Photos by Sebastian Arriagada | IG: @seebasschin
After nearly 20+ years in corporate America, two of the best days of my entire career happened in a conference room in 2023. It was the first time I'd ever been in a room with eight other Black colleagues, each of us leaders of our Black employee resource group. Over the course of two days, we collaborated, laughed, strategized, and just existed in a space that felt built for us. Two days is all it took to understand what had been missing for almost three decades.
That's the terrain Naomi Osaka and Taylor Townsend were navigating when they sat down to dinner at Soho House Paris a few days before the start of Roland Garros to break bread with Coco Gauff, Gael Monfils, Chris Eubanks, and Asia Muhammad. The most remarkable thing wasn't the guest list. It was that it hadn’t happened sooner.
For many players, tennis is a lonely sport by design. You travel the world solo, you grind solo, you win solo and you process a lot of losing solo. But there's another layer of solitude that nobody in the press box speaks to directly. Imagine scanning the locker room, the practice courts, the sponsor suites, for a face that looks like yours and coming up short. Not every week. Not every tournament. But often enough.
That's not an indictment, it’s just the reality of the landscape. And not just in tennis.
What Osaka and Townsend did was simple, elegant, and long overdue. They identified an need and they chose to build their own table. A space where the fellowship could breathe, where everybody understood the magnitude of being in the same room together. Where they all understood the significance of creating an environment, that allowed them to choose each other in a safe, unapologetic space. It looked beautiful.
Predictably, the internet had opinions.
When you ask "what if someone had an all-white party?" you have already revealed that you either don't know history or you're choosing to ignore it. All-white parties, spaces, institutions, governing bodies, country clubs, and tournament rosters have existed in tennis (and outside of it) since the sport's inception. It wasn’t called "all-white,” it was just tennis (or life).
Osaka handled the noise the way she normally handles these off the court moments, calculated and with just enough edge to let you know she wasn't actually asking for permission. She was explaining herself out of grace, not obligation. She said what she had to say and left the burden in the laps of the people who were triggered.
The actual substance of what she communicated, that existing in a sport where you rarely see yourself is isolating, that shared identity creates a community that doesn't require words to explain. And it shouldn’t be controversial, it’s just an honest reality.
The real question isn't why Black tennis players had dinner together in Paris. The real question is why that needed explaining at all. Why does any gathering that centers Blackness not as exclusion, but as celebration (or better yet, existence), trigger a particular brand of discomfort. If someone finds themself more unsettled by a dinner party than by a century of gatekeeping in a sport that historically kept Black players off its courts entirely, that's a calibration they need to reconcile on their own.
We'll keep saying and advocating that the culture of tennis is shifting, albeit slowly. The game is becoming more diverse. The faces are more diverse. And the stories are finally starting to reflect the full scope of who plays this game and who loves it. Moments like this small, private dinner, are part of how that shift actually happens. Casual in their ambition, purposeful in their intention.
The table was built in Paris. And it will grow by the time we get to New York for the U.S. Open.
And we hope Townsend and Osaka can save us all a seat.
