I STAND WITH NAOMI!

I don’t often express strident views on LinkedIn, or get involved in controversy, but sometimes, you have to stand up for what’s right.

Tennis player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the Paris Open for reasons of ‘self-care’ and was fined (by the organisers) for not appearing at a contracted press conference.??

For ‘self-care’, we all read ‘mental health’, which (as regular followers of my LI blogs will know) is a key interest of mine.

So I discussed this with a friend who’s spent some of his career involved in Olympic and high level sports, where controversies play out, and where athletes are contractually required to appear in front of the media, at specified times.?

Like it or not.?

He’s helped to bring-in sponsorship, create the ‘model’ which the sponsors buy into, negotiate deals, look after sponsors’ interests, and ‘hold the hands’ of athletes as they face banks of lights and cameras.???

Sponsors may invest multiples of millions – and for that money, they aren’t much interested in what professionals routinely dismiss as “badge-on-the-armpit” marketing.?

Having a brand or company name briefly flashed on TV, on clothing or promotional material, is of some value … but not as much as you might have thought.?

It’s nearly impossible to put a value on that, and equally difficult to know precisely how much to pay for it, and how to argue the case with sceptical Board members.??

It’s a value-added extra; it will be diligently written into the contract, but it’s secondary.?It’s expected, but in itself it wouldn’t secure high profile sponsorship from a brand which benefited from professional advice.?What the sponsor really wants is a close association with the athletes.

The modern ‘model’ of sports sponsorship is complex but often centres around the personality, the character, the media image of the athlete, not just their performance (though that’s obviously critical). It’s about how the athlete’s image aligns with brand values.

Depending on the deal, the sport, the sponsor, and the sums involved, athletes may attend multiple sponsor events throughout the year - conferences, private dinners with investors and VIP customers, social events such as corporate golf days. They may appear in ads, videos, social media, and so-called ‘ambient’ advertising and PR.??And that’s the real value, in many such deals.

But all of that’s no use at all if the athlete isn’t famous and it’s of less value if they don’t have a rounded public personality.

To be famous, they have to appear on TV and in the media, a lot, even if they do so without the sponsor’s brand visible at the time.?To have a rounded personality, they have to have some kind of opinion, on something, at some point. They have to reveal character.

So when an athlete ducks a press conference, it’s a problem.

Or it isn’t.

My friend believes the organisers, and sponsors, catastrophically mishandled this issue, and missed a major opportunity to showcase compassion, and values; he thinks they were ‘badly advised’ and will come to regret it.

So do I.??

Naomi Osaka didn’t do this lightly.?It could reduce her lifetime earnings, if sponsors regard her as ‘unreliable’.?

Most brands have rules about this – some are celebrity obsessed, but others won’t get involved in deals with celebrities, because of the risks.?

Celebrities get photographed with competitors’ products, get drunk or high in public, engage in high-profile bad behaviour and sexual misconduct, associate with the wrong people, become embroiled in sordid marital disputes or court cases which involve unwholesome evidence, adopt the wrong causes, say stupid things, or come across as crass, gauche, tasteless, bigoted, or offensive in ways no one predicted.

Not all of them, but some of them.

And when they do, and you’ve paid a lot of money to be linked to them, there’ll be corporate soul-searching.

Reputational damage can spring from a wide range of issues, not all of them involving misbehaviour. Tiger Woods, Tyson Fury, Brad Pitt, Ollie Robinson and many others have been down this road.?

My friend has some hilarious ‘back room’ stories, narrow escapes involving intoxicated celebrities and those who had to be ‘saved from themselves’; most of these never made the media (sharp-witted professional minders got a grip, quickly) but all, briefly, made some sponsor’s hair stand on end.

When celebrities bring sponsors into disrepute there are contractual penalties (though the penalties are unlikely to match the brand-damage inflicted by the celebrity’s conduct).?

A celebrity who recognises that she’s under pressure and uses common sense to do something about it (even at significant immediate cost, and despite potential long-term implications), should (perhaps) be regarded as showing level-headed judgement. Strength, not weakness.??

After all, it’s a better option than having a breakdown (just ask Tiger).?

The politicisation of sport has widened this debate (for example, taking a knee, Black Lives Matter, and Marcus Rashford, who forced the current Government into two rather humiliating u-turns).

Politicised sport isn’t new (Hitler refused to give Jesse Owens a medal in the 1936 Olympics, black power salutes were given in the 1968 Olympics, South Africa faced an international sporting boycott in the Apartheid era … there are numerous examples).

But in the age of 24-hour news and our divisive political environment, it matters more.

For me there are two distinct issues.?

Firstly, should sports people become involved in political issues??

I don’t know the answer, but one of the UK’s most distinguished sports writers, Matt Dickinson, suggested recently that ‘sport has little meaning unless we know the character within’.?

One of the reasons we love sport so much, he reminded us, is not that it builds character, but that it reveals character.?

Dickinson’s theory has legs.?The British female boxer Nicola Adams has been taken to the heart of the nation, even by people with no interest in boxing, because of her infectious smile, her relentless optimism, and her captivating back-story.??She’s seen as courageous, determined, fun, and great company for a TV audience, and as a result she’s steadily building a media career independent of her sport.??

Some sports personalities ‘get by’ as celebrities without any personality hinterland, until they stop competing - Wayne Rooney, for example.?Once he’d stopped playing top-line soccer, he had little else to offer. On the pitch, he was dazzling, but you wouldn’t rely on him to deliver penetrating insight, or devastating wit, in an after-dinner speech (as you might in the case of Gary Lineker).?

Clearly, the Tiger Woods back-story, his fight to re-establish himself, contributes to his sky-high public support.?Muhammed Ali was a great boxer, but his personality was more than that; Billy Jean King, Marcus Rashford and others also have ‘rounded’ personalities that have enhanced their value as public speakers and media personalities, and consequently, we care more about whether they win or lose.?We want athletes to be more than just athletes. We want them to have other dimensions to their personality; we want them to have human frailties (as we all do).

In the past, Naomi Osaka made no secret of her political views, and opinions about that will vary.?

Fair enough.?

But when she dropped out of the Paris Open, she wasn’t being political.?

She was (in my opinion) being grounded, and sensible, and looking after her mental health.

And that brings us to the second issue: should sports personalities try to bury their mental health issues??

The short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction of the organisers and sponsors might have come across as a little more empathetic if, instead of fining her and adopting a mean-spirited attitude towards contractual obligations, they’d given thought to some public announcements about support for mental health charities, and provision for athletes facing mental health challenges. If they’d cared for her, and supported her, and helped to advocate for sensible attitudes towards mental health in every field.?

No one suggests that any other aspect of sports health should be suppressed; injuries to senior soccer players can change the course of a World Cup, for example, and are covered, ad nauseam, in the media.?

Players aren’t expected to risk their physical health, or violate Covid-19 social distancing rules, to attend press conferences, so why should mental health be different?

I’ll keep my own counsel on politics in sport, but I approve wholeheartedly of a greater awareness of mental health in sport.?

Top athletes take themselves to the very edge of the human performance envelope, walk a competitive emotional tightrope in the full glare of publicity, and then face a daunting array of cameras and lights.?

In the 1990s, my friend flew back from a global sporting event (long haul) with a British team that hadn’t fulfilled its potential or matched expectations.

“I remember every minute of that flight,” he says, more than two decades later.?

He’d been concerned about several of the team; they’d faced the media, in the aftermath of their performance, and found that hard; but they knew they’d face another grilling at Heathrow (and they did).?On the flight, he and his colleagues tried to prepare them, mentally, and get them to rest (a conflict which, in the end, was impossible to achieve).

They were all “desperately young”, he recalled (the brain is not fully formed until the early to mid 20s), but contracts, sponsors and money were involved, and there was a limit to the protection they could be offered.?

Some were “physically frightened” at the prospect of the Heathrow media scrum.??

If athletes don’t win, the questions can be ruthless, merciless and aggressive.??

In that environment, anyone who isn’t self-aware enough to prioritise their mental health is unwise.??

But the Paris Open organisers, and sponsors, didn’t recognise that, and came across as small-minded, ignorant, and mean. In 2021, we should be smarter than that.

Talking of which, Piers Morgan saw it as an opportunity for self-serving provocative comments designed to generate mindless publicity for himself.?

His asinine contribution (boorish and sarcastic) was roundly condemned, which he’ll regard as a success (he needs the publicity).?

As one commentator pointed out, these odious remarks came from a man who walked-off his own show after 90 seconds of gentle criticism.

But I’d better not get started on The Piers Morgan Analysis of Mental Health in Sport, because (as you’ll have gathered) I have a view on that, too … and we’d be here for a while!

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