Naomi Osaka is still somewhat undecided what her first Grand Slam victory after the hot-blooded US Open final feels like.
An opponent who gets a point deduction and then a game deduction from the referee? An audience that booes at the award ceremony even though they have played one of the strongest matches of their lives and are Grand Slam winners for the first time at the age of 20? And a Serena Williams who reassures her audience with the words that they will somehow survive all this together?
No, it’s not the images you have in front of you for your premiere victory on a bigger stage when you dream of it as a child. And while Williams still hasn’t been able to condescend to an apology for her behavior, Naomi Osaka is still thinking about what she should think about what happened in the final of the US Open.
The memories are somewhat bittersweet,” she said after her opening victory at the WTA premier event in Beijing. “The next day I didn’t want to think about it, because it wasn’t necessarily the best memory for me. I just wanted to keep going.”
The possibly good thing: Osaka didn’t have time to think anyway. Cup shoots, interviews, talk shows – especially in New York you’re busy after a victory like this. And after that Osaka went straight on to Tokyo, also for press appearances and the WTA tournament she won. Of course, she was happy to have won a Grand Slam tournament, Osaka continued. “No one can take that away from me.” They also don’t think it’s a bad memory, “but it was so strange, I just didn’t want to think about it, push it aside. Tokyo was one way of thinking about something else. That’s probably why I played so well there,” she philosophized.
But, typical of Osaka’s unusual humour, a somewhat unusual comparison had to be made for their US Open. Your feelings can be imagined as if you were eating ice cream with a green tea taste. “If you bite into it, it tastes very sweet, but also very strong. That’s how it all feels.”