The August 2023 issue of Sports Illustrated features The Power List, the definitive index of the 50 most influential figures and forces who drive the sports world, on and off the field and court. For more on The Power List’s Athletes, like Naomi Osaka, click here.
It was the summer of 2020, and veteran tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg seized on a thought. Naomi Osaka would make for a hell of a biography. Then 22, Osaka was emerging as a singularly beguiling figure, the personification of a globalized, multicultural, digital, complicated world.
Here was Osaka, both accessible to her millions of online followers and inscrutable, as she cast her eyes downward and (by her own admission) mumbled through interviews. She was fiercely confident but also strikingly vulnerable. She was born to a Japanese mother and Haitian father but grew up mostly in Florida and was unmistakably American, not least in her slang and diction. She was a celebrity whose tennis earnings were dwarfed by her endorsement income—her sponsors so plentiful that Nike had to relax its rules and let other brands put their patches on her tennis attire. Yet, for all the photo ops and appearances at the Met Gala, Osaka was just as happy to sit in the stands with other millennials at Overwatch tournaments in Brooklyn or the USC spring game in L.A. in April. She might characterize herself as “super-shy,” but there she was, on the streets of Minneapolis, attending a protest after the murder of George Floyd by police.
