One day after Kobe Bryant’s death, Naomi Osaka went for a walk and cried. She pulled out her phone and recorded a video of herself commemorating the late basketball icon, who had been her mentor since the year before.
Around the time of his death, Osaka had been struggling after losing a string of matches and getting in her head about the craft. Bryant, she said, had been both a buoy and a touchstone, a reference point for how she wanted to navigate her career. “I felt so similar to him,” she says quietly in the video, which is shown in the new Netflix docuseries Naomi Osaka.
Bryant’s influence on Osaka is a tender through line in the intimate, three-episode docuseries directed by Garrett Bradley (Time). After Osaka rose to global fame by defeating Serena Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open, her agent and manager, Stuart Duguid, saw that she had the potential to become a star beyond the tennis world. He reached out to Bryant in June 2019, according to The Wall Street Journal, hoping the Lakers legend would be able to help Osaka on her path to superstardom. Bryant arranged a meeting the very next morning at his Orange County facility. After the meeting, Duguid told WSJ, Osaka “came back to the car and said, ‘That was the most productive meeting I’ve had in my life.’”
From there Bryant became Osaka’s mentor, always just a text or call away. In an interview with GQ, Osaka said he was like the brother or uncle she never had, and that she constantly turned to him for career advice. The young athlete, who was thrust onto the international stage at 20 years old, struggled with the media and the fact that she had become a central figure in the press. Losing matches only exacerbated that stress, she told the magazine, but Bryant offered her some words of wisdom.
“I remember he told me, ‘Imagine that you’re a lion and you’re hunting your prey,’” she recalled. “So you see a deer off in the distance. And if you watch Animal Planet, you always see the lions looking at their prey, and they have gnats around their eyes. Think of the media and the press as gnats, and you’re the lion, so never get distracted. And you never see the lion trying to swat away the flies or anything like that.”
It’s clear Osaka took that message to heart. In the docuseries, Bradley gently positions Bryant’s death as a turning point in the tennis champ’s career. In the first installment, Bryant—alongside Colin Kaepernick and Osaka’s boyfriend, rapper Cordae—is shown attending one of Osaka’s matches, a clear sign of her rise in cultural affluence; she has become the athlete that other athletes venture to see.
Later in the episode, Bradley includes a scene of Osaka getting massaged in preparation for another match. On the television happens to be an interview with Bryant, who’s being asked questions about his mentee’s journey. “There’s going to be a lot of things that’s going to be thrown at her: commitments, responsibilities,” he says. “Those things will grow. It’s important for her to stay focused on what’s important, which is the craft.” Early on in Naomi Osaka, it’s clear that Bryant will be a deft presence in the narrative, his legacy influencing Osaka’s direction as both an athlete and role model.
His influence is most felt in the second episode. By this point Osaka has lost some matches and is struggling with her newfound position as a defending champion. It’s around then that Bryant and his daughter Gianna, a rising basketball player in her own right, die in a tragic helicopter crash. As the world reels, so too does Osaka, going for that late-night walk and confessing her innermost thoughts to her camera phone. She recalls how she and Bryant were similar in their athletic approach, using the same tactics to intimidate their opponents. She then chastises herself, bluntly taking stock of her recent performances—an unguarded, heartbreaking moment.
“I’m feeling like I let him down,” Osaka says. “I’m supposed to carry on his mentality in tennis, and here I am…I haven’t won a Grand Slam. I’m losing matches because I’m mentally weak, and that’s so uncharacteristic of him.” She recalls how the two of them had talks about winning and losing. After her most recent loss, she had wanted to reach out to him for advice, but then held back. “I didn’t text him that because I didn’t want to feel like a loser—and now I’ll never have the chance to talk to him again.” She trails off, grief-stricken.
Osaka’s career does not magically turn around in the wake of Bryant’s death. She loses a match in the 2020 Fed Cup in Spain, still grieving the loss of Bryant. “She was very, very sad for a while,” Osaka’s coach says in the doc. “And then what happened in Spain, she wasn’t there. She was there in body, but she wasn’t there in spirit.”
But, as the third episode shows, things do eventually pick up again. For the first time Osaka also becomes overtly political, going to Black Lives Matter protests and wearing a series of masks with the names of police brutality victims on them at the U.S. Open. It’s her first Open since Bryant’s death, one year after he originally came to watch her play. In an interview shown in the docuseries, Osaka is asked about her late mentor.
“I just always wish that I would do something he was proud of,” she says. “I felt incredibly lucky to have known Kobe and to speak to him on a personal level. Hopefully whatever I do, he won’t be mad about.” She pauses, looking down and smiling to herself. “And he’ll be proud.”
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