Should athletes be compelled to talk to the media?

The Game Room
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Although political press conferences have some relationship to tennis post-match press conferences, they are quite different. Tennis pressers are usually not confrontational and the atmosphere is much more relaxed. Journalist rarely trot out “gotcha” questions to the players. So while they are both question and answer sessions, they are not that similar.

Can you explain how I am trying to take away her agency? I don’t want to belabor the point about Mardy Fish, but as a long time fan of the sport, it just appears to me that people tend to think of this moment as the first moment this issue has been brought up and therefore Osaka the first person to do so. This is true in many areas where our collective memory seems to extend to only to the last few years.

Yes, if the tournaments did not realize the stars bring the money, they would not put them on the biggest courts. When was the last time one of them was relegated to the outer courts to play? Sometimes a well known player who is coming back from an injury and does not have a high ranking will get to play in the main court because of their name recognition particularly if they are considered a “local” by the tournament. If they did not realize the value of the big players they would simply make random court assignments as well as not have any of the designated start times that increase attendance and/or viewership. Players outside the top 10 don’t get much consideration at all. Does the tournament wield much more power than the players, that is true and some tournaments are more friendly to players than others because they are run by former players. This is also true in the press room where not only commentators but people conducting interviews and asking questions during the press conference will be former tennis players that the interviewee knows already from having played together.

Once again, as I have stated numerous times, I agree that she should be given consideration, and that mental health is often neglected as an issue in tennis a sport that is all about individual success. At the same time I feel that Osaka handled it badly and put the tournament in an unexpected situation quite suddenly, and the tournament responded in a way that was out of proportion to what she did, even if it was within their rights, as spelled out in contracts, to do so. There should more provisions for this type of issue and work should be done to address it, but I do not think simply dismissing the idea that players don’t have to do any pressers because a certain amount of people don’t see it as important is the correct solution.

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…where are you getting this impression from?

That was a question asked at a press conference this week to a 17-year old woman of colour. The questions are often passive-aggressive, not quite as aggressively racist and misogynistic as this one, but often microaggressions. We don’t notice a lot of it because we don’t see the questions, just the odd response. But Andy Murray, a fierce critic of sexism in women’s tennis, would often push back like this:

So where are you getting this impression from?

Does it matter “who was first?” Mardy Fish certainly doesn’t think so. And Fish most definitely wasn’t the first and only other player to have to deal with mental illness. Fish’s story is useful to help illustrate that this isn’t an isolated problem. But it isn’t a competition and we don’t need to view this through the particular lens you seem to want to view it through.

A quick google shows that in 2016 Venus Williams, at the time the 8th seed and five time Wimbledon champion played on Court 18 while a couple of players outside of the top 10 played on centre court. And this isn’t uncommon for women players, I remember hearing about that happening more recently, but I can’t be bothered going down the rabbit hole here for you because its really irrelevant to the larger point. This doesn’t show that they “care.” If anything, putting Venus on Court 18 shows that they don’t.

And you really need to get more specific if you want me to comment on the rest of what you wrote because it’s all a bit to general to be able to apply it to the subject at hand.

I have no problem with what Osaka did. I have no sympathy for the tournament at all. Look at how they handled the question that Coco Gauff had to answer at that press conference. If they had any regard for the well-being of the players that reporter would have been kicked out of the venue and his press badge revoked. But they don’t care. This has been going on for decades. We don’t have to “both sides” every situation.

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I have gotten that impression from watching a lot of post match press conferences. That is not to say that there are not occasions were there irrelevant or, passive-aggressive questions, or even negative questions have been asked, but on the whole the atmosphere is usually less confrontational than what I have seen during political press conferences. The fact that bad questions do occur and are reported upon given how many press conferences there are per day, tends to support this belief. But, it is my impression, others are free to disagree.

No, not really. It is just a pet-peeve of mine I guess. Kind of like people touting some technological advance that is all of sudden in the news, when it might have existed for years. I should not have brought him into the discussion though it does show how detrimental to a career mental struggles can be.

Yes, I remember that. It rained a lot that year at Wimbledon, which made them make a number of adjustments, including doing best of three sets for men for a few rounds, and play on Middle Sunday which they had not done for over 10 years. The tournament, forced to make a decision due to limited amount of play time, made a decision based on who they thought would be the bigger draw, and they were wrong in that respect.

I guess this is where we will have to continue to disagree, I have no problem with her decision, but I still think she could have handled it better. I tend to feel that you should try to reach an agreement with the interested party before making a public announcement. If she had, and still had been rebuffed, I feel it would have strengthened her position.

In any case, for those people (not you) who counter that if she did not want to deal with the press she could have still continued to play on the periphery of the pro circuit, that really goes against the whole idea of competitive sport, which is to try to measure yourself against the best players, and those cannot be found on the periphery of the circuit. Unlike golf where you can, to a certain extent, see how well you could play a course, tennis requires an opponent to push you, and the best ones are on the pro circuit. You may not want to play for a crowd, and you may not want to talk to the press, but if you want to play against the best, you have to go where they are. Although monetary compensation does go into it, I have to believe, maybe naively, that these athletes are motivated more by being the best than the monetary rewards that also come with it.

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…but they do get sometimes get confrontational even if you don’t see it. And the purpose of the press conference, for the media to get snippets of information so they can recontextualize it for a newspaper article or the evening news remains the same.

And they are often filled with micro-aggressions, and as I’ve shown outright racism and misogyny. The tournaments should have a duty of care to prevent the worst of it: but they don’t.

Listen to the stupidity.

Let’s not pretend that tennis press conferences don’t sometimes get confrontational.

As for the establishment, listen to what Raymond Moore had to say about the WTA. He was the CEO and Tournament Director of Indian Wells at the time he said it. In 2016.

He was foolish enough to say what the probably says behind closed doors out loud. I can’t imagine he is the only one behind the scenes to think the same way.

You do realize that “touting some technological advance” and normalising the process of talking about mental health in public are two very different things right? Fish was brave to speak out. Osaka is brave to speak out. Osaka speaking out takes nothing away from Fish. And us talking about Osaka takes nothing away from Fish either.

But they still did it. And that matters.

And it is still irrelevant to the larger issues at play here. The institutions have shown they consider the players largely irrelevant. They don’t see this as an issue about the health and well-being of their players. They see it as a power-play, and they want to assert their dominance. If that means Osaka never plays again then so be it.

Maybe she had tried before at this tournament, or at other tournaments, and had been rebuffed. She hasn’t made a public statement since her last tweet. So maybe that was how it played out. But ultimately that doesn’t matter. On the one hand we have a player going through something that is causing her emotional pain and distress. On the other we have the establishment that threatened to kick her out of the game. We don’t need to “both sides” this.

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Well, they threatened to kick her out of the French Open. If the organizers of the French Open get into the habit of booting the best players off the tour, very soon no one will give a shit about the French Open, and the second leg of the Grand Slam will be Madrid or Rome or something.

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…it was a threat to ban her from the four Grand Slams.

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The way I read that is that they are saying she could be suspended from those tournaments, in theory, if she did the same thing at those tournaments, not based on the incident that has actually taken place, at the French Open. It isn’t exceptionally well written, though.

I am a little puzzled as to why the reaction has been as severe as this, because this isn’t the first time a player has skipped a press conference. I mean, it obviously can’t be. Much surlier players have graced the men’s and women’s tours in the past. You’re telling me no one ever skipped one just because something else seemed more interesting? They heard their Mom was sick? It’s had to have happened.

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I’m watching these and some media person asked Johanna Konta (paraphrased) “when you swore, was it because you were angry?”

Is this really the important, hard hitting journalism that we need otherwise the entire sport will crumble under itself? Those are the questions that keep you interested in the game? Not the game itself, but wondering if she was angry when she dropped an f-bomb?
Or who someone’s favorite non-boxing, mouthpiece wearing athlete is?

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Most questions of most athletes are stupid though: “You won, how are you feeling?” or the opposite.

Interviews exist because the fans, who indirectly pay the salaries, really enjoy putting a face behind the performance, and just seeing the emotion etc.
(Before anyone rants at me, I’m not talking about myself; I’ve never got into sports to that level, but many fans do).

So I think reasonable goals, for an ideal world, is that the press conferences are not too long or otherwise onerous, and the questions are polite.
But there is always going to be a strong push to take part in such conferences, and it doesn’t make much difference in practice whether it is the sporting association mandating such appearances, or financial incentives making it crucially important (except that with the former, a badly run sporting association might mandate too many conferences, that are too long etc. But it’s not inherently the case that requiring press conferences means requiring particularly obtrusive ones).

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If these fans wanted her to appear in a bikini, would this be okay with you, because they are paying her salary? We do not do any stupid thing because the customer wants it.

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I’m a sports fan, especially a football fan, and I normally pay no attention to press conferences. They’re boring and full of canned answers. Hell, I could probably stand in for any coach or athlete at an NFL press conference because I could probably rattle off the same cliches as anyone else.

The only time they matter is if someone says something controversial or funny. I used to love Michael Bennett’s press conferences because he’d always wear some goofy “ugly sweater” and say hilarious things. But people like him love the spotlight and are having fun with it. Those doing it as an obligation are rarely worth watching.

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…here are a couple of interviews of Osaka.

The first is immediately after the game, before she left the court.

And here she is during a press conference.

Which one of those two situations do you think the fans appreciated more? Which one do you think Osaka was more comfortable with?

Again the post-match press conferences aren’t really catering to the fans. They are catering to the news organizations who are looking for a few quotes for a newspaper article or a soundbite for the evening news. There is nothing wrong with them, most of the time. But they are there for a specific purpose and that’s for the news organizations to be able to round out the coverage of that match. So you get the boring questions, or you get the occasional reporter who wants to either be edgy, or is completely clueless. But the press conferences aren’t “for the fans” in the direct sense you seem to be implying. The average tennis press conference is as boring and as awkward to watch as the Osaka one I linked too.

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No, and that was already implicit in my post. I said that press conferences should be short and questions should be polite. So, to make it explicit, there’s obviously a degree of reasonableness here, and I don’t expect athletes to be under the command of fans.

But there are already lots of requirements made of professional athletes. Having to answer a few silly questions is far from the most onerous.

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…unless you are suffering from clinical depression and/or social anxiety and answering those questions cause real distress.

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I was responding to the OP, about talking to the media in general, not press conferences in particular. I actually hate that style of questioning too.

And in that case perhaps a special allowance can be made. I would see it like, say, where headwear is a part of the uniform, but a sikh player would not be required to wear it. Sports generally need contact with the media, but it need not be so absolute.

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It’s not like current news media behavior is anything new. Ian Toll in Twilight of the Gods, the last in his trilogy about the Pacific (in WWII) refers to the “remorseless chatter” of war correspondents:

“…it was in their nature to investigate controversy. They flitted and fluttered around it, like moths around a porch light.”

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Nor is sexual harassment, domestic violence, racism, and a bunch of other stuff we must not tolerate anywhere (except in sport because sportspersons are supposed to be mentally tough and rise above any adversity?)

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It’s not as if other workplaces don’t pull this off on a daily basis. It’s not actually that hard.

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The difference in a workplace is that people are often working more or less independently. Giving consideration to someone for their issue does not greatly affect anyone else. That’s not the same in sports. Athletes are often extremely close in ability and any edge given to one athlete may mean the difference in winning the next match. In some sports, the difference between athletes is in the tenths or hundredths of seconds. Anything that gives an edge to an athlete means that athlete is more likely to win over athletes which don’t get that edge. If an athlete skips the presser, they get more time for rest, relaxation and nutrition and comes into the next match with their mind clear from any swirling press questions. That may be the edge that allows them play stronger, play longer, play with more strategy, or whatever that enables them to win the match over their competitor who didn’t get the exemption for the presser.

Sports generally doesn’t give consideration for physical limitations either. For example, if someone has a skin condition which is affected by the sun, the sport won’t accommodate them by scheduling their matches indoors or at night. But if they were in a workplace, it’s essentially irrelevant to their coworkers if their desk is by the window or in an interior office.

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It’s true, but come on now, that’s small fry compared to the schedule of tournaments and matches and other requirements like e.g. “You must play X ranking matches this season to maintain your Y status”. It’s often the case in many sports that two competitors or teams might be playing where one played yesterday late afternoon / evening and the other has had a week or more rest.
It’s a PITA talking to the press but in general it’s not going to rank up there as making a huge difference compared to factors like this.

And it’s largely self-policing anyway. Like I say, if you want to make any money outside of the arena / pitch / court (or have other motivations, like raising money for charity) it’s important for people to recognise you.