A question of questions

Once upon a time I knew this high school kid.

I won't identify her by name or by school or even by the sport she played, but she was a linchpin of a team -- maybe the linchpin -- that won a state championship one year. And so local media, electronic and what we used to call "print," had occasion to interview her more than once.

It wasn't exactly like Leroy Jethro Gibbs grilling a suspect in the box. I mean, she was a high school kid.

Yet she was terrified.

So terrified, her coach had to beg her to answer even the simplest questions, and then had to stand next to her while she did. I always wanted to say "Hey, it's OK, I don't bite." In fact, I did say that a time or two.

All of which is a long-way-around-the-barn way of saying I understand Naomi Osaka's own unease around the media.

She's no high school kid, but she's young, too -- just 23 -- and she's not an exceptional athlete at a high school in Indiana but an exceptional athlete on a global stage. As maybe the best women's tennis player in the world, she is in many ways the face of her entire sport, or at least one of them. And I think we  forget sometimes what a burdensome thing that can be.

Especially if, like Osaka and my nameless high school kid, you're someone whose discomfort with the spotlight veers into a phobia over which you have little control, and for which no one should blame you.

That's what I think about Osaka -- and Simone Biles, for that matter. And so you won't catch me saying her struggles with this are just a ploy to get out of answering tough questions at news conferences, as some of my sportswriting colleagues have suggested.

However.

However, I don't think this means you paint media types as ogres just for doing their jobs.

Example: Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Who's one of the best, if not the best, sports columnists in America, and a seasoned pro who knows how to ask the tough questions. The other day he asked Osaka an entirely legitimate one at a presser for the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati, and Osaka teared up and fled the podium as a result.

Later, her agent called Daugherty a "bully" whose "sole purpose was to intimidate." And yet ...

And yet, here's the text of Daugherty's question. You tell me if he sounds like a bully:

You are not crazy about dealing with us, especially in this format, yet you have a lot of outside interests that are served by having a media platform. I guess my question is, how do you balance the two, and also do you have anything you'd like to share about what you did say about Simone Biles?

Those are entirely appropriate questions framed by an entirely legitimate point. In fact, those are great questions, given the issue of mental health to which Osaka, Biles and others have recently focused some well-deserved attention. And they're exactly the sort of questions you'd expect an exemplary journalist such as Daugherty to ask.

That hardly makes him a bully. And it hardly makes him someone trying to intimidate anyone.

Yet Osaka fastened on the word "crazy," responding "When you say I'm 'not crazy about dealing with you guys,' what does that refer to?"

To which Daugherty responded "You are not crazy ..."

Wrong thing to say, obviously. Even the pros misstep once in awhile.

Yet it doesn't change the fact Daugherty's questions were fair and on point. And that, in reacting the way she did, Osaka clearly still is struggling with the issues to which she first called attention at the French Open.

That should elicit our compassion, not our disdain. But on the other hand, labeling a respected journalist a "bully" when he indisputably wasn't does nothing to help either her or her situation.

Two things. Both true.