It has since been referred to as l’affaire Osaka by some commentators, imprinting a French accent to the ruckus 23-year-old world number two tennis player Naomi Osaka raised after revealing her battle with depression and withdrew from the Roland-Garros Tournament. He announcing she won’t take press conferences for the emotional toll they take on her and then exiting the tourney animated much of the news and commentary last week about what it will mean for sports and the wellbeing of athletes. Though the wide attention it attracted seemed a surprise to her, admitting she “never wanted to be a distraction”, it nonetheless served the important purpose of raising public consciousness on the subject of mental health in sports. This is the genius of her activism, that, whether she intended to or not as happened this time in her vulnerability, she is able to bring attention to larger issues, as with her stand last year against racial injustice. It also helped this time that she received wide support from around the sporting world, notably from her idol Serena Williams and tennis legends Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King. Even some of the major sponsors such as Nike and Mastercard came out with their support for her. But, in Osaka robbing the tourney one of its biggest draws with her exit, it also provoked some soul searching from the organisers and other parties to the French Open, including the media. Along with the organisers, I would think the media especially would have something to answer, given its being core to the abiding rules she decries have been causing her the emotional turmoil. This, notwithstanding that much of the media coverage being favourable amplifying her causes and helping the 23-year-old become the world’s best-paid female athlete raking in more than $55 million over the past 12 months. But as a member in the profession, and not being as active as I once was, I was keen to hear how fellow journalists – especially the sports journos in the antagonising press conferences of Osaka’s detest – would account for themselves. I found Jonathan Liews’s commentary in The Guardian refreshingly uncompromising under the title, “We’re not the good guys: Osaka shows up problems of press conferences” Alluding to the advent of social media, which affords athletes the stature of Osaka direct and immediate communication with the public in a single tweet, he is severely critical of sports pressers: The modern press conference, he suggests, is no longer a meaningful exchange but really a lowest-common-denominator transaction: [it is] a cynical and often predatory game in which the object is to mine as much content from the subject as possible. Gossip: good. Anger: good. Feuds: good. Tears: good. Personal tragedy: good. He sounds earnest in his disappointment, and as an insider, you take him seriously. What he describes is what Osaka described as kicking people when they are down, resulting in detrimental effect on her mental health. Such predation on hapless athletes is “media voyeurism”, as one psychologist aptly termed it. It does not affect all the same, however, as it also emerged. The more experienced athletes are more artful in their responses and know how to play the media. And, of the constellation of star athletes who expressed their support for Osaka, one of the most memorable must be by Venus Williams. Asked how she deals with nuisance pressers, it was a thing to watch how she coolly replied taking a dig at the journalists’ abilities or lack of them compared to her prowess: For me personally how I deal with it,” she evenly explained, “I know every single person asking me a question cant play as well as I can. And never will. “So, no matter what you say, or what you write, you’ll never hold a candle to me. That’s how I deal with it. But each person deals with it differently.” The take-home in all this is that one does not get to see many such sports pressers in this region and Africa in general, but our local media ought to heed the lesson l’affaire Osaka has afforded us.
