“I think she (Osaka) can bounce back with the right people around her,” Garrison says. “They have to show her it’s okay to be whoever you want to be, because if all your life experience is in tennis, you’re in a box. You need that experience of the outside world to grow as a person. She needs a team to help her figure that out. It’s not going to happen just by itself.”

Shriver’s takeaway from Osaka’s first-round US Open loss to an in-form Danielle Collins was that if Osaka hoped to rebuild, she must play more.

“Naomi needs to get back on the tour, back to the job,” Shriver says.

A good team would be helpful, but one of the concerning aspects in play is that any tennis infrastructure Osaka once had seems to have disappeared. She burned through a series of coaches and was last guided by her father. There’s no sign of a supportive partner. Her engagement with the tennis community appears minimal.

“For a career to work,” McEnroe said, “You need to be immersed in what tennis is about—for better or worse. Many of us lifers love it, even though we distance ourselves from the game some of the time. Tennis may be just a part of our life, that’s okay. But it’s an integral part.”

The Wiliams sisters were deservedly praised for expanding their horizons and developing interests beyond tennis. Osaka may be taking her cues from them, but Naomi Osaka is no Serena Williams. The younger Williams sister loved to play tennis, to compete. Often over the last two years it seemed that competition was the last thing Osaka craved.

“Serena possessed a unique talent and a lot of confidence,” McEnroe says. “But I don’t think that anyone in their 20s can be a part timer.”

Osaka may be trying out new identities, which is a prerogative of youth. There’s a movie producer hat, an actress hat, an Instagram celebrity hat, and a wide range of pitch-woman hats provided by numerous companies. For one professing to be painfully shy, Osaka certainly gets around in the public space. The implied contradiction therein is less a criticism than a sign of Osaka’s own confusion.

“My personal opinion is that Naomi is struggling to find out who she is, and she maybe knows who she wants to be,” Garrison said. Herself an African-American woman who navigated through an overwhelmingly white world with great success, Garrison believes that bi-racial individuals (Osaka’s father is Haitian, her mother Japanese) sometimes have to work through an identity crisis.