Opinion: Naomi Osaka has sparked a mental health conversation. Are we willing to have it?
Once again, sports has taken us to a national and international conversation that we as a society otherwise most likely would have ignored. Just 23, Naomi Osaka, already the highest-paid female athlete in sports history, posted news Monday of her struggles with long bouts of depression and anxiety since she won her first Grand Slam tennis title at the U.S. Open in 2018. She withdrew from the French Open and left us with this parting line: “love you guys I’ll see you when I see you.”
So this prodigious talent and remarkable social activist, at the top of her game, has now disappeared from public view, for how long we don’t know. Let us hope she takes care of herself and gets the understanding, guidance and love she needs to return when she is ready.
Meanwhile, we are left to pick up the pieces of a week of fractured discourse. It began last Wednesday when Osaka posted on social media that she was not going to show up at the press conferences she was contractually obliged to attend at Roland Garros. “I’ve often felt that people have no regard for athletes (sic) mental health and this rings very true whenever I see a press conference or partake in one.”
For many sentences, her focus was trained on the peril of the press conference, especially the repetitive, tough questions a top professional athlete often receives after a devastating loss. Many joined her side. But not all.
There is a reason tennis players are fined if they skip press conferences. The sports’ leaders and the players themselves have long since decided tennis needs them to promote the sport. Opportunities for free media coverage are vital for a sport like tennis, trying to hold its place in a packed sports calendar as TV ratings for almost everything on air these days continue to slip and slide.
Had Billie Jean King and her pioneering peers skipped interviews, for any reason, women’s tennis wouldn’t be what it is today. Times have changed and so have our sensibilities. But women’s sports in particular still are in desperate need of attention and coverage.
So, is it possible to be extremely concerned for Osaka’s well-being and also understand that there’s a very good reason for the players’ media accessibility rules, and that those rules need to be followed?
ANALIS BAILEY:It’s time to accept that Osaka is human before she’s an athlete
DAN WOLKEN:Osaka’s shocking French Open withdrawal offers lessons for all involved
Take a look at Twitter and you’ll say no, it’s impossible, this conversation is not nuanced, there can be no middle ground.
But then listen to retired tennis player James Blake on CNN Tuesday. After expressing heartfelt concern for Osaka, hoping that she takes care of herself and that her courage in speaking out perhaps leads to having a mental health expert on site every week on the tours, Blake said this: