Naomi beat Serena, at the Miami Open in 2018, Serena was so beside herself that she skipped her mandatory post-match press conference. According to Rothenberg, she went straight to the VIP parking area, “where Serena, still in her sweaty tennis clothes, gets into her parked Lincoln Navigator and drives. Serena runs a stop sign in the parking lot and keeps going,” all the way to her home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, more than 80 miles away.

Later that year, when Naomi again beat Serena in the finals at the U.S. Open—a match best remembered by Serena’s on-court outburst against the umpire—she at first accepted the silver platter given to the runner-up during the trophy ceremony.

“But once she was behind closed doors, Serena made her feelings about the relic of her loss clear, dumping the platter into a trash can in the locker room,” Rothenberg writes. “As Serena took a shower, a locker room attendant pulled the platter out of the trash and set it neatly on a bench near Serena’s locker. Spotting the platter’s unwelcome resurrection when she returned, Serena was incensed. So there could be no misunderstanding of her wishes again, Serena announced her disdain for the token of her loss for everyone in the locker room to hear: ‘I. Don’t. Play. For. Second. Place,’ Serena said, spiking the platter away once more.”

Relatedly, Rothenberg also writes that after Serena lost the U.S. Open final in 2019 to Canadian Bianca Andreescu, Serena canceled a planned Saturday Night Live hosting gig.

Naomi really did keep herself in the dark about Serena’s U.S. Open outburst.

Two days after Naomi’s aforementioned U.S. Open victory against Serena, she appeared on the Today show for her first in-depth interview since the match. Rothenberg writes that a publicist from IMG, Naomi’s agency at the time, gave her the following advice: “They will bait you into it, but don’t say anything bad about Serena, it’s not worth it.”

Naomi followed that advice, and even went a step further: She publicly disengaged from the story entirely, saying on Today, and in subsequent interviews, that she had no idea what was going on on the court between Serena and the umpire, and that in the aftermath, she purposely avoided learning more about what had happened. According to Rothenberg, “Naomi chose to engage with the story as little as she could for not just days, but for weeks, months, and years.” Indeed, her coach at the time, Sascha Bajin, said they never again discussed the match after that night.

She sacked her coach over his relationship with another player.

When Naomi broke things off with Bajin, it was a shock to the tennis world; at the time, she was the reigning No. 1 player, and he’d just been named the WTA Coach of the Year. After the 2019 Australian Open, though, where she won her second consecutive major, she called a fateful team meeting in Melbourne.

“Naomi confronted Bajin, breaking the weeks-long silence between them, putting him on the spot about what she’d heard about his off-court relationship with another player,” Rothenberg reveals, confirming a long-held rumor. “Bajin, who had encouraged Naomi to hit with this player at tournaments despite her much lower ranking, denied it repeatedly, and the group dispersed. The next day, when Bajin came back and admitted it was true, Naomi told him that her trust had been broken.”

According to Rothenberg, Naomi and Bajin had one last practice together a few days later, which ended with her in tears. Later that evening, Naomi’s agent called Bajin to fire him.

Her stand against racial injustice didn’t sit well with all of her peers.

In 2020, Naomi announced she would step off the court at the Western & Southern Open tournament as a stand against police brutality, following in the steps of some NBA players who had done the same. After her decision, tournament organizers scrambled and then announced that play for the entire tournament would be paused for a day, as “a stand against racial inequality and social injustice.” That didn’t sit well with a lot of Naomi’s peers, Rothenberg writes.

“Unlike in the NBA and WNBA, where decisions had been publicly made team-wide and league-wide, Naomi Osaka was getting sole credit—or blame—for sparking the stoppage in tennis… The European players, far less attuned to happenings in American politics, were largely shocked and confused by the decision. Many were angry, especially with the U.S. Open so close on the horizon.”

Rothenberg adds: “Though no players publicly dissented on the day of the stoppage, several players took their complaints to tour and tournament officials… The two other major champions still in contention in the Cincinnati draw, Novak Djokovic and Victoria Azarenka, both independently lodged the same complaint to officials: no one would ever stop a tournament for something unrelated to the sport happening in their respective home countries of Serbia and Belarus, so why should something happening in America disrupt a tournament?”

Another of the ATP semifinalists that week, Roberto Bautista Agut, told Rothenberg he “felt that it was not fair… The ATP schedule shouldn’t depend on what she did; we have to be for ourselves, and I think it was not a great choice.”

She wasn’t seeing a therapist at the same time that she was the public face of mental health.

Naomi’s emotional wellbeing became front-page news after she withdrew from the 2021 French Open, citing mental health concerns. After the tournament, she signed a deal to endorse the mental health services company Modern Health, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “It’s O.K. to Not Be O.K.”

“What she did not do,” Rothenberg writes, “despite being the focus of a worldwide conversation around mental health and depression, was seek or accept meaningful professional help from mental health professionals, which many outside her circle assumed was happening given the public spotlight on her mental health.” Later, he writes, “Those close to her knew there was a disconnect between her public presentation and private reality: she hadn’t been getting any professional psychological help of her own.”

That finally changed when Osaka’s team called a meeting the day after her disastrous 2022 loss at Indian Wells, where she was brought to tears by a heckler who shouted at her, “Naomi, you suck!” She began speaking to a therapist over the phone, and later sarcastically quipped, “It only took, like, a year after French Open.”