FOR sports reporters (and likely most other beats, too), the press conference is a tedious ritual during which we are fed pat answers to often equally banal questions. 

If you have a really good question, you’d rather hold it back, because otherwise all of your colleagues are privy to the answer. No scoop there.

Most of the time, you have to ask it anyway, because gone are the days when you could sidle up to an Australian tennis player at a bar after a match and share some on-the-record banter over a beer.

But once in a while, a press conference rises to an irresistible height of theatre, feeding a jaded press corps with the juiciest of spectacles. The press conference itself suddenly becomes the story.

One of the most memorable was the notorious punch-up in the press interview room at Wimbledon. It happened in 1981, after John McEnroe had won his semi-final match against Australian Rod Frawley (a friendly throwback with whom you could still share beers at a bar). McEnroe went on to win his first Wimbledon title, defeating his rival, Bjorn Borg.

McEnroe’s relationship with the British press was already rocky after the tabloids labelled him “Superbrat” for his on-court tantrums. After answering a couple of match-related questions, the Daily Mirror’s James Whittaker — better known as the purveyor of gossip about the royal family — abruptly switched the subject. 

Where was Stacy Margolin, Whittaker wanted to know. Margolin, also a tennis player, was McEnroe’s girlfriend at the time but had left the tournament early. 

Notoriously shy despite his on-court exhibitionism, McEnroe considered his personal life entirely off limits. But Whittaker kept pressing. “You’re pissed off aren't you?” I seem to remember Whittaker asking. “You’re pissed off that she left.”

At that point McEnroe walked out in disgust and the press conference abruptly ended. Whittaker got what he wanted, leaving the rest of us with pretty limp copy and no post-match quotes.

American RKO Radio reporter, Charlie Steiner, decided to take Whittaker to task, prompting Whittaker’s Mirror colleague, Nigel Clarke, to throw a punch at Steiner that missed. The boxing segued into a wrestling match before the pair were finally separated. Arthur Ashe, working then for US television and always the modicum of decorum, stood at the back of the room in silent shock.

I never thought those scenes would be topped, but they may have been surpassed at the current Paris Olympics when a press conference with a similar fight theme, hosted there last Monday by the International Boxing Association, went monumentally and memorably pear-shaped.

It was intended to salvage the IBA’s reputation and make the “big reveal” about the gender identity of two women boxers — Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting — whom the IBA had disqualified from its own world championship claiming the women had tested as male. Instead, the debacle turned the institution into a laughing stock, and tore its already shaky reputation into tatters.

For an hour, three IBA representatives sat in awkward silence on the dais while nothing happened, arguably a gold medal performance for the most uneventful press conference in history. 

But then IBA’s Russian chairman Umar Kremlev, straight out of central casting and looking like someone you definitely would not want to face in the ring, finally started talking, his face looming on a giant screen behind the dais.

At which point the event shifted dramatically from boring to utterly bizarre. 

With a backdrop of Madonnas and Christ figures, Kremlev railed against the Olympic opening ceremony, complaining, through an interpreter, that an apparent depiction of the Last Supper re-enacted by drag queens had personally “humiliated” him. (He had earlier called the Games “outright sodomy” in a post on X).

Then Kremlev called IOC president, Thomas Bach, a “sodomite.” Biblical sins were not what the frustrated press corps, packed into a gilded and airless ballroom, had come to interrogate.

Mics failed and buzzed or delivered startlingly loud bangs.

The only unfunny part in all this was that it was four white men passing judgement on the bodies of two non-white women.

As the event wore on, frustrated reporters began to shout their questions all at once, demanding that the IBA “show us the evidence.” Mark Adams of the IOC — who says the IBA test is “so flawed that it’s not possible to engage with it”— later told Time magazine the press conference had been “a chaotic farce.”

Then someone spotted Khelif’s boxing teammate, Roumaysa Boualam, sitting at the back of the room, an Algerian flag in her hand. Instantly, reporters rushed to surround her, a crush of cameras and microphones thrust in her face in a desperate attempt to capture something, anything, that would make a story.

On the screen, Kremlev kept talking, but by then no-one was listening any more.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.