U.S. Open darling Naomi Osaka's Vancouver connection

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Two friends. One anonymous hotel room in Toronto, the most recent stopover on an endless string of rooms of a year-long road trip. One portable karaoke mic. One free, unrepentantly lung-busting rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Then laughter and more laughter.

“It’s one of my favourite moments. Just her and I, jamming out,” said Vancouver’s Kat Jayme.

The “her” in this case: Naomi Osaka, four-time Grand Slam winner, one of the greatest tennis players of her generation, and occasional Freddy Mercury epigone.

That moment was a behind-the-scenes snippet from Jayme’s latest documentary, Naomi Osaka: The Second Set, briefly clipped in the end credits. There’s a year full of moments like these as Jayme became part of Osaka’s travelling family — much of the time just her, a camera and Osaka.

The documentary is available on Tubi for free.

“Before this, I knew nothing really about tennis, but I knew who Naomi Osaka was; I thought she was just incredible,” said Jayme. “Naomi is one of the funniest, most lighthearted people I’ve ever met. She’s so funny.

“It is just so interesting now to see this narrative of Naomi is a sad person, and it’s just not true. My hope was with my new film, that people see a different side of Naomi — the true Naomi.”

Since her decision to withdraw from the 2021 French Open for mental-health reasons, there has been a persistent media image of Osaka. She’s presented as an injury plagued and mercurial talent battered by the mental side of high-stakes competition and repressive stardom. A physically gifted and aggressive player with a 200 km/h serve, but emotionally unstable and weak.

That wasn’t what Jayme saw, nor is it what she wanted the world to see. Whoever Osaka was then is not the woman she is now.

Osaka’s world changed in July 2023 when she welcomed her daughter, Shai, into the world. The story that Jayme and Osaka wanted to tell — as Osaka says in the documentary — was that Shai didn’t end her career, she saved it.

“One of the things that Naomi and I talked about extensively was, like, we want to change the narrative that women have to quote, unquote, ‘bounce back’ to what they once were. Even now, there’s articles of ‘she’s back to her old self,'” Jayme said.

“Motherhood is such a transformative experience. … Your body has changed. You’re physically, emotionally, a different person. We talk about how she’s a new person, and she wants to be a better person as well.

“I made this thinking about Naomi and Shai, but also … all my mom friends who I know sometimes struggle with balancing being a mom and having a career, or postpartum — all these things are really difficult.”

On Thursday, Osaka played in the semifinals of the U.S. Open in New York, losing in three sets to the eighth-ranked Amanda Anisimova. Osaka won the tournament in 2018 and 2020, vaulting her atop the tennis world and making her one of the most marketable female athletes.

Jayme was known first for Finding Big Country, the real-life tale of the superfan tracking down the former Vancouver Grizzlies star, as well as The Grizzlie Truth and I’m Just Here For the Riot, which revisited the 2011 Stanley Cup riot. But the Osaka documentary was on a different level for the Vancouver native.

In 2023, she pitched the idea of a telling the story about motherhood through the lens and eyes of athletes to LeBron James’s media company, Uninterrupted, even citing Osaka as a central figure. The company reached out to her a few weeks later to say Osaka’s team was screening directors and producers for a similar project. Jayme “locked herself in a room for five days” to write her deck and, out of all the pitches from other award-winning directors, Osaka chose hers.

“Kat’s deck seemed like it was just different from everyone else’s. It felt like a piece of my heart, and it felt like Kat understood the story I wanted to tell,” Osaka told Gayle King in an interview.

They had a synergy, that it ultimately would be a keepsake of sorts for Shai, so her daughter could someday see the impact her arrival had on Osaka’s life.

“I 1,000 per cent felt the pressure to make sure I got this right,” said Jayme.

From December 2023 to October 2024, wherever Osaka went, Jayme followed. They soon learned that a large film crew disrupted any relationship-building, so it was pared down to just Jayme and her producer, Madeline Saporito. They became family. Osaka’s mom, Tamaki, was welcoming and open, and also figures heavily in the film.

Much of the familial feel of the movie comes from Osaka’s edited banter with Jayme behind the camera. Where documentaries usually steer their subjects to ignore the camera, much of the time Osaka wouldn’t do that.

“You might not know it’s me that she’s talking to or looking at me directly, but my hope is that you feel like you’re her friend, because that’s what I felt when I was filming with her,” Jayme said.

When Jayme got sick and was briefly hospitalized in New York, then showed up for filming soon after, Osaka and Tamaki admonished her. The tennis star monitored Jayme to make sure she was eating, offered her own food or to carry her bags, and constantly pushed her to get enough rest — acts of kindness not usually reserved for multimillionaire media darlings.

It’s why Jayme watched the semifinal on TV during the early morning hours in Exeter, southwest England, where she’s working on her latest project.

“I obviously wish we were still filming,” Jayme said a few hours before Osaka played.

“The goals that Naomi set for herself in the film … she’s accomplishing them right now. Her coaches last year kept saying, ‘This is the best Naomi,’ tennis wise, that they had seen. It will just take time, things will come together. Everything that she’s worked for, how hard she’s worked, how much she sacrificed. I think she’s just having fun now, which is really, really, really nice to see as someone who cares about her as a friend now, as well.”

jadams@postmedia.com