Naomi Osaka brought to tears by a heckler at the same tourney the Williams sisters boycotted for 14 years because of abusive fans

• Naomi Osaka addressed the crowd after a fan's heckling drove her to tears at Indian Wells.
• She referenced fan abuse Venus and Serena Williams experienced at the tournament many years ago.

Naomi Osaka crashed out of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells after a fan's incessant heckling brought her to tears during her Round of 64 match against Veronika Kudermetova.

But the four-time Grand Slam champion is just the latest tennis star to face harassment from the crowd at the Southern California tournament. At the peak of their tennis careers, Venus and Serena Williams boycotted the Indian Wells Masters for 14 years after they were the targets of racist abuse, epithets, and overwhelming boos from the unfriendly audience.

The Williams sisters' issues at Indian Wells date back to 2001 — when Osaka was just three years old. That year, both Venus and Serena rode hot streaks all the way to the semifinal of the tournament, where they were set to face one another, but the elder sister pulled out of the match 20 minutes ahead of its scheduled start time with a knee injury.

Fans were furious about the last-minute scratch, which fueled speculation that the sisters' father, Richard Williams, predetermined which of his daughters would win their head-to-head matchups. So when Venus and Richard arrived to watch Serena compete in the finals of the tournament a few days later, all three were bombarded with boos and far more vicious jeers.

"I stepped onto the court a couple minutes before [my opponent], and right away people started booing," Serena recalled in her 2009 autobiography, On the Line. "They were loud, mean, aggressive... pissed!"

"What got me most of all was that it wasn't just a scattered bunch of boos," she continued. "It wasn't coming from just one section. It was like the whole crowd got together and decided to boo all at once."

"The ugliness was just raining down on me, hard," Williams added. "I didn't know what to do."

Williams noted in the book that she was surprised by the audience's response at the time, especially considering "tennis fans are typically a well-mannered bunch." She couldn't figure out what she'd done to become the subject of fans' ire, and didn't initially make the connection to her sister's injury from the round prior.

"I looked up and all I could see was a sea of rich people — mostly older, mostly white — standing and booing lustily, like some kind of genteel lynch mob," Williams wrote. "I don't mean to use such inflammatory language to describe the scene, but that's really how it seemed from where I was down on the court. Like these people were gonna come looking for me after the match."

"I wanted to cry, but I didn't want to give these people the satisfaction," she added.

It was quickly apparent to Serena that race played a role in the abuse. She "heard the word n----- a couple times" through the chorus of boos, she wrote.

The racial slurs left her feeling physically unsafe, not to mention singled out as the crowd swapped its jeers for standing ovations whenever her opponent, Belgian star Kim Clijsters, did anything. Note that the Riverside County, Calif., city boasted a population that was 96.4% white at the time, according to data collected in the 2000 Census.

"Just before the start of play, my dad and Venus started walking down the aisle to the players' box by the side of the court, and everybody turned and started to point and boo at them," Serena wrote. "It was mostly just a chorus of boos, but I could still hear shouts of 'N-----!' here and there."

"I even heard one angry voice telling us to go back to Compton," she added. "It was unbelievable."

Though the younger Williams — who was just 19 years old at the time — dropped the first set, she bounced back to beat Clijsters 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 and take home the tournament's trophy. After securing the win, Williams walked over to her family, then hugged her dad and sister in an outpouring of emotion.

The Williams sisters chose to boycott the tournament for years after the incident transpired. Only in 2015 — 14 years removed from the harrowing episode with the acrimonious crowd — did Serena choose to return to Indian Wells.

"I feel that was 14 years ago and this is now," Williams said upon ending the boycott. "I did the best I could at this event and am really happy to have put a lot of that behind me."

Venus returned to the tournament the following year. And in 2016, Serena made her way back to the Indian Wells final but fell against Belarusian star Victoria Azarenka.

Osaka wasn't subjected to race-based abuse during Saturday's match, as the wayward fan who caught her attention was repeatedly caught shouting "You suck!" Still, the heckling brought to mind the Williams family's experience, and that triggered Osaka's emotions, she said later while addressing fans after her straight-set loss.

"To be honest, I've gotten heckled before. It didn't really bother me," Osaka said into the microphone. "But [being] heckled here, I watched a video of Venus and Serena [Williams] getting heckled here, and if you've never watched it, you should watch it."

"I don't know why, but it went into my head, and it got replayed a lot," she added. "I'm trying not to cry."

Neither Venus nor Serena has spoken publicly about Osaka's experience with the Indian Wells heckler — or her post-match comments — since her exit from the tournament. But when Osaka was in the news for refusing to fulfill her media obligations at last summer's French Open, both Williams sisters were firmly in the young star's corner.

Serena said she wished she "could give her a hug" because she knows "what it's like" and has "been in those positions" before. Venus, meanwhile, offered Osaka some blunt advice about dealing with the press — which could easily double as advice for dealing with hecklers.

"For me, personally, 'how I deal with it' was that I know every single person asking me a question can't play as well as I can and never will," the elder Williams said. "So no matter what you say or what you write, you'll never light a candle to me."