Naomi Osaka pulled out of the French Open earlier this month after being penalised for avoiding press conferences. At the time, many pundits labelled her decision as selfish and entitled and ridiculed the idea that she had withdrawn to protect her mental health. Roger Federer, the 20-time Grand Slam champion, withdrew from the same tournament shortly after, saying “it’s important that I listen to my body and make sure I don’t push myself too quickly on my road to recover.” Nobody criticised his decision and the announcement elicited sympathy and regret.
Setting aside how differences in age, gender and race affect media attitudes to these individuals, there seems to be an assumption that athletes should accommodate the media. This mandates post-match press conferences to provide journalists with usable quotes, as though traditional match summaries and analysis were not enough. Like other media celebrities, athletes are expected to accommodate the media’s intrusive interest in their lives. If they fail to do so, if they behave like an “uppity princess”, they threaten the status quo, leaving the press, in the words of the Guardian sportswriter Jonathan Liew, with the daunting “prospect of having to construct an article entirely from their own words.”
Sixty years ago, the historian Daniel Boorstin anatomized the phenomenon of “pseudo-events” like press conferences and news ‘leaks’, activities that were becoming a staple of American journalism. He blamed them for creating “the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life”. A cunning president could easily manipulate the press corps if he understood their hunger for colourful details, for stories that were more colourful than the humdrum reality that the world naturally produced. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (once described as “the best newspaperman” to become a president) understood this perfectly. “While newspaper owners opposed him in editorials, which few read, F.D.R. himself, with the collaboration of a friendly corps of Washington correspondents, was using front-page headlines to make news read by everybody.”
Pseudo-events, Boorstin warned, erode traditional distinctions between “hard” and “soft” news and place the interpretation of events higher than the things themselves. Four years of Donald Trump’s presidency showed what this looks like when extended ad absurdum. Instead of holding the president to account, the press found itself helplessly chronicling his lies and manipulation, unable to pan away from Trump’s larger than life “newsworthiness” and address the baleful facts that his antics concealed. By the same rationale, sports journalists have come to believe that it is a far better story if an athlete’s wins and losses can be explained by their moods and personal lives rather than their opponents’ skill. Is it surprising, then, that nonwhite women athletes who are constantly grilled in spaces that are overwhelmingly controlled by white men should find the ordeal of a press briefing one they would rather forgo?
As Liew points out, in Osaka’s case the real entitlement belongs to the media. For decades there has been a condescending and often prurient interest in female tennis players. Are their styles, or physiques, too masculine? (Navratilova, Serena Williams); Why do they grunt so often and so loudly? (Graf, Seles, Sharapova,); and of course the old chestnut: How much, exactly, do they enjoy male attention? In 2004 the 17-year-old Maria Sharapova was told “You’re a pin-up now, especially in England. Is that good? Do you enjoy that?” In 2013 Eugenie Bouchard was asked: “Are you prepared [to] be held up as a sex symbol, given you’re very good looking?”
Male athletes never face such ridiculous scrutiny, yet they can be respected for “listening” to their bodies and still receive far more sympathy, and compensation, for doing so. Instead of being denounced as selfish and contemptuous, Naomi Osaka ought to be celebrated for standing up against an over intrusive press culture and for establishing a line in the sand that tournament organizers should have drawn many years ago.
