Time & Perspective Quote by Martina Hingis

Hingis is doing something athletes rarely get credit for: describing media distortion as a business model, not a personal feud. The line starts in the plainest register of scheduling conflict - time, priorities, the grind of an elite career - and then pivots to the mechanism that punishes that boundary-setting. If she withholds access, the machine doesn’t pause; it fills the silence. Her blunt “they have to sell papers” reframes the journalist-athlete relationship as transactional, with scarcity manufactured into a narrative whether or not she participates.

The subtext is about control. In tennis, Hingis was marketed early as a prodigy and then scrutinized as a personality, not just a player. Refusing an interview becomes a form of self-management, but the penalty is reputational: stories “come up,” implying speculation dressed as reporting. Her careful hedging (“I don’t think is always true”) is telling. She’s not claiming total fabrication; she’s pointing to the gray zone where assumption, insinuation, and the need for a headline blur into something that feels like truth to readers.

Context matters: this is the pre-social-media era when tabloids and sports pages acted as gatekeepers. Today, athletes can bypass traditional press with their own feeds, but the underlying incentive hasn’t changed. Hingis is naming the quiet coercion built into access journalism: talk when asked, or be talked about. The quote works because it’s not melodrama; it’s a cool, lived-in diagnosis of how “no comment” gets translated into a story anyway.