Today, Explained - Game, Upset, Match

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

Naomi Osaka defeated her lifelong hero Serena Williams to win the US Open on Saturday. The match might be remembered for the wrong reasons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Today Explained this week comes from TransferWise. It's a cheaper way to send and receive your money. The Economist says TransferWise takes a machete to the hefty fees that come with sending money abroad. I wouldn't recommend taking a machete to anything, but you can check out TransferWise for free when you go to TransferWise.com slash today or download the app. I watch a lot of tennis. I've been watching tennis since I was a kid with my dad who watched a lot of tennis before me, but neither of us had ever seen anything quite like Saturday's U.S. Open final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka. No one who watches tennis had ever seen anything like it. Caitlin Thompson was watching the U.S. Open on Saturday. Yes, I was. She's the publisher of Racket Magazine.

I am. Let's start before that first serve even happened, Caitlin. Was this matchup between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka going to be a big deal regardless of who won? Yes, and I'll tell you why. Serena Williams has 23 Grand Slams total. Technically, she has the most Grand Slams of anyone, male or female, ever. And for the kids at home who don't know what a Grand Slam is, it's what? The Australian Open, the U. the US Open, the French Open, and Wimbledon in the UK, yeah?

Correct. It's the biggest tournaments of the calendar year. Now, there's a bit of an asterisk next to that because originally the record stood at 22 Grand Slams held by my girl Steffi Graf, German, 22. Nobody ever thought in our lifetimes anybody would surpass that. Then here comes Serena, ties it, breaks it, and some would say a new record was invented for her to chase. 24 Grand Slams won by Margaret Court, who's a terrible homophobe who lives in Australia. But nobody really considered that a big deal because Margaret Court won it in the non-open era. Will she surpass Margaret Court putting into any clarity the fact that she is in fact the greatest male female to hold a racket of all time?

And Serena won her first US Open, her first Grand Slam title in 1999. And she was facing off against Naomi Osaka, who was potentially going to win her first U.S. Open against her hero Serena Williams. Against her hero Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka's dad, Leonard, who's a Haitian man, was watching the Williams sisters compete and decided that that is what he would teach his daughters. And so the tie between Naomi Osaka and Serena, it like extends way back to basically the beginning of 20-year-old Naomi Osaka's career. Now, a lot of us who watch tennis were expecting Naomi Osaka to win. She'll be giggly and deferential in press conferences, but when she gets on the court, she's not messing around. When I step onto the court, I feel like a different person, right? I'm not a Serena fan.

I'm just a tennis player playing another tennis player. She's what I think a lot of us are so thrilled is the future of tennis. There's no doubt that she is in terms of what she's capable of doing and playing like, but in terms of how she sort of effortlessly but also thoughtfully talks about being Haitian, having a ton of connection to the States, having spent a lot of time here, but being born in Osaka and being an outsider in a culture that she really identifies with because obviously her mother is Japanese. She's kind of an outsider no matter where she goes. She's an interesting kid. And I think coming into this match, the question wasn't, can she play better tennis than Serena? It was just more like, can she keep it together this is a grand slam final against her

idol knowing that the crowd was going to be super super crazy pro serena could she bring her best game to the court and we should say that in the semi-final match that naomi osaka played to get to this final with serena at the post-game interview, they said, you know, you faced 13 break points. 13 saved. How did you do that? This is going to sound really bad, but I was just thinking I really want to play Serena. Why?

Because she's Serena. Like, what do you mean? And she said it so sincerely. And then they said, like, do you have anything you'd like to say to Serena? And she goes, I love you. And then kind of giggled and smiled. Anything else to add? I love everybody.

Okay, so how does this match on Saturday evening start off? Naomi Osaka immediately is winning points. Going in for Sato Saka. Six games to two. That's not always the worst sign for Serena fans. I knew Serena had another gear, and when she would find it is kind of what I was thinking. So Serena goes down a set, right, in all this,

and then things start to get interesting at sort of the beginning of the second set? At the beginning of the second set, she goes up a game, which puts her ahead for the first time in the match. Now, her record of coming from behind, finding a way, finding another gear, getting fired up, getting the crowd involved, all of these things are things the other players know about her. And then the infamous thing happens. And this is an incident involving Serena's coach. He, at this point, flashes a signal to her.

Play the net, because Serena's getting beat on the baseline. Well, I mean, I'm honest. I was coaching. I mean, I don't think she looked at me, so that's why she didn't even think I was. And the chair umpire notices it, right? The chair umpire immediately says, code violation, coaching. Warning.

It's not a super common call, but by all accounts, it was the correct call. And it might be confusing to some people who don't know tennis, but basically when someone's in a match, you're not supposed to be receiving coaching of any kind. It's sort of one-on-one, no other voices, no other input, yeah yeah that's another confusing thing that is a rule that's applied uniformly across the men's game and only in grand slams in the women's game so in the women's game you actually can have coaching and oftentimes players will request their coach and their coach will come down and sit with them on changeovers and go over tactics sometimes they'll have smart pads they'll talk about statistics And oftentimes they're mic'd up.

So Carlos Ramos, the chair umpire, says, hey, that's a warning. You can't receive coaching. How does Serena react to that warning? Real bad. She's somebody who takes the sort of ethics of the sport extremely seriously. And I understand why you may have thought that was coaching. But I'm telling you, it's not. I don't cheat to win. I'd rather lose. I'm just letting you know.

I don't in any way think that this was this umpire's intention to sort of cast dispersions onto the metal of her character. That said, that's how she interpreted it. Which was interesting because just watching it from home, I saw it as almost he was giving her coach a warning, not really giving Serena any sort of warning. Serena clearly didn't do anything wrong. She looked up at her coach, who was making a hand signal,

and the chair umpire said, hey, you can't do that. She perhaps charitably could be seen as having a misunderstanding of what that rule means and how to sort of interpret it, which is, as you said, your coach is coaching you, not you are cheating. Or you could uncharitably view it as the beginning of Serena finding a reason to get the crowd involved, to get herself riled up and find that Serena Williams that needs to be on this court because whatever's happening isn't working. So what happens next once Serena has this first altercation with the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos? She came back out after that, and she played a couple of brilliant points, getting fiery. But you know what else happened?

Naomi Osaka had answers for every single one of them. Naomi Osaka breaks in front, second set. She was better, period. And that made Serena very angry, and that's when the racket gets broken. Code violation, racket abuse, point penalty, Mrs. Williams. Serena, as she loses that game, and there's no doubt in my mind, Serena, knowing she was breaking a racket, knew she was going to get a code violation. It's an automatic one. There's no room for

interpretation. If you abuse your racket, you get a point penalty, period. But I think Serena, maybe because she was sort of, all this emotion was swirling around, the greater sort of context of what's happening, she doesn't realize that she's already been warned. The coaching was the warning. She thought that the penalty might have gone away, the warning might have gone away, but it hadn't. So instead, she was facing sort of her second tier of penalty. Right. The first infraction is a warning.

The second infraction is a point. The third infraction is a game. The fourth infraction is getting defaulted. I believe this rule was instituted in 1990 when basically John McEnroe couldn't behave at all. Answer my question! The question, jerk! Now, she gets so enraged at this point and she has a lot to say about it. I didn't get coaching. You need to take, you need to make an announcement that I didn't get coaching. I don't cheat. I didn't get coaching. You need to take, you need to make an announcement that I didn't get coaching. I don't cheat.

I didn't get coaching. How can you say that? You need to, you need to, you owe me an apology. You owe me an apology. I have never cheated in my life. I have a daughter and I stand to his right for her

and I've never cheated. And you owe me an apology. You owe me an apology. You don't ever do that. And this continues after the next changeover. You stole a point from me. You're a thief too. Instead of de-escalating the situation, he decided to apply

the full force of the rules. Code violation, verbal abuse, gang penalty, Mrs. Williams. Upon being called a thief and a liar, he decided to dock her a game. Now, that's not an arbitrary docking of a game. It's a third violation of the rules.

She goes back to the baseline, now trailing three games to five. And once this game is penalized, not only does it look like the match is almost over, but all hell breaks loose, right? All hell breaks loose. There are men out here that do life-large because I'm a woman.

Because I'm a woman, you're going to take this away from me? That is not right. And everyone starts booing and basically losing their minds. Oh my goodness, this is very unfortunate. And what's Osaka doing while all this is going on? To her credit, she's literally hopping at the back of the baseline, eyes on her strings, adjusting with her fingers,

basically just trying to breathe and stay detached. Some context that's useful at this moment is that Sasha Bajan, who's a Serbian-German guy, used to be a hitting partner of Serena's and notably got his first coaching job when he started working with Naomi Osaka last fall. He knows Serena very, very, very well. And it is at this moment that I suspect he had sort of the most impact on the match, only in the sense that watching her calmly detach herself from the pandemonium that was happening between a number of tournament officials and Serena and the crowd, she goes into her own kind of bubble.

She's staring at her strings. And I have to imagine that Sasha Bajan gave her some kind of coaching before this match, saying, with Serena, it's never just about the tennis. There's going to be something else. There's going to be some kind of other big moment, whether it's the emotions or the crowd or all the above. I doubt he could have predicted this, but I saw a well-coached player and also an incredibly emotionally poised player choosing not to involve themselves or get rattled by any of this, which is remarkable. After this subsides and the two players take their positions, Naomi Osaka serving, Naomi Osaka is ice cold. That is undeniable. She gets up and she serves a game with poise and

an incredibly, honestly to me, breathtaking amount of concentration and closes it out. The second match, Osaka 6-6-4. There'll be Osaka, a quantum leap, U.S. Open champion, instant star. And celebrates in a muted way amid an increasingly distraught crowd. But the tennis that she played, the game that she plays on her serve at 5-4 is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen because it combined what we knew of her,

which is her tremendous tennis playing skills, which was really tested, which was the fact that she's a 20-year-old in her first Grand Slam final playing against the greatest of all time, men or women, period, and coincidence or not, her idol. And she keeps it together and plays an incredible game. One of the things I'll never forget from watching this match wasn't necessarily all the unprecedented stuff that happened on the court during the match, but it was after Naomi Osaka won what is the realization of a lifelong dream she had to play Serena Williams in the U.S. Open Women's Final and win. She gives Serena a hug.

She climbs up to the stands to give her mom a hug, and then she comes back down and puts a towel over her face and sits on the sidelines for like five minutes and the camera keeps oscillating between serena who's clearly upset and the champion who's sitting there covering her face from the world in the height of her entire professional career because the emotions were so raw and mixed for her. Well, and I think also the context here is that the crowd was, of 20,000 people, is raining down booze. And then things get worse during the trophy ceremony.

And now, if you would, for our finalist, Serena Williams. I've never seen anything like this. I was distraught watching this. It was horrible. I think I might have cried a little bit. Serena, not the result that you wanted tonight. How do you put into perspective what this match contained? Well, I don't want to be rude, but I don't want to interrupt.

I don't want to do questions. I just want to tell you guys, she played well, I don't want to be rude, but I don't want to interrupt. I don't want to do questions. I just want to tell you guys, she played well, and this is her first Grand Slam. Naomi Osaka, the fresh-faced champion of the sport, who should have been basking in applause and exhilaration at achieving this thing, is pulling her visor over her eyes, covering tears. And it was just a fiasco. Like nobody quite knew what to do or how to deal with it. And it gets so bad that Serena has to ask the crowd to stop booing and let Naomi have her moment, right? And I know, I know you guys were here rooting and I was rooting too, but let's make

this the best moment we can and we'll get through it. But let's give everyone the credit where credit's due and let's not boo anymore. We're going to get through this and let's be positive. So congratulations, Naomi. No more booing. Serena pulls it together, gets the crowd to acknowledge that this is Naomi's moment and that Naomi played really well. This was the shining moment for me of Serena pulls it together, gets the crowd to acknowledge that this is Naomi's moment

and that Naomi played really well. This was the shining moment for me of Serena. Gives Naomi a hug, makes it very clear that she is not angry with her. And then Naomi's fighting back tears as she gives her acceptance speech. I know that everyone was cheering for her and I'm sorry it had to end like this. I just want to say thank you for watching the match. Thank you. From what happened in terms of the way that the players spoke on the podium, great sportsmanship, great leadership,

and I think a great job done by both of them to sort of save the moment. But I would argue also that, you know, the damage was already done by then. coming up williams osaka instantly goes from being a tennis match to a rorschach test for your attitudes on sports and fairness and gender and race and tradition whatever this is today explained They explained. Hello? Hey, Jeff Bird. Hi, how's it going? Hey, it's Sean Romsom. How you doing? I'm doing really good, man. How about you?

Doing well. Hey, I'm calling you from Washington, D.C. You're in Toronto, Canada, right? This is an international call, Sean. Yeah, that's right. And I'm calling you internationally to tell you about TransferWise because you're my friend and you're a great friend and one time when i came to visit you in toronto as a great friend you just gave me 10 bucks and we're like hey have one on me and i just want to let you know that with transfer wise you could just do that digitally you could just send me

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Amazing. I think I might do that slash today. Okay, Caitlin. So we got Serena saying this is about equality. We've got Osaka saying I'm just glad to have won. Thanks. Please leave me alone. We've got the U.S. Tennis Association saying we need to figure this out they slap serena with the requisite fines but then something happens which is of course

the mob reacts and what does the mob do as far as i can tell in the media circles i inhabit this This ignites a firestorm, mostly pro-Serena, pro-women, pro-empowerment. This can be seen as part of women's fight for equality, a working mother, think pieces, hot takes, op-eds, television appearances. Everyone's got something to add into this, which I think is great. Well, there is real inequality in the game, right? Just a week earlier, a female player got fined for changing her shirt on court while wearing a sports bra. While, you know, when there was a break in a match later on in the tournament, Novak Djokovic took his shirt off and like lean back with his hands behind his head and sort of had a big grin on his face and basked in having a little bit of ventilation. So women are fine for taking their shirts off and not exposing anything. Men take their shirts off and are celebrated for it. This is a game where there is a pretty certainly misogynist sport. based in Paris, which takes place in late spring, announced a rule change to their clothing policy. And the cat suit, and they specifically called out

Serena Williams' outfit from this year. Her onesie, that was dubbed by a lot of players as the cat suit, would be banned next year. Now, Serena took this sort of in stride and said, And when it comes to fashion, you don't want to be a repeat offender, so it'll be a while before this even has to come up again. And didn't sort of want to take on the implications of her getting singled out in a French Tennis Federation announcement from another Grand Slam,

basically saying, we didn't like how you looked at this tournament, and we're going to make sure that nobody, especially you, feels like they can look that way again. And we should mention that Serena said that this catsuit was actually meant to prevent these blood clots that she had dealt with post-pregnancy, yeah? Exactly. It was made of a material that helped her circulation. And in talking about how egregious this was and how terribly unfair this was and how male

outfits don't get policed. I was recalling literally all the ways that Serena Williams has been policed her whole career, her whole life, I would imagine. Obviously, she sort of famously grew up playing on the public tennis courts in Compton after being born in Michigan and was raised by a dad who didn't know anything about tennis but learned it from books and took her and her sister out to the court and was determined to make them champions. You can see an early interview with Venus, her sister,

where an interviewer is basically trying to pry from her, her confidence. Did you think you could beat her? I know I can beat her. You know you can beat her. Very confident. I'm very confident. you say it so easily why because i believe it and her father to his great credit steps in and says what are you doing why are you trying to

take away a little kid's confidence so we can't keep interrupting. I mean, if you want... You've got to understand that you're dealing with an image of a 14-year-old child. And this child is going to be out there playing when your old ass and me are going to be in the grave. When she says something, we done told you what's happening. You're dealing with a little black kid, and let her be a kid. She done answered it with a lot of confidence. Leave that alone. And it's heartbreaking because you know that this is not an isolated incident. These kids showed up on the tour with braids that clacked. People complained

about the noise. People complained about the way their father coached them. People complained about the outfits that they wore, the celebrations that they did, the way they spoke. They've never not been in the conversation. Serena has never not been in the conversation in a way that she, I would imagine, must feel is terribly out of her control. And I think to her credit, in these last couple of years especially, she's really started to take the lead in how she shapes that narrative and how she understands her force as a cultural figure and what she's going to use it to do figure and what she's going to use it to do and what conversations she's going to use it to highlight. When Serena, in the heat of this

conflict with the chair umpire, with the tournament referee, made mention that, you know, this isn't the first time she's endured something like this at the U.S. Open. What was she referring to? There's three incidents that come to my mind. In 2004, she's playing against Jennifer Capriati and gets what is largely now sort of acknowledged as a series of some of the worst calls that a player has ever gotten. This is a woman umpire who gives Serena basically unconscionably bad calls and Serena goes on to lose the match.

Serena's going to come right over to talk to the chair. That was way in. That was way in. I always defer to you on these guys. I thought it was good. Excuse me? That ball was so in! A larger conversation is engendered by this incident,

and they institute something called Hawkeye, which if anybody has watched tennis on TV and you see the instant replay where the ball is sort of zoomed in upon after the point, that's the Hawkeye system that basically Serena's incident helped come into being. So Serena has been on the receiving end of such historically bad calls that tennis literally changed the way it conducted its affairs, changed the rules to make up for it. 100%. Now, what I'm about to say is a huge part of this conversation too. In 2009, she's playing Kim Kleisters.

She's two points away from losing the match. She goes up, loses a point, down match point, gets called on a fault, turns around and threatens to shove the ball down the umpire's throat. She already had a code violation. And I guess have made a decision to default Serena Williams on match point down. Well, it's an awkward situation for Kim Pleisters. She certainly did not want to win this match in this way. In 2011, she gets called in the second set of a Sam Stoser match,

the finals, with a hindrance call. A hindrance is when you do something as a player that hinders your opponent's ability to play. In the middle of the point, Serena felt like she hit what was a winner, said, come on, celebrating it, even though Sam Stoser was about to hit the ball. And the Empire, another woman, Eva Adzeraki-Moore, a Greek woman, calls the point against Serena and gives her a warning. And she loses her mind, goes to the Empire and says, you're a person who's ugly on the inside. If you see me walking down the hall, look the other way. When I was watching Saturday's final, all three of those things were in my mind. Serena has been surrounded by controversy, and not all of it was thrust upon her. Some of it is of her own making.

This incident has been a Rorschach test for tennis fans, for sports fans. But the one thing I think anyone can agree on is that this whole mess seriously detracted from what should have been the crowning moment for Naomi Osaka, who made history. She became the first player of Japanese descent to ever win a Grand Slam, male or female. Is there always going to be an asterisk on this match? I hope not. I think they both deserve better. There are very few things I am certain about. Having watched this, having been a tennis fan, being a publisher of a tennis magazine, this is what I'm certain of.

If you are somebody who doesn't want to admit the context that women, particularly women of color, operate in, now's your chance to do better. If you're somebody who thinks it is acceptable for one second to boo at a final or go into Naomi Osaka's social media mentions and tell her she got a Grand Slam gifted to her, now's your chance to do better. There's nobody in this who doesn't need scrutiny other than Naomi Osaka, who played lights out tennis, who I hope and know will be back in that situation again and again. Caitlin Thompson is the publisher of Racket Magazine. I'm Sean Ramos for them. This is Today Explained. friends and family too. You can use TransferWise to save some money on an exchange rate and to avoid some high fees when you send money internationally. And you can try the service

out for free at TransferWise.com slash today or when you download the app. Kara Swisher, you've been here for five, six, seven, eight days now in a row. We're talking about the Recode Decode podcast. I hear you have one last episode you really want to tell our people about. Yeah, it's Dale Doherty and Mike Senezy. They are really important figures

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