“I always thought that would be a mistake for her. “Forever, whether it was the WTA Tour or other interested parties, everyone was always putting pressure on me to get Naomi media-trained,” Stuart Duguid, her agent, said.
There’s a faction in tennis that has long wanted to hear a more polished version of Osaka. Osaka eschewed the playbook of other tennis stars. In doing so, she came to be as precise and efficient in her protest as she has been in her tennis, offering up her version of soft power: deploying bold activism shaped by her unique understanding of the world and her place in it. With time to engage with civil rights protests because of the pandemic’s pause of tennis, Osaka found the space to unravel her thoughts to convey an urgent and unequivocal demand for change. But in 2020, Osaka found her voice and the self-possession to speak up when and how she saw fit, a massive leap for a global superstar who once felt too self-conscious to exhort herself even on the court. When it came to opening up about nearly any deeply felt topic, Osaka used to let the words kink up inside her like an unspooled garden hose.
That demeanor was sufficient as Osaka navigated the world as an effervescent upstart.
SERENA WILLIAMS BLEACH HER SKIN TV
As her star has grown, Osaka has described herself to interviewers as shy and quiet, though her older sister, Mari, likens her to the character Stewie Griffin, from the animated TV show “The Family Guy,” whose malevolent genius is subverted by the constraints of being a baby.