Naomi Osaka opened her 2026 US Open with an Allen Iverson tribute and a two-tiebreak win over Anastasia Zakharova, 7-6 (6), 7-6 (3), Monday night in Flushing. The Naomi Osaka Allen Iverson nod is the part everybody clipped. The tennis underneath it was the harder work.

Look at that scoreline again. Two sets, two tiebreaks, and a first set that went to 8-6 in the breaker. That is a match that lives on maybe four or five points total, and Osaka won all of the ones that counted. No blowout, no coasting. Just a player who kept her nerve in the exact moments where first-round matches turn into three-hour problems.

The Iverson choice tells you something too. Osaka has always treated the walk to the court as part of the performance, going back to the seven masks she wore through her 2020 title run, each one carrying a name. She is not a person who picks a reference by accident. And Iverson is the reference for undersized, oversized-heart, do-it-my-way athletes: the 1997 Rookie of the Year, the 2001 MVP, four scoring titles, a Hall of Famer in 2016, listed at six feet and 165 pounds while getting knocked down 40 times a night and getting back up 41.

checked the almanac: game one of the 2001 finals, iverson drops 48 on a lakers team that had gone 11-0 through the playoffs and had not lost since april. philly won that one in overtime. he lost the series in five. that is the whole iverson bargain in one night.

That is the spirit of the borrow, I think. Not the cornrows or the sleeve. The refusal to shrink. Osaka has won this tournament twice, in 2018 and 2020, and has spent the years since navigating a career that stopped looking like a straight line: the breaks from the sport, the motherhood, the return. Showing up in New York wearing the iconography of a guy who never once apologized for how he played is not a costume. It reads more like a mission statement.

What comes next is simple and unforgiving, the way majors always are. She has to do it again, and then again, and the opponents get better every round. But she is through, she is healthy enough to grind out two tiebreaks in a night session, and the building clearly still loves her.

I will be watching whether that first-set-breaker calm holds up when somebody starts returning her second serve.