The super suit, the cape, and the Inner Game: how Naomi Osaka borrowed a trick tennis already knew

Naomi Osaka walked onto Arthur Ashe for her first match of the 2026 US Open in a floor-length white gown printed with news clippings of her own career. She wore a red and white headband over cornrows and athletic sleeves modelled on Allen Iverson. The gown was built by the New York label Who Decides War in a little over a day by her stylist Law Roach. Nike had asked her to lean into basketball ahead of the tournament. “Nike said basketball,” she said afterwards, “so I said, OK, you want basketball, I’ll give you basketball.”

Osaka calls the outfit a super suit. Asked more than once what the clothes are actually doing for her, she has said:

I like to be like a video game character sometimes. I don’t want to be myself when I’m playing on court, and I kind of try to embody her a little.

What the psychologists call it

In 2017, a group of researchers at the University of Minnesota ran a now well-known experiment on children and perseverance. Rachel White and her co-authors took 180 four- and six-year-olds and gave them a repetitive computer task for ten minutes. On a table next to the computer was a video game that was far more interesting. The children were free to switch to the game whenever they liked. Every minute or so, a voice from a recording asked them to check in with themselves.

The children were split into three groups. The first was asked a first-person question: “Am I working hard?” The second was asked a third-person question using their own name: “Is Hannah working hard?” The third was dressed up as a character they had chosen from a short list (Batman, Dora the Explorer, Rapunzel, Bob the Builder) and asked “Is Batman working hard?”

The children in costume lasted the longest. The ones using their own name came second. The ones talking to themselves in the first person came last.

The paper was published in Child Development under the title “The ‘Batman Effect’: Improving Perseverance in Young Children.” The authors described the mechanism as self-distancing. Stepping outside the first person makes it easier to see yourself from somewhere else, and from somewhere else, easier to stick with the task you are supposed to be doing. The further out they stepped, the longer they lasted. The costume took them furthest.

What (some in) tennis already knew

Four decades earlier, Timothy Gallwey had described the same mechanism in a chapter of The Inner Game of Tennis titled “Programming by Identity.”

Gallwey’s exercise was simple. He would ask the player he was coaching to imagine that he, Gallwey, was a television director, casting the player as an actor in a top-flight tennis role, with the brief that only the player’s mannerisms mattered on camera because the ball was never in shot.

What I’m mainly interested in is that you adapt professional mannerisms, and that you swing your racket with supreme self-assurance. Above all, your face must express no self-doubt.

When a player succeeds in forgetting himself and really acts out his assumed role, remarkable changes in his game often take place.

Gallwey was careful about the distinction between the exercise and positive thinking. Positive thinking tells a player they are as good as Andre Agassi, no stranger to dressing up on court either. The role-play asks them to play a part for a camera and see what comes off their racket while they do.

You are quite consciously playing a role, but in the process, you may become more aware of the range of your true capabilities.

You do you, but different

The children in the Batman cape, the player cast as an actor on Gallwey’s imaginary set, and Osaka walking into Ashe as her video game character are all doing one thing. They are suspending the version of themselves that would normally be in charge of the next shot, and letting a different version play it instead. The cape, the gown and the imagined role are different ways of making the switch.

Gallwey called the voice that normally sits in the way Self 1. It is the voice that judges, instructs and second-guesses between points. Self 1 can only talk to the person it believes it is talking to. When the player becomes someone else for a set, Self 1 has nothing to say for a while. Self 2, the part of the player that already knows how to hit the ball, has the run of the court.

So what, I hear you say.

Dressing up may not be your thing, or at least not in public. You're not a kid getting roped into psychological experiments and maybe you've never heard of (although that's a stretch) the The Inner Game of Tennis. You can still borrow the theme underneath them all the next time you crack open a can of balls.

The next time you walk out for a match, set, or first-to-eleven points, give yourself a role to play before the first serve. Make it specific: the confident club player who hits through the ball on big points, or the doubles partner who poaches at the net with the authority of the Bryan Brothers. Decide what that player looks like, how they stand between points, where they put their eyes on a change of ends. Play that player for a bit and see what happens.

You'll be engaging in a technique that the psychologists call self-distancing. In all three cases, a persona (the Batman cape, the actor’s role, the Who Decides War gown) puts enough distance between the player and the critical voice in their own head that the unhelpful voice loses its grip for a while, and the trained skill runs on its own.