U.S. Open Controversy Hurt Osaka More Than Serena
By KATHERINE MCDONOUGH ‘19
On Saturday, September 9th, 2018, Naomi Osaka won the U.S. Open Women’s singles championship, defeating Serena Williams. Naomi became the first Japanese professional tennis player to win any of the four major tournaments and, at 20 years old, became the youngest U.S. Open champion in over 10 years in both the Men’s or Women’s finals. Naomi outplayed Serena in every aspect of the match: she had two times more aces than Serena, only one double fault to Serena’s six, a higher serve percentage and win percentage on first serve. She also made fewer unforced errors, ran further than Serena, and won ⅘ breakpoint opportunities, all while only letting Serena win ⅛ of her breakpoint opportunities. Osaka outserved, outsmarted, outran, and simply outplayed Serena Williams on Serena’s home turf: the U.S. Open. Yet, the talk of this U.S. Open is not of the incredible upset of Osaka dominating the greatest tennis player of all time, but instead of her victory, the first grand slam of her career, that ended in a cloud of controversy.
By now, everyone seems to know something concerning this final, but many of the stories are either exaggerated or false. To start the U.S. Open final, Osaka dominated the court. She “broke,” or beat Serena, on Serena’s service game, twice in the first set to win the set 6-2. In the 2018 season, Osaka is yet to lose a match in which she wins the first set. In the middle of the second game of the second set, with Serena leading 1-0, umpire Carlos Ramos called a coaching violation on Serena after witnessing her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, sending signals to her. Serena immediately denied any coaching, exclaiming that “[she doesn’t] cheat to win, [she’d] rather lose.” To Serena’s credit, I fully believe she never saw any signals from her coach, as video evidence proves she was looking in the other direction at the time of the coaching. Whether or not Serena received the coaching signals is irrelevant because as long as her coach was assisting her, she receives a violation. Mouratoglou admitted after the match that he was indeed coaching.
A few games after the initial violation, Serena broke Osaka to take a 3-1 lead in the second set. Osaka quickly retaliated, breaking Serena right back to put the match back on serve. Upset that Osaka broke her, Serena smashed her racquet on the court, resulting in a second code violation. At the U.S. Open, two code violations result in the deduction of a point to start the next game. Serena, still angry that the coaching violation counted, argued with the umpire about the call, continuously telling him she did not cheat. The match continued, and Osaka broke Serena again, resulting in Osaka’s 4-3 lead. All Osaka had to do to win the match, and with it her first grand slam, was to hold her serve -- which Naomi had done for 21 of her past 22 service games. At the 4-3 changeover, Serena continued to defend herself to the umpire and, in doing so, called him a “point thief.” The umpire deemed this aggressive enough to penalize Serena with a third code violation, resulting in the loss of a full game for Serena, putting Naomi ahead 5-3 in the second set. While calling the umpire a “point thief” does not dictate a code violation, and Serena is correct in her claim that male tennis players say many worse comments, this violation appears to have penalized Osaka more than it did Serena.
Yes, the umpire took the game from Serena, not Naomi, but Naomi was most likely going to win the match anyway. When she eventually did, winning 6-2, 6-4, she stood on the podium, receiving her trophy to the sound of an entire stadium booing her. The first Japanese grand slam winner in history and youngest U.S. Open winner in a decade felt the need to apologize on stage – for winning. Naomi is yet to have an interview where the controversy hasn’t come up, and I haven’t seen a single article from a major sports source about how incredibly Naomi performed throughout the match. While this issue raises important questions about the equality between Men’s and Women’s tennis, Naomi Osaka, the Winner of the U.S. Open, seems to have gotten lost in the midst of it all.