Naomi Osaka Is Talking to the Media Again, but on Her Own Terms

By Ben Smith July 4, 2021

In early May, a couple of weeks before she tweeted that she wouldn’t appear at a required news conference at the French Open, Naomi Osaka was on a Zoom call with a writer for Racquet magazine who was trying to gain insight into the athlete’s inner life.

Ms. Osaka said she’d gone to the protests in Minneapolis last year and had been moved by what she saw.

“It was a bit of an eye opener,” she said of the experience, “because I’ve never had time to go out and do anything physically.”

Ms. Osaka ignited a furious debate over the role of the tennis media with her announcement that she’d pay a $15,000 fine rather than attend a news conference that she said was bad for her mental health. Her decision, and the response from tennis officials, ended with her withdrawal from the French Open. The British tennis writer Andrew Castle called her decision “a very dangerous precedent” that would be “hugely destructive and a massive commercial blow to everyone in the sport.”

If the freak-out over the cancellation of an inevitably boring news conference seemed a bit oversized, it was because Ms. Osaka didn’t just open a new conversation about mental health in sports. She touched a raw nerve in the intertwined businesses of sports and media: the ever-growing, irresistible power of the star. We journalists are touchy about retaining what is often pathetically minimal access to athletes. The media was once the main way that sports stars found fame, glory and lucrative endorsements, and a glossy profile can still play a role in elevating an obscure player. But the rise of social media and of a widening array of new outlets has produced a power shift, as my colleague Lindsay Crouse wrote in June, “redistributing leverage among public figures, the journalists and publications that cover them.”

...https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/business/media/naomi-osaka-tennis-journalism.html