Naomi Osaka knows a good opportunity for teasing when she sees it!
After beating Serena Williams during the women's singles semifinals at the Australian Open on Wednesday, the Japanese tennis star, 23, used her moment in the spotlight to poke fun at her sister, Mari Osaka, on national TV.
Naomi shared an emotional hug with Williams, 39, and then moseyed over to a TV camera where she used a marker to jot down a message on the camera's lens. Traditionally, match winners sign their name but Osaka was clearly writing a longer message. Viewers at home likely wondered if she was sharing her joy over her straight-sets triumph or perhaps sending a heartfelt post-match message to her idol Williams.
In reality, she was calling out her sister for kooky texts.
"Mari, stop sending weird images in the groupchat!" her hilarious message read.
Mari Osaka, who's also a tennis player, proved her sister's point when she shared one of her "weird" images in a now-deleted Instagram story post captured by USA Today. "To the people asking what I sent in the gc," she wrote next to a photo of a someone licking another person's eyeball. Eww!
After her win against Williams, Naomi, who last won the Australian Open in 2019, now advances to the women's singles final on Saturday in Melbourne.
Off the court, the athlete has been romancing rapper Cordae for the past two years. But the Grammy-nominated music maker, 23, admits he had no idea Naomi was a tennis champ when the pair first met.
"It's not my sport," Cordae told GQ. "If you asked me about tennis, before being immersed in it because of Naomi, I could only give you Venus and Serena Williams, you know? Because they're just a part of the culture."
In fact, the first time Cordae ever attended a tennis match was when he cheered on Osaka at the 2019 U.S. Open — and found himself feeling like a fish out of water.
"I don't know if I ever told Naomi this or not, but I felt really out of place. Like, that was my first time being in an environment like that in my entire life," he shared. "My elementary school, middle school, high school was 99.9% Black. Kids who look like me. It just felt really weird for me being in that space."
The athlete and the rapper gradually learned how to adjust to each other's different rhythms.
"I start super early in the morning, and then I end late afternoon. But I feel like for him everything starts at night," said Naomi. "So it was kind of hard to adjust to that in the beginning. But when I did, I felt pretty comfortable."
Eventually, Osaka wound up going on tour with Cordea, which she called "a fun adventure." She's also grateful that he exposes her to more music than she ever dreamed of hearing.
"He knows the whole catalog of everyone," she gushed. "I feel like the knowledge that he has about his craft and his passion is so much more vast than mine."