10 ms·

Did they change the rules just to punish her? Last I heard, the policy was that missing interviews incurs a fine, which Osaka decided she could handle. If so, t

• chitowneats 5y ago
  I don't watch sports nearly as much as many other people in my life, though I am interested enough to watch with them when I'm spending time with them. Serious question for sports fans: do you find the athlete interviews before and after the game all that compelling? Many athletes don't seem interested in doing them and often times they offer a nothingburger response that allows them to get through the interview without having to say too much or expend much emotional energy. I support Naomi and her decision to call B.S. on this.
  • edoceo 5y ago
    My favourite interview quote, about winning: "the secret is to get more points than the other team". Since hearing that pearl of wisdom in like 1997 I've no more need for these. What could one possibly add?
    • glandium 5y ago
      Fun fact: in tennis, you can actually win a match with less points overall.
      • hyperbovine 5y ago
        Ok sets then.
    • wumpus 5y ago
      The famous comic along those lines: http://vectorbelly.com/electrical177.html http://vectorbelly.com/electrical177.html
    • aidenn0 5y ago
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KeVca9MwDX8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KeVca9MwDX8
  • stordoff 5y ago
    I've watched a fair amount of live cricket and swimming, and it's _very_ rare for me to find the interviews interesting. I might leave them on as background noise or if I'm waiting to see something after them, but I'm not going to seek them out. They feel like a way to fill air time more than anything.
  • bsder 5y ago
    > Serious question for sports fans: do you find the athlete interviews before and after the game all that compelling? Many athletes don't seem interested in doing them and often times they offer a nothingburger response that allows them to get through the interview without having to say too much or expend much emotional energy. Reference: Bull Durham
  • akudha 5y ago
    No, I find those interviews shitty and insulting to players. There is no value add. It is a bit different in combat sports. People like Conor have made this an art form - constantly insulting others, shit talking, talking about money etc. None of this makes any sense, or is useful to elevate sports. It is just disgusting. Just like other shit things in life, there seems to be a market for this.
    • rapsey 5y ago
      This is a very idealistic point of view. At the end of the day sports for viewers is entertainment. Athletes make their money by entertaining the audience. They can do this with their skill only and many do. That however is not a path of making the most out of their career financially. Fighters are literally going against the clock of getting permanent severe brain damage before they retire need to make as much money as fast as possible. What Connor did is the best move a fighter could do. Be as entertaining as possible, outside the ring and inside. Retire with hundreds of millions.
      • MrMember 5y ago
        He was one of the highest paid athletes in the world last year and almost none of it (percentage wise anyway) came from fighting.
        • dagw 5y ago
          His last win against an actual decent opponent was in 2016! He's a celebrity and showman now and hasn't taken fighting seriously for years.
          • brokenmachine 5y ago
            He fought Poirier in January and fighting him again on July 10th. Poirier is absolutely top level competition and Conor had him wobbled early. Also he fought a guy called Nurmagomedov in Oct 2018 who is a sorta ok fighter, good enough to have never lost in 29 fights. There must be a lot of fighters out there that you don't like if you expect wins over guys of that calibre.
  • kaczordon 5y ago
    Or maybe she should have responded when they reached out to see what they could do to accommodate her. Throwing a tantrum should absolutely be punished.
  • paxys 5y ago
    Sports broadcasting has been going down the gutter over the last couple of decades. The game itself has become an afterthought. Commentators have been replaced by dull celebrities. Analysts only want to create outrage. ESPN and every other network is solely interested in drama between players and pushing a certain narrative.
  • jnsie 5y ago
    No. Interviews are almost always useless. Best case you get an interviewer asking benign questions and an interviewee provide fluff responses (“it was a team effort”, “we’re ignoring the trophy - we only ever concentrate on the next game”, that kind of thing). Worst case you get malevolent questions aimed at riling then interviewee and resulting in a sound bite. These might be more interesting but are not beneficial to the sport or audience IMHO. In some sports mid game interviews with coaches (during play) and players (at breaks) are becoming a thing. It’s a complete and utter waste and gets my dander up. I watch a ton of sport and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an insightful response to an interview question. Nobody is going to give away their tactics, preparation processes or any other insight that might act as a competitive advantage.
  • rsj_hn 5y ago
    One of the reasons why I stopped watching sports was the annoying reporters, broadcasters, and announcers, as well as ridiculous chyrons, graphical effects and general ADD style eye candy constantly thrown at you and also interrupting the flow of the game. The worst is in the olympics, where they have maybe 100 hours of coverage of which maybe 10 is showing the sport and the rest are various life stories, replete with mood music and weeping parents holding up handwritten signs with clenched fists as Tammy begins her first uneven bar routine. I might get into sports again if they just showed live sports with zero commentary but good camera work. And I still ocassionally go to a live sports game to, you know, watch the sport without anyone buzzing in my ear.
    • sircastor 5y ago
      I have a friend who has explicitly traveled to Canada to watch the Olympics with her sister because the coverage is so much better than in the US - which is to say it’s mostly just the actual competition.
      • csa 5y ago
        They may also want to consider using a VPN. It makes for a much better Olympic viewing experience, and it can be done with a variety of devices.
        • fridif 5y ago
          Right? Jesus christ! It's like upending your entire life to watch Thai TV in Thailand-- someone will happily beam that data to you anywhere in the world for a fee.
    • user-the-name 5y ago
      Please call this kind of thing "ADD style". ADD is a condition where people find focusing on things extremely hard and are easily distracted. The kind of programming you refer to makes thing much, much harder to watch for people with ADD.
      • 5y ago
  • riffraff 5y ago
    They're mostly useless, but sometimes something interesting happens. This is generally true of sports commentary too.
  • MrMember 5y ago
    They're awful. 95% of the time it's stock questions and stock answers. The only time they're entertaining is when it's someone like the Patriots' head coach Bill Belichick. He very clearly hates stupid questions but rarely he'll be asked a good one and have a chance to launch into a detailed discussion on punting in the NFL or some other lesser discussed aspect of the game. Ask him good questions and he'll happily give thoughtful, detailed responses, it just almost never happens.
  • maybelsyrup 5y ago
    I've long said to anyone who'll listen that there should be an alternate audio channel a la "En espanol en SAP", but instead of another pair of announcers calling the game in another language, it's no announcers at all, and it's just the sounds of the game and the crowd. No commentary. Sports-spectacle is atrocious and ruins most games.
  • hellotomyrars 5y ago
    While it is exceedingly rare (2-5% I would guess, at least in the motorsports I watch), the times when it goes beyond a simple canned response it can be incredibly interesting and compelling. Though I think the dynamic of Motorsports is different than most other sports as you're not going to get the same situations where a driver is being interviewed as they return to the garage from crashing out of the race. I think ultimately though it's pretty simple math. If you don't have them, you'll never get something good out of them so the small number of them that break the mold justify the whole operation. When you do get something meaningful out of them it usually serves to create drama or fuel whatever narrative is going on in the season.
  • paganel 5y ago
    > do you find the athlete interviews before and after the game all that compelling? I completely ignore them. I used to find them relatively interesting about 30 years ago, when I first started following sports, but as the time has passed I've begun to realise that the only thing that matters is what happens on the playing field. That's also why I'm really not interested in the private life of athletes.
  • gorgoiler 5y ago
    The pitch side TV 1:1s are good. The press conferences are universally abysmal. I would not be surprised if an enormous part of it is just to get an athlete head-and-shoulders shot with the Gazprom logo in the background.
  • robryan 5y ago
    Mostly useless, same questions and same answers every time. The media is trying to spin some narrative and the players/ coaches just throw out the same old lines. F1 for example is loaded with media that the drivers are required to participate in. The only real memorable stuff is when something funny happens at the interview or the media drag out some team/ driver conflicts.
  • approxim8ion 5y ago
    I'm very deeply invested in football (soccer for my freedom-loving friends). I don't particularly care for athlete interviews, but manager interviews can often be pretty interesting. For example, Marcelo Bielsa can do very interesting tactical deep-dives in pre and post-match interviews. That said, the majority of these interviews are pretty bad. Vacuous reporters chasing headlines or expecting a particular answer and working backwards from that to frame questions. There has been some pushback from players and managers. An example of this is the UEFA Champions League Final this weekend. The player who scored the winning goal was the club's record signing but he hasn't had a very prolific season in terms of goals and assists (long story, he caught COVID and had a tough recovery, the managers and tactics changed multiple times this season, etc.). Moments after the final whistle, the entire team is celebrating and a journo decides this is a good time to ask "there were questions about your performance and your price tag, do you feel like you have paid it off in full with tonight's goal?" The guy just said "Right now I don't give a fuck, we won the fucking Champions' League."
  • wccrawford 5y ago
    My wife and I watch Sumo wrestling, and I often understand what the wrestler is replying because it's almost always incredibly simple, like, "I was really happy." The questions are almost inevitably like, "How do you feel about winning the whole tournament?" They add nothing to the sport, except that I get to laugh that they say the same things as every other competitor. Reading the comments here, I understand why. If they say anything else, they risk saying something that offends accidentally and it could hurt their career. So I've got a lot of sympathy for the players here, and not much at all for the industry.
  • JackFr 5y ago
    95 times out of 100 the interview is simply robotic repetition of the same cliches. You watch the interview for the other 5 times when you sometimes do gain greater exposure or understanding through an emotional or unguarded moment. This is not BS. This is part and parcel of the job she has signed on for. Apparently she finds it very unpleasant, but that doesn’t make it any less an obligation of her job.
• tomhoward 5y ago
  > Did they change the rules just to punish her? I’m sure we would/will hear an outcry if that happened. It’s pretty normal that penalties escalate after repeat infractions.
  • tomhoward 5y ago
    This seems to have been an unpopular comment, which is a little perplexing. I’m not endorsing or criticizing anyone/anything. Just pointing out that penalties usually escalate (in sport and elsewhere in society) after repeat breaches, to prevent people just treating fines as a cost of doing business. Indeed, if Osaka wants this convention/rule to change, then the best thing to happen is for the penalties to escalate to something as extreme as her being forced out of the tournament (which is bad for everyone involved) to draw attention to the issue and create a movement for change.
• uselesstech 5y ago
  I mostly agreed with this point of view until I saw Rafael Nadal’s (post match ha) interview on the subject. Ultimately these press conferences are another avenue to put a spotlight on the sport and it’s the popularity of these top players that bring in fans that write checks for the top ~500 players in the world (plus all the staff around players and tournaments). If a player doesn’t want to participate it only hurts the sport which will eventually hurt you if you want the sport to grow/survive. Honestly, if they didn’t change the rules because of her, it would eventually happen due to other players following in her footsteps. I’m sure nobody really wants to talk to the press, even after a win (especially when there is another match the next day). I’ve seen so many good moments in those interviews and even the salty people that lost usually have great gems that add something to the sport and make you interested in the next tournament. Storylines are what make sports interesting in the first place. If there are no stories, a sport is doomed to die IMO.
  • tolbish 5y ago
    You can have storylines and build narratives without annoying star players with paparazzi. And you can have press conferences after big events without the current fashion in which the media harasses athletes.
    • xwolfi 5y ago
      But how do you prevent people turning against sportpeople when they show disdain at taking a bit of heat for a defeat ? I'd be super worried my sport league would start looking like a bunch of snotty elitist who refuse to lower themselves at people's questions. It's really really hard to feel pity for a multi-million advertisement model who happen to play tennis :s I almost feel like if she can't do that, maybe we shouldn't watch her and she'd be left alone.
      • nrb 5y ago
        I guess they depends on whether you, as a fan of the sport, prefer athletic excellence in the game being played vs being make-believe friends with athletes.
• SiempreViernes 5y ago
  No, they've just fined her for now and said that if she keeps missing interviews it will (sensibly) count as repeat violations. It is the (supposed) repeated violations which carry the possibility of a forced default. A one day time lag would mean the media couldn't get a quote for the match until the day after, an impossible long time to wait before reporting the outcome of the match. So most media would just cut the time they spend on tennis, and spend the liberated cash when reporting on other sports instead. I suppose some really niche tennis journos would go the other way and start agressively pestering the big players for a quote to put along with their match report as all such same-day quotes are now elevated to the status of "scoop".
  • thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > It is the (supposed) repeated violations which carry the possibility of a forced default. "Possibility of a forced default" isn't really indicated by the rulebook for repeated violations of the MEDIA CONFERENCE rule. That's specified on the Point Penalty Schedule, which MEDIA CONFERENCE offences don't use. It could be AGGRAVATED BEHAVIOUR under the third defining clause ("A series of two (2) or more violations of this Code within a twelve (12) month period which singularly do not constitute 'Aggravated Behaviour', but when viewed together establish a pattern of conduct that is collectively egregious and is detrimental or injurious to the Grand Slam Tournaments.") But the penalties for Aggravated Behaviour are much more severe than that: "Violation of this Section [...] shall subject a player to a fine of up to $250,000 or the amount of prize money won at the tournament, whichever is greater, and a maximum penalty of permanent suspension from play in all Grand Slam Tournaments." It would be interesting if she chose to appear in just one tournament a year specifically to invalidate the potential charge of Aggravated Behaviour.
    • SiempreViernes 5y ago
      Yes, my reading is that the Aggravated Behaviour clause clearly grants them the power to be harsher, and they simply chose to place a more moderate upper bound for now.