Naomi Osaka has reached the final of the Bad Homburg Open, the first grass-court final of her career. She defeated Wang Xinyu in the semi-finals on Friday to advance to the championship game on Saturday, finishing a week in Germany that she said surprised her. After the win, she was asked about her daughter, Shai, who is almost three years old and waiting for her mother in London. What ensued was one of the more whimsical moments of the grass-court swing and on-court interviews. 

“She’s in London right now, so that’s good. She watched it maybe. She’s waiting for me in Wimbledon, but I don’t know if she knows that I’m successful. I think she just knows that I play tennis,” Osaka said. 

The observation came with the kind of self-awareness only a parent operating at the highest level of professional sport can really articulate. The child is familiar with the bag. She is familiar with the activity, but not with everything else.

“Sometimes when we’re at home and I pick up my tennis bag, she’s like, ‘Oh, are you going to tennis?’ I don’t know if she really likes it, but she knows what I do. She probably just doesn’t know how good I am at it, or not,” Osaka said.

Osaka’s win at Bad Homburg is her top result on grass since adding a semi-final to her record in the 2018 Nottingham Open. She is yet to drop a set across the entire week. She knocked out Ekaterina Alexandrova 6-2, 6-2 in 59 minutes in the quarter-finals, a player who had just beaten Roland Garros champion Mirra Andreeva in the previous round.

She credited coach Tomas Wiktorowski, who came on board last July, as a key reason for her comfort on the surface. “Obviously I can’t say that I’ve had much experience on grass, but I feel really good right now,” she said after the Alexandrova win.

The Japanese pro has got 23 aces in her four matches, and has won 79 percent of her first-serve points, while not having dropped a single set during the tournament. The victory over Alexandrova was notably her 49th career win against a top-20 opponent, and her first on grass, a distinction that says everything about how long this surface has resisted her. Grass has always been the least preferred surface for a player who made her career on the hard courts and now has slowly adjusted to playing on clay and grass. Bad Homburg, arriving with Wimbledon three days away, has opened that frontier in the best possible way. 

Shai was born in July 2023, and her name means “gift” in Arabic, a choice Osaka made deliberately. She made her first appearance at a professional tennis tournament at the 2025 US Open, where she cheered her mother on from the stands. Osaka has made it clear on her comeback that her daughter is not a hindrance to her tennis career, but is the reason she’s decided to rebuild her career.

“My return to the sport is a love letter for moms,” she said in the trailer for her documentary, Naomi Osaka: The Second Set. The Bad Homburg final, reached the week before Wimbledon with Shai waiting in London, is the most eloquent installment of that letter yet.

Osaka eyes history at Wimbledon after career-best grass run

Naomi Osaka’s opponent in the Bad Homburg final is fourth-seeded Karolina Muchova. The Czech defeated Romanian player Elena Ruse in the semifinals, 6-4, 6-4, to set up the showpiece match. She is 28-8 on the season and 5-1 overall on grass and poses a true test for the four-time Grand Slam champion. The final itself is not the only thing Osaka will get out of it; she’ll get more match time on grass at the right time of year.

She has reached the third round in Wimbledon on three occasions in her career. Her game of heavy serves and clean, flat groundstrokes should be more dangerous on grass than her results have indicated over the years. Bad Homburg is the first time she has answered it in kind. After the Alexandrova victory, she was asked about her relationship with the surface and was honest, saying how long it took her to get results on the surface. 

“When I was younger, my first grass season, I injured myself. I slipped, and it kind of scared me a lot from moving on grass. My relationship with grass, I’m learning to love it a little bit, like clay,” she said. 

The injury was not just physical. It created a hesitancy in her movement that took years to untangle. The Bad Homburg week, as it has progressed, has become a classic example of the unraveling process and is now fully in motion. 

Shai, who is waiting in London, is probably only aware that her mom plays tennis. By Saturday evening, she may know something more.