[Syd Thrift]

I feel like sports fans get super entitled and whiny when it comes to access to players. In my mind, the only thing you’re being paid to do a the French Open or wherever is playing and winning matches. If you don’t talk to the press afterwards that’s probably going to make your own band suffer but to me, when organizations make press conferences a requirement they’re basically asking for people to quit them or for folks like Marshawn Lynch to come in and answer “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” over and over again.

In the US in particular so I can’t really speak for other nations, access to athletes has historically been granted not by the athletes themselves but by the owners of the sports teams they play on. This has led to an often adversarial relationship between the sports media and athletes and this isn’t anything close to new: Dick Young hated on Ted Williams for sport and Williams basically couldn’t do anything about it. I mean, hell, we’re seeing that man child Stephen A. Smith responding to Kwame Brown’s perfectly reasonable critique of why his career never got off the ground with “LOL HE SUCKS SEE THESE CLIPS LOOK AT ME AMERICA LOOK AT ME”. The fact that athletes are becoming more and more empowered to make their own decisions on this stuff, both in terms of abstaining and in terms of criticism, is good, not bad.