MIAMI — As a vital starting point: When someone tells you they struggle with depression, do not doubt them. I know folks who do. It is a mental health condition both invisible and real.
So when tennis star Naomi Osaka wrote on her Instagram this week, “I have suffered long bouts of depression ever since the U.S. Open in 2018” — even though she had not publicly revealed that before — we can only trust that is true and hope she is being treated for the condition.
That tournament, her first of four major wins by age 23, of course, was fraught with controversy because Serena Williams — whom Naomi is replacing as tennis queen — bitterly argued with the umpire and incurred a game penalty. Booing continued during the match and into the award ceremony, marring Osaka’s big moment.
“It wasn’t necessarily the happiest moment,” Osaka described it.
That’s the backdrop to Osaka’s abrupt and stunning withdrawal from the French Open this week, after the tournament fined her $15,000 for refusing to partake in a postmatch media session and threatening to default her from the tournament if that boycott continued.
Quickly the sport’s other three majors aligned with the French Open in support of the hard line against Osaka, and the narrative was set:
Big, bad tennis exercising its authority and seeming to care very little about the mental well-being of its biggest rising superstar.
The controversy is big and broad, because Osaka — born in Japan, raised in America with Haitian Heritage — is the biggest star to ever withdraw from a major competition with no physical injury to blame.
Instantly Osaka is cast as both innocent victim and sudden advocate for athletes’ mental health, a role she had not before invited or embraced.
Most fellow athletes have stood behind her. Kyrie Irving, Usain Bolt and Venus Williams were some of the first to like her Instagram post. The list is long (Michael Phelps, Kevin Love, DeMar DeRozan) of athletes who have been open about their mental health struggles.
Others such as tennis star Ash Barty have said “It’s part of the job,” in reaction to Osaka refusing her media obligations, but the vast majority are behind her.
The controversy is curious and complicated, though, and worth exploring further.
I do so on egg shells because I cannot overemphasize enough that depression, sometimes triggered by anxiety, is real, and nobody understands what Naomi Osaka is feeling better than Naomi Osaka.
Circumstances matter here, too, though. The French Open has been a devil for Osaka. She is not great on clay surfaces and has never gotten past the third round at Roland Garros in Paris. The foreign press can be pointed, making interviews sound like interrogations, and Osaka faced two weeks of “Why have you failed here?” ad nauseum.
I get preferring to avoid that, wanting to keep the media’s line of questioning from sowing distractions or doubts in your head space.
And to a young woman who made $37.4 million in earnings, in 2020 — biggest single year for any female athlete ever — fining Osaka $15,000 is about like fining you or I a nickel.
It’s moot to argue whether top athletes should be required to speak to the press after games. They are. So until that changes, they should. It quite literally is part of their job.
As I have experienced often in my career, that obligation doesn’t mean athletes have to be willing or engaging. They just have to be there. They can answer with surly two-word answers if they choose. They can disarm prickly questions with humor. In Osaka’s case, she could have spun it and used the platform to advocate for mental health if she chose.
She had not before boycotted any media session until she got back to the one where she knew the questions would be tough.
Osaka’s own sister said as much in a Reddit post prior to Naomi withdrawing from the French, a post since deleted.
“Naomi mentioned to me before the tournament that a family member had come up to her and remarked that she’s bad at clay,” Mari Osaka wrote. “At every press conference she’s told [she] has a bad record on clay. So her solution was to block everything out. She protecting her mind hence why it’s called mental health.”
I do not know Osaka. I believe I have been in her company once, at a Miami Open a few years ago. I recall the media session as cordial, unremarkable.
Michelle Kaufman, the Miami Herald’s longtime (and really good) tennis writer, knows her better. She has been in dozens of interviews with her including an in-depth two-hour private interview two years ago.
“She has always been a media darling, a breath of fresh air,” Kaufman said. “She joked with us. She was totally natural.”
Michelle emphasized to me those impressions do not suggest she doubts whether Osaka is prone to depression, only that her countless personal interactions over the year showed no indication of it.
It may be coincidental, or understandable, that what led her to withdraw from the French Open was triggered by a likely onslaught of questions she simply didn’t care to answer.
Bottom line:
May Naomi Osaka have the mental well-being she needs.
And may tennis get back the rising superstar it needs.
