After a set and a break in service against Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka quickly threatened to leave the Western and Southern Open in her return to the WTA Tour.
But Osaka kept her composure, tinkered with her tactics, cut back on mistakes and found a way to impose her power play on 17-year-old Gauff.
With creaking foundations and especially pounding decisive serve, the number 2 seed Osaka came back and won 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 and secured a spot in the round of 16 against Jil Teichmann from Switzerland.
It was a reaffirming win for Osaka, who has had a season of ups and downs, winning her fourth Grand Slam singles title at the Australian Open in February and then withdrawing after one round at the French Open after her decision not to participate in the mandatory press conferences led to a clash with tournament officials.
She skipped Wimbledon and then returned for the Olympics in Japan, the country she represents. She became the first tennis player to light the Olympic cauldron, then lost in the third round of the women’s singles to Marketa Vondrousova, missing out on a medal.
On Monday, before her opening game against Gauff, Osaka began to cry and briefly broke off her first press conference in nearly three months after thoughtfully answering a question about her relationship with the news media.
But she was determined to make it through the game against Gauff on Wednesday, applauding some of Gauff’s best shots while producing plenty of highlights of her own.
She lost just one point on her serve in the last set and capped the win with an ace.
“I’ve had a really weird year,” Osaka said in her court interview. “I think some of you know what happened to me this year. I’ve changed my mind a lot. Even if I lost, I would feel like a winner. So much is happening in the world.”
She said she’d been thinking a lot since her Monday press conference.
“I wondered why I was so affected I guess, like why I didn’t want to do media in the first place,” she said. “And then I thought and wondered if I was scared, because sometimes I saw headlines from… players lose and the headline the next day would be a ‘collapse’ or ‘they aren’t that great anymore’. And then I thought, if I wake up every day, I should feel like I’m winning. Like the choice to go out and play, to see fans, for people to come out and watch me play, that’s an achievement in itself and I’m not sure when I started desensitizing that and it didn’t start a performance to be for me, so I felt very ungrateful on that fact.”
Osaka remains committed to using her stardom to draw attention to things that matter to her. Before the tournament, she announced that she would donate her prize money from the Western and Southern Open to disaster relief in Haiti, her father’s native country.
“I don’t do that much,” she said Monday. “I could do more. I’m trying to figure out what I can do and where exactly I can put my energy, but I’d say the prize money is pretty much the first thing I thought I could do to create the most awareness.”
Osaka said the restrictions on playing during the pandemic have affected her.
“I think this whole Covid thing was definitely very stressful with the bubbles and not seeing people and not having interactions,” she said. “But I think it’s really crazy to see the state of the world, what everything is like in Haiti and what everything is like in Afghanistan now, and now I’m just hitting a tennis ball in the United States and making people come watching my game is, I don’t know, like I’d like to be myself in this situation instead of anyone else in the world.”
Osaka has played relatively little tennis this season. Wednesday’s game was her first in a tour competition since her first round victory at the French Open in May. The Olympics, while prestigious, do not award ranking points and are not an official part of the tour.
But hard courts remain by far the best surface in Osaka. Her Grand Slam titles have all been won on hard courts: two at the Australian Open and two at the US Open, which starts on August 30 in New York.
“Of course I would really like to win this tournament because of the extra motivation I have to give an organization my prize money for Haiti,” she said on Monday. “But I accidentally saw my draw, so I know how hard it is going to be.”
Osaka had played against Gauff twice before, beating her 6-3, 6-0 in the third round of the 2019 US Open and losing to her 6-3, 6-4 in the third round of the 2020 Australian Open, where she walked. streets of Melbourne to try to process her emotions.
Wednesday’s game was long in form compared to the previous two, but still featured full-cut shots and short rallies. Their longest exchange was just 11 strokes, and both players struggled with consistency in their returns.
“I think if I come from Tokyo, come here and play her as my first opponent, she’s not really my favorite player to play,” said Osaka. “Mentally, I think it’s most strenuous to play against her.”
But Osaka adjusted her return position early in the second set on Gauff’s second serve and stepped back a few steps to give herself more time to react. It paid off with three service breaks, and although Osaka blew hot and cold, she was the more reliable player in the end.
She had three double faults on Gauff’s nine and 31 unforced mistakes on Gauff’s 45. Most importantly, as Gauff struggled to control her forehand, Osaka seemed to be at peace with the moment and the pressure, upping her game when she needed it most. needed.
Waking up in the morning is already a win,” Osaka said.
