Naomi Osaka is skipping the Australian Open. Is she cashing in her golden ticket?

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On Sunday, former world No. 1 Naomi Osaka announced that she will skip the Australian Open. She isn’t injured. She just doesn’t want to go.

This wasn’t a big surprise. Osaka hasn’t played since last September, shortly after she was bounced in the first round at the U.S. Open.

She didn’t enter any of the usual prelims to the year’s first Grand Slam. Last week, her Instagram showed the 25-year-old vacationing with her boyfriend.

Online, people viewed this latest absence through the prism of Osaka’s well-publicized bouts of anxiety and depression. The Guardian’s headline struck a low-key alarmist note: “Concerns mount for Naomi Osaka after withdrawal from Australian Open.”

Maybe. Or maybe Osaka is cashing in her golden ticket.

Maybe she’s figured out what her colleagues could not, would not or failed to consider through a lack of imagination. That like all other jobs, sports are a living rather than a vocation. But that unlike all other jobs, you’re on the Freedom 25 plan.

In the past couple of years, Osaka’s tennis hasn’t gone so well. Her brand, on the other hand, is making out like a bandit. According to Forbes, in the 12 months between June ‘21 and May ‘22, Osaka made US$60-million. Only one million of that was prize money.

You’ve heard of quiet quitting? Osaka is doing the loud version. This is someone everyone knows saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll get right back to you on that. You’re cutting out on me. I think I may be losing … .’ And then they start leaving your texts on ‘read.’ You can’t vacation forever. Nobody can do nothing for a long time and remain happy. But having spent her childhood grinding her way to the pinnacle of her profession, who would argue that Osaka isn’t owed a long sabbatical?

She can go back to work whenever she feels like it, with the added bonus of being able to do any sort of work she likes. If Osaka decides tomorrow she wants to be a film producer or a video-game designer or establish a women’s shelter, she can do all those things.

When you think of it that way, running around after a ball 40 weeks a year to make more money that you do not need starts to sound like a waste of time.

So, hooray for Osaka. She’s not doing nothing. She’s just not doing the thing everyone expects her to do. She’s skipped forward to the Roger-Federer-in-his-40s phase of her career. One nice perk is that she won’t need a half-dozen back surgeries.

Thinking of Osaka, it’s hard not to also think of Ashleigh Barty. Barty pulled a Rocky Marciano last year, quitting tennis while she was the game’s top-ranked player.

This week, Barty, 26, announced that she’s pregnant. It sounds like things are going great for her. New family, enough money to live on forever, a platform from which to build another career once she decides to do that. We’re always talking about the sports dream. Maybe this is what that looks like now. Maybe the new sports dream is a life without sports.

If anyone deserves congratulations here, it’s the sports establishment. By that, I mean the people who run sports, who play it, who cover it and who watch it. They all operate in lockstep now, pulled together by the hive mind of social media.

That establishment has spent the past five or 10 years telling athletes to shed their fossilized ‘anything for the team’ attitudes and consider their own desires. It encouraged them to take an interest in what’s happening in the wider world and then get involved. It badgered them to be more like regular people and straighten out their priorities.

Whenever they do something that falls two inches outside shifting, modern politics, it goes online to yell at them that if they don’t like the new way of doing things, they should leave.

Guess what? Some of them are doing that. And as it turns out, it’s great for them, but maybe not so great for the sports establishment.

The WTA has become the canary in that sporting coal mine. It runs a successful business featuring some of the world’s most famous women athletes. Not so long ago, this league was the standard.

Now its top salespeople are dropping out for no discernible reason. It would be bad enough if they were moving to other jobs. But no. They’re just going away. They’d rather earn nothing than work for the WTA.

If I were the WTA, I would be starting a radical rethink of my employee-relations policy, like, yesterday.

The other possibility is that there is no fixing this because you can’t stop the future. In the 21st century, there is a whole new way of being a successful athlete, and it doesn’t involve working for anyone but yourself.

You make your name as a player in your teens and early 20s. You get pulled into a big sporting business such as the WTA, the NHL or the NBA. You use that league’s reach to build your own brand on social media. You diversify into other cultural products. You put out a face cream or a line of tuques. You start a production company and stream yourself playing video games.

Being famous isn’t the hard part. Getting famous is. For a gifted few, sports provides that service for free. Why wouldn’t people take advantage of it?

Using this professional approach, sports is the fulcrum, not the lever. The athlete is the lever, and, after a little while, they can switch fulcrums. Once they’re famous enough, everything’s a fulcrum.

If I were in the sports business right now, I would not be concerned for Naomi Osaka. It looks to me as though she has found an enviable balance. If the best thing that can be said for any working life is that you have options, Osaka is miles ahead of the rest of us.

Instead, I would be very concerned for what this says about the business, writ large. Sports used to be the dream job. Now it’s becoming a springboard to something better.