Who are the press conferences for?
Roland-Garros deserves the brunt of the blame in the Naomi Osaka debacle, but it would be a missed opportunity if the nature of a sports press conference wasn't re-examined as well.
When Naomi Osaka announced she’d be forgoing press conferences at the French Open to protect her mental health, the Twitterverse erupted in a chasm of finger pointing and in-fighting. Right-wing talking heads took aim at their usual target — a woman of color using her platform to speak out — while sports media at large were uncharacteristically split over how to process the statement.
Some interpreted Osaka’s tweet as an indictment on the institutions that failed to provide the necessary mental health resources for her to thrive as an ascendant athlete in an individual sport. Others saw it as a referendum on the efficacy of press conferences in sports, while many focused on a media landscape, especially in pro tennis, that has refused to reflect the diversity of the stars they cover.
Those blaming the press conferences were perceived as being anti-access, while anyone critical of Osaka was viewed as insensitive to the mental health challenges public figures are facing, especially on the back end of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
The storyline has accelerated in the days since, with Roland-Garros responding with a $15,000 fine for Osaka skipping her first press conference after advancing past the first round and a threat to suspend Osaka from Grand Slam tournaments if she continues to sidestep press conferences. Finally, on Monday, Osaka said she’d be dropping out of the French Open “so that everyone can go back to focusing on the tennis going on in Paris.”
Osaka’s choice to leave a major tournament at the height of her career and in peak physical health is a conglomeration of many factors, and to blame Roland-Garros without reflecting on the totality of how Osaka reached this point of resignation would be a missed opportunity. Specifically, it’s worth re-evaluating the role of a mass press conference, and how the media can play a vital part in maintaining access while protecting the figures they write and talk about from unsolicited mental strain.
Press conferences in sports can be revealing, but they are far from hubs of investigative journalism. Sometimes, when a coach or athlete uses the platform for social justice or to address a tragedy, they can be enlightening and emotional. Oftentimes, they are regressive. Osaka experienced this after her victory over Serena Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open, when asked about the negative crowd reaction to the result, and again, after her loss in Wimbledon in 2019, when banal inquiries attempting to illicit emotion from an already-rattled Osaka led her to eventually say, “There’s answers to questions you guys ask that I still haven’t figured out yet.”
At a time when availability to high-profile athletes is hard to come by, press conferences are necessary. Yet it can be a necessary evil. It’s absurd to expect every athlete to manage the maelstrom of a crowded press room with the same level of comfortability. The jockeying among journalists and conflicting interests between TV and print reporters (one craves tidy sound bites, the other thirsts for juicy details) can make for a chaotic environment for the person sitting at the podium. The line between a reporter preceding their question with crucial context and someone showing off their knowledge of the game for the sole purpose of flexing is a thin one. For every well-thought-out question, there are several that one human would not ask another in any other setting (one reporter’s question to Osaka after her Wimbledon defeat: “Is it difficult to be consistent at this age?”) All this does not take into account the history of misogynistic and racist questions tennis players have fielded in the past and the fact that when Osaka, a 23-year-old biracial woman of Haitian and Japanese descent, looks at the media, she sees primarily older white men.
There is misplaced concern that Osaka’s bold move could cause an avalanche of athletes taking matters into their own hands and skipping out on their press conference duties at the risk of a hefty fine, thus cutting deeper into the amount of time reporters spend with athletes. But Osaka is not doing this just because she can. She took a deliberate step to plead for change, the same way she did when she wore the names of police brutality victims on her masks in the wake of the killing of Jacob Blake. There has been a fundamental failure of some in sports media to hold up their end of the bargain, to fill the room with diverse voices, to encourage engaging in conversation rather than settling for dehumanizing Q&A, and to be vocal in supporting athletes’ rights to miss a press conference, or end one early, if they need a mental break, without passing judgment.
This routine procedure of athlete-press relations, in tennis especially, leaves young Black women vulnerable to racist questions. Slate’s Alex Kirshner recently wrote, “In major sports, press conferences are increasingly not worth the trouble they create. It’s time for both sports media and the athletes they cover to settle on a new way to talk to each other.” Until that happens, it’s counterproductive to defend press conferences in their current iteration while ignoring that it can feel like a minefield to athletes who simply want to be treated fairly.
The more reporters show a willingness and an ability to listen to the sports figures they cover and adjust accordingly, rather than record, transcribe and move on to the next question, the more Osaka and athletes like her who are so important to the dialogue around so many issues inside and outside the sports world will feel comfortable using their time with the press to provide a glimpse into who they truly are. Not who we want them to be.