Naomi Osaka and the Changing Power Dynamics in Sports

Her background — raised primarily in the United States by a Japanese mother and an Afro-Haitian father — gives her a potent allure. Add to the mix a disarming personality and a willingness to enter the fray on social issues that emerged during the pandemic, and she has become tennis’s newest supernova.

So it comes as no surprise that she feels less need to deal with the traditional press.

Such is the way of the modern celebrity — be they an athlete, an entertainer, a business tycoon or a political leader. They are all looking for workarounds, ways to tell their stories as they prefer, usually in short bursts, offering small tendrils of their lives and their opinions, their triumphs and pain, often without the depth that comes from great journalism.

It wasn’t always this way. Think about the powerful insights Muhammad Ali gave in interviews with David Frost — meditations in which Ali opened up about race, power, civil rights and the Vietnam War. In tennis, Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe would speak at length about the most pressing topics. You knew not only where they stood, but also about their motivations, the evolution of their thinking and their visions of the future.

Athletes still speak out, but they tend to do so on their own terms — very often limited to 280 characters on Twitter.

One of the highlights of sports in 2020 was Osaka’s willingness to go against the grain in tennis and take a stand against racial injustice. She decided not to play one day at a tournament last summer to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, saying on social media, “Before I am an athlete, I am a black woman.”

Point made. Message delivered. The tournament paused for a day, allowing Osaka to keep her promise without defaulting.

She then went to the U.S. Open and again seized the conversation. This time it was with the masks she wore — adorned with the names of Black victims ofracist violence — as she took to the court for each of the seven matches she played on her way to winning the tournament.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-empowered-athletes.html