After 15 months of this, it’s all clear now.
In the midst of the pandemic of the century, mental health is everything. This goes for both the general public and the sports world. Yet the former maintains that athletes have a duty to entertain them, ease their overstressed minds and impose a sense of normalcy to their confined, disrupted lives.
The athletes, though?
Their mental health means nothing because their lone reason for existence is to safeguard the public’s mental health. The public’s mental health is their everything.
Naomi Osaka’s current plight is just the most obvious example. But over the last month, more were added to the list. Kyrie Irving, Trae Young, Russell Westbrook, Ja Morant and his family, Dillon Brooks and now Simone Manuel.
Every player in professional and college sports that was told to play understands. Through the testing, distancing, masking, quarantining, and contact tracing. Through the empty stands, full stadiums, multi-billion-dollar TV contracts, and negotiation and navigation.
They understand.
Every athlete who opted out of a game or season because of the physical and mental effects of the pandemic. Every athlete who had their character questioned. Those who had their courage doubted, their commitment disparaged, and their priorities interrogated.
They know, too.
But everyone else failed to catch on.
It took two tries for the public to discover and acknowledge the reality of what Osaka was, and is, experiencing.
June began with the French Open threatening to fine and suspend Osaka for asking out of her post-match press conference obligations. They mocked her on social media for it, the powers-that-be at the other three Grand Slams collaborating to scold her and multiply the threats. Ultimately, they issued a craven retreat in virtual silence when Naomi withdrew from the tournament.
Osaka withdrew from Wimbledon as well. But unlike their Roland Garros counterparts, Wimbledon officials chose sympathetic brevity and wished her “all the best” in her absence.
While it was the bare minimum, it felt like the zenith of human compassion and decency in comparison. It’s something too many people and institutions can’t even manage.
As long as an athlete’s life – especially a Black athlete and double for a Black woman athlete – is reduced to performing for the crowd like a unicycling bear at the circus, their mind will cease to be a priority or considered essential.
Their bodies? Wholly essential.
The health of everything packaged in those bodies? Not so much.
For the Public’s Good
The public doesn’t concern itself with the mental state of their entertainers. No matter if it’s a whale at Sea World or a professional athlete. As long as fans are entertained, nothing else matters.
French Open officials made that clear to Osaka earlier this month. The NBA and its individual teams said it to the players, and Irving in particular. The indecency and inhumanity they were all subjected to has been well-documented.
Osaka and Irving had even previously sent up signals that they had mental-health concerns. But the powers-that-be just didn’t seem to care.
Four months ago, Osaka said after winning the Australian Open: “What I have learned on and off the court is it’s OK to not be sure about yourself. For me, I feel like I’ve always forced myself to, like, be ‘strong’ or whatever. I think if you’re not feeling OK, it’s OK to not feel OK. But you have to sort of go within yourself and figure things out in a way.”
Recall what the previous 11 months had been like for her – the pandemic, the previous Grand Slam, the U.S. Open, and the re-ignited Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd. She refused to play her match in her U.S. Open tune-up after the August shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, Wisc., police (the same crime that spurred the NBA’s mid-playoff walkout and the subsequent halt in play across every sport).
She played and won the U.S. Open while wearing face masks donned with the names of Black victims of police brutality. She discussed those masks and victims after every match, including at her victory in the final. This was done despite the restrictive Covid restrictions surrounding the entire Tournament in New York City.
This all took place because the Open decided to return to play. Even while the virus exacted its toll all over the world and the former US president completely bungled the management of the crisis.
Yet athletes went out and played because everybody told them they had to. Because what were the poor, homebound, isolated fans supposed to do without their games?
The rhetoric that accompanied the quest to keep the games going emphasized the power of sports to unify and heal (this concept that have always proven more mythical than realistic to me). That platitude comes off as hollower when recognizing that the product counted on to heal is other human beings.
Music found a way (thanks again, Verzuz). Movies, television and theater found a way. Even houses of worship made the most of livestreaming to reach their flocks. Their progress through the pandemic was never perfect. But in comparison, it didn’t put nearly as many people at risk to continue them.
Sports chose to bull ahead and not let some annoying contagious respiratory illness stop them. Do your job, fulfill your contract, honor your scholarship. In Osaka’s case, sit at that podium and conduct that press conference and worry about your well-being later.
On the hardwood, the NBA turned to the Covid-resistant bubble that allowed them to finish their season and crown the Lakers as champions. Less than three months later, the new season started because their world needed normalcy.
Could that affect players? It appeared so as Irving left the Nets for two weeks in January. He was not physically injured. He missed a slew of games, and everybody demanded answers, often harshly. They felt he owed them something. Explanations, games, time, money. Something.
In response, Irving gave them this:
“When things become overwhelming in life, you know, you just got to take a step back and realize what’s important. I’m not alone in this. And that’s just a big thing about also mental health, you know, just coming in and being balanced with yourself and then being able to perform. So, with everything going on in the world politically, socially, it’s hard to ignore. I want to make changes daily. You know, there are so many oppressed communities, so many things going on that are bigger than just a ball going into the rim. So it’s just the balance of it.”
For their actions, both Irving and Osaka were fined. Apparently, mental health was secondary to their obligations to the public and the sport.
As The Money Rises, So Does The Cost
What athletes owe to their bosses and fans – how they can keep the vaults full of money and the fans paying more – has always been what matters most. This fall NFL teams will play 17 games, after 43 years at 16 games. In light of what we now know of what the sport takes out of the players’ bodies and brains, 16 games were almost certainly too much already. Yet not only did the owners get their wish for one more, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that they will get their true wish, expressed persistently for the past 10 years: an 18-game season.
More games mean more broadcast product, and naturally this coincides with a new TV contract that goes into effect in 2023 and adds more streaming outlets. With two extra playoff teams added to the inventory, there’s little reason to think it will stop there. It might add an extra bye or subtract preseason games, as the players have always wanted and proven they’ve needed.
But it also might not do that at all.
College football has proposed expanding its four-team playoff system to 12 teams in the near future, further padding what, as recently as 2005, was just an 11-game regular season and a relatively small number of selective bowls. Thus, favorable Supreme Court ruling or not, the unpaid players will soon put in even more work and absorb more punishment for their insufficient scholarship, room and board.
This is all two decades behind the NBA. In 2002, it sweetened the product it sold to ABC and Turner and received a significant rights fee raise. That’s also the year that the first round of the 16-team playoffs – a best-of-five series for the previous 20 seasons – was expanded to a best-of-seven.
Nobody particularly liked that except for the networks. They got more games to air and monetize.
Nobody can pretend that the extra strain on players hasn’t been obvious from the very beginning. Yet just as there’s been no legit attempt to shorten the regular season on behalf of the players’ health, there’s no chance the playoffs will go backwards to even one shorter playoff round.
The Cycle Continues
Once again, the players pay the price. And once again, the public does not care.
NBA players that broke down late in the season and in the playoffs were ruthlessly mocked – we’re talking to you, Charles Barkley and your “Street Clothes” nickname for Anthony Davis. What chance would there ever be for sympathy for their mental state? The next person, for example, that shows concern for the mental state of the otherwise widely-popular Chris Paul as he deals with the Covid protocols, will be the first. The only question asked so far is when he’ll be back to help the Suns get to the Finals.
It’s worth pointing out here, meanwhile, that as NBA players are trashed for breaking down physically, players in Osaka’s sports are lauded for their courage and smarts in backing out of majors to protect their physical health and their futures. Roger Federer quit the French Open mid-tournament and Rafael Nadal backed out of Wimbledon, both citing the necessities of “listening to my body,” as Nadal put it.
Ask yourself how Federer and Nadal are not like Osaka, or Davis and Irving and Kawhi Leonard, and see if the differences in sympathy and empathy are clear.
The scourge shows no signs of easing, either.
The Summer Olympics in Tokyo is a few weeks away. As of now, Osaka plans to play there. But if she pulls out again to safeguard her mental health, why wouldn’t anyone expect the same vitriolic reaction? The aforementioned Manuel, the double gold-medalist swimmer from the Games in Rio de Janeiro, lost badly in one of her preliminaries in this week’s Olympic Trials and cited serious mental and physical stressors, including depression, in the interim between Games.
If athletes suffer the effects of the strain of the past year-plus while in the Olympic spotlight, will that strain be factored in when the inevitable public backlash results? Will the backlash be evenly distributed by race and gender, or will it go the way it always goes?
We actually already have the answer. Look at Osaka’s words, the reaction to them, and at the image of the bottle flying past Irving.
Now ask yourself if we’ve hit rock-bottom yet.
