JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Being a tennis fan, even a tennis fan who does not play (I don’t like sweating, which is probably the only thing I have in common with Roger Federer) is a grueling hobby. You get jet lag without leaving your house (12 hours’ time difference during the US Open, 6 during Wimbledon), and the emotional toll is high (You can be glum for days after the player you root for loses a big match. I submit that this vicarious form of tennis is more painful than losing a match yourself because it is totally beyond your control, jeez, you’re not even holding a racquet).

I’ve been a Federer fan since 2001 (Like many who watched the Sampras passing-the-torch match at Wimbledon, I feel like I discovered him), and around his 18th grand slam I figured my emotional investment had already paid off and I stopped watching tennis altogether. Periodically I would emerge to gloat, but I was largely over it. Post-Federer (a period that is still continuing because the old man still has a few slams in him, assuming you let him rest for six months) I didn’t take up a new fandom (Never liked the way Nadal plays—see sweat and visible effort, yeah it’s too late to pretend not to be an elitist; admire Djokovic’s ugly-beautiful style but not enough to root for him). Touch, the quality I like watching, has largely disappeared from the current power game.

Having retired from watching tennis, I’d never even heard of Naomi Osaka until Raul mentioned her at lunch last Saturday. Well.

She was ready, and she knew it. You could see it in the steely look she gave Williams when they met at the net before the match began. And Williams knew it, too, or learned it quickly. Osaka’s service returns were coming back at Williams’s feet, not giving her time to recover, nor letting her exploit an angle. Williams started to press. She had been making nearly eighty per cent of her first serves in this U.S. Open; against Osaka, she made a little more than half of them. She started double-faulting. Osaka’s own serve, meanwhile, was humming. And, as has been true all throughout the tournament, her serve was perhaps most dangerous in the toughest situations. She saved four of five break points, while winning five of six break points on Williams’s serve. Off the ground, too, she was outplaying Williams, moving better while matching her for pace, angles, and depth. In almost every statistical category, Osaka had the edge. Osaka took the first set, 6-2. Coming into the match, she was 31-0 when winning the first set this year. Still, no one doubted that Williams had the capacity to turn things around.

Read Louisa Thomas’s thrilling article about the US Open final.

And this prescient NYT article, Naomi Osaka’s Breakthrough Game.