There was a time in this country when a sports columnist could dictate exactly how an athlete was allowed to dress simply by clearing his throat on AM radio. I know this, because I lived it. So you can imagine my profound disappointment on Monday evening when I watched Naomi Osaka walk onto the court at Arthur Ashe Stadium for her first-round US Open match against Anastasia Zakharova. Osaka was wearing a white skirt, a gray hooded robe covered in newspaper clippings, and a braided hairstyle paying direct tribute to former NBA guard Allen Iverson.
Osaka won the match in straight sets, but honestly, what does that even mean anymore. She may have advanced to the second round, but she failed the eye test. The eye test tells you that champions do not pay homage to men who wore baggy jeans on the team plane. Champions pay homage to the unsung heroes of the sport, which is to say, the brave men in the press box who tell them they have a bad attitude.
Back in my day, we did not celebrate Allen Iverson. We spent eight hundred words a week dissecting his tattoos and demanding the league office institute a mandatory business-casual policy for grown men riding on a bus. I spent the best years of my life typing furiously about how a shooting sleeve was ruining the fundamental pick-and-roll, and Osaka is out here treating him like some kind of cultural icon. It completely erases the rich, proud history of front-office dress code enforcement that my colleagues and I worked so hard to build.
And then there is the robe. Osaka emerged wearing a garment literally constructed from newspaper clippings about herself. I paused my television and examined the high-definition broadcast for twenty minutes. Do you know what I found. I found pieces praising her return to tennis. I found pieces about her mental health advocacy. I did not find a single clipping of the column I wrote in 2021 where I said her lack of intangibles would keep her from ever winning another major.
If you are going to wear the newspaper, you have to wear the real newspaper. You have to wear the hit pieces. You have to wear the column where a fifty-year-old man who gets winded walking up to the press box tells you that you do not want it bad enough.
The modern athlete simply refuses to understand that our relentless, unearned hostility is what makes them great.
I was sitting next to a very high-ranking tennis official at a charity luncheon just last month, and we agreed that the sport has a serious problem with players expressing themselves without our prior written consent. We talked about how a winning culture requires a sterile, corporate environment where athletes show up, hit the ball, thank the media for their brilliant insights, and go home to sit in silence.
Instead, we get tribute outfits. We get athletes controlling their own narratives. Osaka is out here wearing cornrows to honor a man who famously refused to practice, completely ignoring the fact that men like me spent years trying to get that man benched for wearing a gold chain.
Give a player an inch of self-expression, and suddenly they stop answering our questions about their deepest personal traumas.
I do not know what the rest of the US Open holds for Naomi Osaka. Analytics guys will tell you she has a strong serve and great court coverage, but I do not care what the analytics say. I care about respect. And until she walks out onto that court wearing a three-piece tweed suit and a clipping of my 2018 column demanding she smile more, I will continue to consider her a threat to the very foundation of sports journalism.