The 2021 French Open tennis championship will reach its climax this weekend at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. However, the woman who is second-ranked in the world will not be on the court. Naomi Osaka withdrew from the tournament before the second round.
Osaka had announced before the tournament that she would not participate in any post-match interviews. When she declined to appear before the microphones after her first-round victory, she was fined $15,000. But more importantly, she was warned that she would be barred from future participation in Grand Slam tournaments (i.e., Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open) if she persisted in refusing to appear for the interviews.
Osaka had predicated her refusal on the fact that she was concerned that negative questions about her play affected her mental health. On Instagram Osaka tried to explain herself further:
The truth is that I have suffered long bouts of depression since the US Open in 2018 and I have had a really hard time coping with that.
Naturally enough, in the perverted world we live in, many of the criticisms of Osaka revolved around money. For example, the New York Times referenced Donald Dell,“a founder of the men’s tour, the ATP, and a longtime agent and tournament promoter,” who said that
media access to the biggest stars is essential for the promotion of any sport, and vital to engaging its most loyal fans.
Access creates name recognition . . . . [I]t is part of the sport and part of trying to build a bigger sport.*
The Times goes on to say,
It can also have a direct effect on the bottom line. Sponsors often pay millions of dollars in part to have their names on banners behind top players at news conferences and to have their products, such as a bottle of water or an energy drink, next to the microphones in front of the athletes. If players do not have to attend those news conferences, the value of those deals could drop significantly.
So, put all your concerns about your physical and mental health behind you. Just keep greasing the wheels of the commercial juggernaut.
(Not that we have to worry about the economic welfare of Naomi Osaka. At 23 years of age, she earned $55 million last year.)
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Perhaps the best summation of the belief that money is the be-all and end-all is the following from The New Yorker:
Last December, a twenty-two-year-old employee surnamed Zhang at the e-commerce company Pinduoduo collapsed on the ground in the middle of the night, on her way home from work, and died six hours later, apparently from exhaustion and overwork. Two weeks later, another Pinduoduo employee leaped to his death, during a visit to his parents, reportedly after he was fired for criticizing the company’s work culture. In response to an outpouring of anger and grievance, the company appeared to dismiss Zhang’s death, posting a comment on its official social-media account: “Who hasn’t exchanged their life for money?”**
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