She's Got Game

Tennis Champion Naomi Osaka Has Shot To Fame At The Blinding Speed Of One Of Her Serves. At 21, She Still Remains Something Of An Enigma. One Thing Is for Sure: The Future Is Coming Up Aces.

- Brennan Kilbane

Naomi Osaka serves a tennis ball at a speed of 125 miles per hour. I do not need to tell you that this is nuts fast: 125 miles per hour is almost twice the maximum speed of an adult cheetah as it bounds across the savanna toward the jugular of a gazelle; 125 miles per hour is as fast as a Bugatti Veyron coming at you at 125 miles per hour from across a tennis court.

It is another day of practice for one of the greatest tennis players in the world. The California sun is the brightest it has ever been, and my forehead glistens with an upsetting amount of moisture. Osaka’s terra-cotta skin beams with the noble glaze of heroes. Her curls bounce around her head like a Byzantine halo, while my hair just kind of gradually dampens. Any tennis ball that comes near her gets smacked as if it has personally offended her, banished to the far side of the court, embarrassed and sad.

I watch from a nearby bench, next to Abdul Sillah, Osaka’s fitness coach, a man whose muscles have muscles, and whose voice is softer than a chinchilla wrapped in Egyptian cotton. He refers to Osaka as “the Baby-Faced Assassin.” I look over at her, and she looks so, so bored, like every other 21-year-old at tennis practice.

The key to making sure Osaka is at her physical peak, Sillah says, is honing that kill switch. When he trained Serena Williams, he quietly called her “the Closer,” because she’d stop at nothing to win the match—fury coursed through her veins from the moment she set foot on the court until the moment she set foot on the podium. Osaka is different. Nothing about her gives warning of the existence of several reserves of rage bubbling just under the surface of her skin, and by the time she sends a 125-mile-per-hour tennis ball directly at you, it is too late, and rest in peace.