ROME — A year and a half into her comeback from giving birth, Naomi Osaka didn’t expect to be losing first-round matches on the WTA Tour. She didn’t expect to have to drop down into the tennis minor leagues to win.

But that’s exactly where the four-time Grand Slam champion and former world No. 1 found herself in late April at the Madrid Open. After three weeks of clay-court training in the south of France with Patrick Mouratoglou, her coach, Osaka traveled to the Spanish capital. There, she lost her first match to Lucia Bronzetti of Italy, against whom she had never lost. That defeat wasn’t far removed from the one in Indian Wells, Calif. that Osaka described as the worst match of her career.

Mouratoglou, who once coached Serena Williams, told Osaka that her tennis was there. Osaka knew it too. But after missing so many matches the past eight months with injuries, she hasn’t competed well because she hasn’t had any practice at competing consistently.

With just over a week until the next tournament in Rome, Osaka only had one place to go for some competition: down the tennis ladder.

“We needed to solve some things in matches,” Mouratoglou said Wednesday, after Osaka won her sixth consecutive match on clay with her first-round victory at the Italian Open.

How did she get to six? She spent last week at a WTA 125 event in Saint Malo, France, where she practiced competing against a series of players outside the top 100.

“When we have a problem we go straight to the problem and we solve it,” Mouratoglou said. “It was risky. Anything except winning the title would be a bad result.”

And with that, Osaka’s sometimes rocky but never boring ride through this comeback took its latest curve, from a WTA 1,000 event in Madrid, just below the level of a Grand Slam, down to the second tier of professional tennis in a small city in northern France, and then back up to the latest WTA 1,000 in Rome.

“I just wanted to focus on the tennis,” Osaka said after beating Sara Errani on the stadium court at the Foro Italico. She wanted clay experience ahead of the French Open and she didn’t care where she got it, she said.

“I’ve always told people that I’m okay, like, playing on Court 16 if I have to anyways. The reason I came back wasn’t to play on center courts all the time, it’s because I really enjoy the game. I just want to see, like, what I can do.”

That statement is laced with whiplash for anyone who has been following Osaka’s return to tennis since early 2024. When she came within a point of beating Iga Świątek at the French Open last May, Osaka was magnanimous: “Obviously the results aren’t resulting right now, but I think I’m growing every tournament,” she said in her news conference.

By September, she had split with coach Wim Fissette, with whom she won two of her Grand Slam titles, and hired Mouratoglou. Fissette is now with Świątek. By December, Osaka was saying that she didn’t see herself hanging around the pro tour for too long if her results didn’t start measuring up to her expectations, which are to return to the top of the sport that she dominated at the turn of the 2020s.

Different times call for different mindsets, and sometimes a good bit of humility. Her decision to go play a WTA 125 tournament did not go unnoticed.

“I just went up to her yesterday and I said, ‘I respected you before, but now I respect you even more,’” Maria Sakkari, who made it through qualifying in Rome as she tries to fight her way back to relevance after falling outside the top 80, said of Osaka during an interview in the Italian capital.

“Four-time Grand Slam champion going to play in Saint Malo. Respect.”

Osaka’s move isn’t exactly new or rare. The advent of more and more two-week long 1,000-level events on the tennis tours has poked holes in top players’ schedules. Go out early in one of those events and the choice is to wallow in the defeat for a week, perhaps longer, while losing rhythm — or to try and coax that rhythm back.

For most of an hour and a half against Errani, that move looked like a master stroke. Save for a few games early in the second set, Osaka was her old self. She bullied Errani around the court from inside the baseline, from on top of it, and from a few feet behind. She dug balls out of corners. She slammed seven aces.

In short, she did what she had not done in Madrid, where in her words: “mentally I copped out.”

“From that moment I promised myself I was going to give 100% no matter what because there’s no point in playing matches or practicing, it would be a waste of everyone’s time,” Osaka said.

There was another part to this, too, she and Mouratoglou said. Osaka isn’t exactly an over-sharer. Never has been. “A bit shy and reserved,” is how Mouratoglou described her.

That’s fine, except when she’s not telling him how she is feeling ahead of matches, which makes it much harder for him — or anyone else — to help her. After those three solid weeks of preparation at Mouratoglou’s academy, she’d burdened herself with expectations heading into Madrid. She played like it too, but she hadn’t talked about it much ahead of taking the court and it came as a surprise to her coach.

Mouratoglou has experienced this dynamic before.

“Players don’t always tell how they feel,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t even know what they feel because the stress doesn’t allow them to.”

In some heart-to-heart talks ahead of Saint Malo, he told Osaka that the more she could express herself to him, the more he could help her get through matches.

“Again, when we have problems we solve them,” he said.

Or at least they try.

During a tight second-round match in France against Diane Parry, Osaka’s mind drifted to whether she had made a mistake by going there, instead of shooting home to spend a few days with her daughter before Rome. Heading into Wednesday’s match against Errani, Osaka told Mouratoglou that she was feeling edgy because she wanted to do well coming off winning her first tournament in four years.

“That definitely helped a lot,” she said. “As a tennis player, as a tennis person, I care so much about winning that I don’t see the full picture sometimes.”

That can be especially hard at this time of the season, during the clay- and grass-court swings when Osaka has always struggled. Maybe this year might be different? In many ways, it already is.

“I’m coming into it with a lot more wins,” Osaka said.

She and everyone else know how and where she found them.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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