The agony of success

 Naomi Osaka broke down in tears again last week, and not because she'd just been ousted from the U.S. Open by unseeded teenage phenom Leylah Fernandez. She broke down in tears because the game at which she is so skilled is also the game that is wounding her.

Much has been written and said, some of it actually coherent, about Osaka's struggles this summer. It began when she bailed on the French Open (and got fined for it, stupidly, by the halfwits who run tennis these days) because fulfilling her mandatory media obligations had become intolerable to her.

Then she skipped Wimbledon.

Then she left a pre-tournament news conference in Cincinnati in tears, because columnist Paul Daugherty, one of the best in the business, asked a completely legitimate question about the mental wear-and-tear on elite athletes.

For that, Osaka's equally halfwit agent labeled Daugherty a "bully." Which was likely an intentional attempt to deflect attention away from Osaka.

Fast forward to New York, where Osaka lost and then, tearing up again, said she likely would be taking a long break from tennis because tennis had become torture for her.

She's not the first athlete, or even tennis player, who's been undone by his or her precocity. Jennifer Capriati, a star at 13 and a burnt-out rebellious teenager at 18, comes to mind. Andre Agassi, raised by a maniacal father obsessed with turning his son into a tennis immortal, always maintained he hated tennis even as he became ascendant in it. Numerous other examples abound.

This hits the Blob's radar again because the other day I sat down and watched the latest installment of Netflix's "Untold" series of sports docs, which centered around former tennis pro Mardy Fish and his own battles with the game's mental toll.

Fish came up with his pal Andy Roddick in the late '90s as the Great Next in American men's tennis, and neither became the Great Next. This owed not to their talent so much as to their timing, because they had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as perhaps the three greatest players in history.

Pretty tough to become the next McEnroe or Connors or Sampras, after all, when you're sharing the stage with Roger Federer, Rafe Nadal and Novak Djokovic. 

Roddick managed it better than Fish, helped along by his victory in the U.S. Open as a teenager. Fish, meanwhile, used an obsessive training and diet program to eventually vault to No. 7 in the world.

But as he became the new American star, he paid a horrible price: Crippling bouts of anxiety that made his mind race and his heart beat wildly, and eventually led to him fleeing the U.S. Open in 2012 on the day he was to have played Federer in the quarterfinals.

As with Osaka, the game and its pressures had broken him in the most intimate way possible. And as with Osaka (or gymnast Simone Biles, for that matter), the halfwits saw this as some sort of failure of will or character or simple intestinal fortitude.

It is not, of course. Fish, like Osaka and Biles, had no more control over what was happening to him than you or I have over a sneeze. And so this was an education, and a window into the world of the elite individual athlete: the unrelenting travel, the unrelenting expectations, the constant spotlight that always attends athletes when they stand alone before the world on their chosen (or chosen for them) field of play.

Fish went public with all this several years ago, a remarkable display of, yes, intestinal fortitude. He was rewarded with the overwhelming support of his tennis brethren, who understood exactly what he was talking about. 

As one imagines Fish watching Osaka break down in tears last week, and understanding, too.

We always hear about the agony of defeat. Now, perhaps, it's time to acknowledge there's an agony of success, too.