As the highest-paid female athlete in the world, Naomi Osaka covers WSJ

Naomi Osaka covers Wall Street Journal on Fighting for No. 1 at the U.S. Open and Why She’s Speaking Out.

As the highest-paid female athlete in the world, Osaka is standing up for Black lives while taking inspiration from her late mentor, Kobe Bryant.

This summer, when the eyes of the world were on Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd’s death, Naomi Osaka flew from Los Angeles to join the protests and commune with people at the street corner where he was killed. Without telling her agent-manager or coach, she decided to pick up and go with her boyfriend, the musician and rapper YBN Cordae. The only sign that she’d been there was a series of photographs she briefly posted on Instagram before removing them from her feed.

“Whenever I have a chance to see something for myself, I jump on it,” says Osaka, 22. “I’ve always watched protests on TV, and I never had the chance to go because I was always playing tennis.” The coronavirus shutdown was the first time she had taken any real time off—ever—she says, since she started playing under her father’s instruction at age 3."

Read the entire article at WSJ here.