Over at The Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati, Ohio this week, the main storyline was Naomi Osaka doing her first press conference since the French Open. The world’s number two tennis player on the WTA Tour was asked a question by Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquirer that has been criticized by some.
Here is video from the press conference earlier this week in case you missed it courtesy of The Guardian:
Daugherty was on The Tony Kornehiser Show this week in what is a rare interview for him about the topic. The first question Kornheiser asked him was why he wanted to write about Osaka, who has been one of the lead advocates for mental health and social justice, and the origin of how he came up with the question he asked her that has drawn backlash:
“The obvious focus of my question was how do you balance the fact that you are not especially comfortable in the press conference setting nor dealing with media generally with the fact that you have an incredibly large platform from which to spread your ideas not only about anything you want to sell…but also she has an acute social conscience,” Dauerghty said. “How do you reconcile the two being media shy but also needing and using and having people handle you push your multiple platforms/agendas? Logical question as far as I am concerned.”
For Daugherty, it was not a question that he hasn’t asked before to a professional athlete as he mentioned he once asked the very same thing to Pete Sampras. In fact, he was so pleased with how Osaka answered his question that he did something in his column that he rarely ever does.
“After a while, she asked me to repeat the question twice. She gave a very thoughtful answer. It was such a good answer, Tony, that I just quoted her verbatim in the column, which is something I almost never do. I thought her answer made her a little more human to lots of people who aren’t familiar with her story, enlightened people as to why she felt the way she did. I thought it was great. She did not cry while giving that answer, she didn’t walk out of the press conference after giving that answer.”
Some of the backlash from the interview came from Osaka’s agent, who said that Paul Daugherty was a bully for asking his question and he said if it was the other way around, legal action would have been taken.
“I was accused of bullying by her agent. Said it was appalling what I did, the question that I asked, and I was a big reason why athletes don’t like talking with the media. The guy basically libeled me Tony in a tweet. If I had written about an athlete what he wrote about me, we would be preparing to go to court and I would be the defendant in a lawsuit.”
In the end, Daugherty doesn’t believe athletes have a responsibility to talk to him and he is disappointed with the way he and the back and forth with Naomi Osaka have been portrayed.
“I’ve never said that athletes have any responsibility at all to talk to me. The only thing I don’t want them to do is complain about what I write if they don’t want to talk to me. Don’t complain after the fact if you didn’t talk to me the first go around. They don’t really owe me anything. I’m not confrontational, which is why the bullying thing was so-off base.”
