Naomi Osaka is showing that public figures have feelings too. The tennis star was brought to tears due to the ongoing tirades from a heckler during the 2022 BNP Paribas Open on Saturday. An audience member was heard yelling “Naomi, you suck!” after Veronika Kudermetova broke Osaka’s serve in the first game of the tennis match. Osaka was visibly bothered, and distracted. She even asked to have the fan thrown out of the match and requested to address the crowd regarding the heckler. Her requests were denied.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t shake the drama. She ended up losing 6-0, 6-4. Osaka didn’t mince words after the match and spoke of how the heckler affected her game and mental state. “To be honest, I’ve gotten heckled before; it didn’t really bother me,” she said. “But [being] heckled here, I watched a video of Venus and Serena [Williams] getting heckled here, and if you’ve never watched it, you should watch it. I don’t know why, but it went into my head, and it got replayed a lot. I’m trying not to cry.”
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Osaka’s struggles with her mental health are well documented. She’s been open about having to adjust her jam-packed work schedule to take time out for herself. In 2021, she withdrew from the 2021 French Open and Wimbledon tournaments amid mental health concerns related to issues with the media.
She took another hiatus after losing in the third round of the 2021 U.S. Open and at the time said that tennis was no longer making her happy. But recently, she’s seemed to have had a change of heart.
“I want to feel like every time I step on the court I’m having fun,” Osaka told reporters at the beginning of this year, per Bleacher Report. “I can walk off the court knowing that even if I lost, I tried as hard as I could. I’m the type of person that cared a little bit too much about the results and the ranking and stuff like that. And I just need to find a way to enjoy the game again because that’s the reason why I was playing in the first place.”
