Naomi Osaka withdraws from French Open, cites mental health

Tennis is a different animal than basketball. It's the one sport where the women pull higher ratings than the men in many countries. Those press conferences get downloaded and watched by millions. It's not a matter if they didn't do press conferences, no one would watch, but yes, less people would watch. Tennis is struggling to attract viewers.

Unlike other sports, most of the people who watch women's tennis aren't interested in the tennis. They are interested in the players. Women's tennis is watched mostly by men. It's understandable why the WTA and tournaments would take a tough stance here. To be honest, all this controversy is actually probably good for a sport that is fading.

 

A press conference is part of PR

 

Not saying that don't have anything I just think its very minimal.

Press conferences are not interviews and nobody is saying not to have access to the athletes, you are conflating many different things.

 

Where are you getting this from?

 

I've done work for the WTA

 

So far this year, Serena's French Open press conferences have been viewed by 45k, 27k and 29k on YouTube. My guess is that the vast majority of those are Serena fans anyway and would continue to be Serena fans.

A sampling of random players at random tournaments have less views (again, on YouTube) than my dolphins throwing fish video.

Press conferences that occur after a controversy or milestone event may attract a million views, but I just don't see it with a routine press conference.

 

I can agree with that but it still is a very small part of it IMO.

 

Ok, I still would like to see a breakdown of those numbers.

 

If you contact the WTA press center / media relations and ask them for a digital press kit they should send it to you. Mention you are an advertiser looking for numbers on downloads.

 

Stop rooting for the company. Root for the players and root for them the way you would want if you were in their shoes and couldn't medically find a solution to a problem sitting between you and your passion.

It is a joke to say "well she should just do x y z it's easy". It screams of ignorance and projection. She would obviously do it if it was that easy, she has outworked the F out of everyone as is. She can't do that any more than you can pick up a racket and kick ass at the French open.

If the person you loved was going through this you would try to find any way for them to do this without it inexplicably taking a baseball bat to their mood each time. You wouldn't pull your self righteous "well then F your passion baby" if it was someone you loved.

 

Is it me or is this not Lex Luther....

Just saying..

T_Man

 

Don't tell @tinman .

He'll white knight his Dark Knight

 

Dude
We all know Elon is Bruce Wayne