Naomi Osaka

August 1, 2023

A senior editor at Racquet magazine, sports journalist Rothenberg has been following Haitian American/Japanese player Naomi Osaka since she first emerged on the Women's Tennis Association tour in 2014. Here he tracks a career that has included Osaka's four Grand Slam singles championships and fierce advocacy of social justice and mental health issues. Prepub Alert.

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October 30, 2023
Racquet magazine editor Rothenberg (The Stylish Life) serves up a compassionate if unrevealing biography of the tennis phenom. Born in Japan in 1997, Osaka started playing the sport when she was still a toddler, practicing alongside her older sister and coached by her father, who sought to emulate the strategies and success of Venus and Serena Williams’s father, Richard. The Osakas moved to the U.S. in 2001 so Naomi and her sister would have more opportunities to pursue tennis (at the time, “Japan had little success producing professional tennis stars”). Highlighting the struggles Osaka faced growing up, Rothenberg notes that “onlookers and park administrators repeatedly called police on the family to interrupt the long hours spent training his daughters on the courts” in Queens, N.Y., and that the family was barely scraping by financially while Osaka was finding her footing in the tennis world. However, by age 16, Osaka had earned recognition for her ferocious serves, which clocked in at over 100 miles per hour. She went on to win four Grand Slams from 2018 to 2021, before taking a three-month hiatus in 2021 to tend to her mental health, and then stepping back again in 2023 to have a child. Rothenberg provides exciting accounts of key matches and a sensitive treatment of Osaka’s public battle with depression, but his subject remains something of an enigma, with the shy superstar’s inner life never quite coming into focus. Still, Osaka’s fans will lap this up.

December 1, 2023
A comprehensive look at the career of a young tennis star. Rothenberg, a senior editor for Racquet magazine, has followed Osaka ever since she joined the Women's Tennis Association Tour in 2014. In this chronicle of the ups and downs of Osaka's career, the author describes her parents' marriage, Osaka's eerie similarities to the Williams sisters, the growth and refinement of her skills as a tennis player, her early tournament successes and failures, her involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, and her pregnancy and (possibly temporary) retirement from tournament play. Born in 1997 in Japan to a mixed-race couple (Japanese mother, Haitian father), Naomi and her sister, Mari, received strict instruction from their father, who followed the example of Richard Williams and improbably succeeded in raising a world-class tennis player (Mari also played professionally but was not as accomplished as Naomi). Osaka won the U.S. Open in 2018, defeating her personal idol, Serena Williams, in a match marred by an officiating controversy, and went on to be ranked number one in the world as both a player and an earner of endorsement income. (She has won three other major tournaments since that first victory.) But as Rothenberg shows, Osaka, like many professional athletes, has struggled with mental health issues, which has caused her to withdraw from tournaments multiple times. The author nicely handles his subject's bouts of self-doubt and depression, and though Osaka herself was to seek a diagnosis and counseling, the descriptions of her crises are compelling. The prose is workmanlike, and the narrative structure is straightforward. The attention to detail is admirable, though perhaps too much text is devoted to the progress of individual matches. Because Osaka is only 25, a 450-page book seems a bit excessive at this point in her journey. A solid account of the early stages of an as-yet-unfinished career.

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Starred review from December 1, 2023
When four-time Grand Slam champion Osaka was just three, her parents introduced her (and her sister Mari) to tennis, using the trajectory of the Williams sisters as a blueprint. Their plan was a success; in 2020, when she was just 22, Osaka became the "highest-paid female athlete in history," earning a whopping $50 million per year. Rothenberg, senior editor of Racquet magazine and cohost of the tennis podcast No Challenges Remaining, offers an insightful look into the unconventional life of this Gen-Z tennis star. Sports fans will devour details about Osaka's coaches and tournament matches on her way to becoming the number one ranked female tennis player in the world. Multiethnic readers will relate as Rothenberg explains how Osaka, who is half Japanese and half Haitian, navigates different societal expectations. Especially moving is the account of how Osaka, a self-described introvert, made her foray into sports activism in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, finding her voice and the power she can wield as a world-class athlete. Using her platform, Osaka has made a mark advocating for mental health and, as Rothenberg shows, along the way learned to be unapologetically herself. Includes photos and notes.

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