Tennis Prose




Nov/17

17

Boy, has pro tennis changed from the 80s!

borg

I love these posts by Johan Kriek on Facebook. Check out the latest on fake news and his near brawl with Bob Hewitt…

Been thinking……

about the new term “fake news” that has been heard virtually every day now…..

Unless you have been a recipient of “fake news” you will not understand how infuriating it is.

Imagine an instance where you are at a party in your neighborhood and your good friend and next door neighbor says “so I heard you are moving away because of financial issues?” “I heard it from so and so 4 houses down”. It couldn’t be further from the truth as to why but you as you know you are going to move as the kids need a pool which you currently don’t have etc or you want to move closer to a school etc. You are now the recipient of “fake news” … but in your neighborhood…you are immediately incensed at this neighbor whom you don’t know really….

I dealt with this “fake news” issue for a very long time especially in the beginning of my tennis career. But the “fake news” perpetrated was on a country wide scale! On a daily basis virtually.

There were times in the early 80’s when as an Afrikaner I was receiving “death threats” from individual people in South Africa! One time I was met on the plane in Johannesburg by plane clothes security officers, was first off the 747 and driven to my hotel in bulletproof cars without them even so much as ask where my passport was and was told to “don’t go far” during my stay…..

I suppose they were tailing me everywhere I went for dinner etc.

Later on I found out that a guy was put in jail for threatening to kill me and I didn’t even know about it except my parents knew but didn’t want to upset me etc. When I won the South African Open in 1983 my dad and mom and brother “packed some heat” all the while watching me on center court! Those were the days before searches and metal detectors at sporting venues…..

What “fueled this” was the fact that I supposedly “betrayed” my own Afrikaner people by becoming a US citizen in late 1982. I lived in Florida and I was “big news” in South Africa as I had won the Australian Open for the second time etc. I also had the newspapers both Afrikaans and English newspapers report on me almost on a weekly basis back then.

I became aware of one or two reporters that wrote very badly about me all the time. Some stuff I deserved as I was not afraid to speak up on the court, had thrown some rackets and acted badly in matches but when these reporters started saying things about me that were totally false and made up stories I decided to set things straight.

On my next visit to SA I had called a press conference (Owen Williams and Keith Brebnor ran the SA Open at the time) and invited all the reporters and tv people covering the tournament and I was open to all questions. The room where we did this was packed with tv and reporters from all sorts of publications. I answered every question they had.

Nevertheless, the reporters that “had it out for me” still continued their nasty “fake news” and I was seriously considering suing them but that would have been a very expensive and time consuming effort etc. I backed off but very reluctantly because I am a fighter. I do not back off easily…..
So what we see with President Trump and many others, this “fake news” is a very dangerous business because people get “swept” into this river of constant bs and it is very hard to fight back at that time we did not have social media and Twitter etc.

Today one can do the “fight back” well but back then I just kept coming back to support the SA tournament for a very long time. That showed themI wasn’t going to stay away despite a barrage of very negative press and inaccurate facts….

One time I did have the opportunity to say to this one reporter what I thought of him which he immediately printed in the paper the next day…..Obviously he festered serious animosity towards me for some reason but I kept coming back to SA.

Bob Hewitt who now sits in jail in SA for horrendous sex crimes against young girls for decades did the tv in Johannesburg and even he went after me for some things he had no idea or the truth to. He even went after my parents who had nothing to do with anything except being my parents.

I set him straight in a one on one interview right after I reached the semis of the SA Open. He sat there in front of me with all cameras ready to go live all over SA and with a full tv crew in attendance I unleashed on him. I was prepared for a serious brawl. Female tv crew left the room as they saw what was coming. We never did the interview but I got all of it “off my chest”….

As I later walked down this long hall to the locker room I heard someone running behind me in dress shoes. It was Keith Brebnor. He just about kissed me as he said “Johan! I cannot thank you enough for what you just did in there. That took some serious balls to do what you just did in front of tv towards Hewitt. That sob deserved everything you said to him! Thank you thank you thank you!”

Many years later Hewitt finally got what was coming.

Fake News is a “cancer” and it can destroy lives….

Be aware….

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7 comments

  • catherine · November 17, 2017 at 11:29 am

    ‘Fake news’ used to be called gossip and rumour.

  • Scoop Malinowski · November 17, 2017 at 1:15 pm

    Then the media got caught literally fabricating fake news. And the people awakened.

  • catherine · November 17, 2017 at 1:51 pm

    All my life the media have been promulgating news stories that weren’t true. The only difference now is that you can put all sorts of fantasies on the internet, anonymously, and they will go all around the world and no one will sue.
    So gossip becomes ‘news’. And I’m not sure people have ‘awakened’ because the public will believe anything.

  • Chazz · November 17, 2017 at 2:28 pm

    Scoop, the problem is it has become such an overused buzzword that it has no meaning anymore. Why? Because anyone these days that doesn’t like what they hear uses it.

  • Scoop Malinowski · November 17, 2017 at 3:43 pm

    Catherine; People no longer trust the media in the US. The polls about trusting the media and the ratings of the big networks here are crashing. Just before the election, the media tried to say Hillary had a 90% chance of winning, obviously a blatant fake news lie. Also I have noticed a clear distrust by many of the athletes I interview compared to ten and twenty years ago. I don’t think the NBA and NFL players like talking to the media and actually dislike and distrust the media. Tennis players and hockey players are the best interviews in sports, generally.

  • catherine · November 18, 2017 at 2:21 am

    Scoop – I don’t think it’s a problem just in the US. And polls are pretty unreliable anyway – in the UK the main polls had the Tories winning comfortably in the election this year but that’s not what happened. People just weren’t asked the right questions. So the polls gave the wrong answers.

    Tennis players vary – some are higly suspicious of the media, often for good reason. Some just get sick of going through the same routines day in day out.

    My main point was the ubiquity of Twitter and other online outlets means rumours can become ‘facts’ so quickly you end up believing nothing or being taken in by it all. Eg, even I had a moment of wondering whether Kerber has really switched coaches because it’s just on Twitter – maybe it’s fake news. You can get that cynical 🙂

  • Scoop Malinowski · November 18, 2017 at 8:37 am

    Catherine; Sharapova summed up her respect for the media when she said it’s the same questions every day, it’s so redundant that I don’t even think when I answer the questions, I just talk like a robot. It’s like she knows what questions are coming and she knows how she is expected to answer. I find it that way in most sports. Same questions, same answers, watch interviews with any hockey players after a game – if you can stay awake 🙂 I’m also noticing some pro teams in US do not like my Biofiles because they can’t control the content.

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