In the Land of the Kickballers

Any claim I might ever make to be a fair dinkum Aussie wouldn’t hold water: I simply loathe football and, in close succession, every other mass-organised team sport that has ever been invented.

Note: mass-organised; nothing whatever against all those who play their own game of golf, tennis, basketball or what-have-you. Not even, for that matter, against all those who, each weekend across the continent, play for their local team their own variety of “kickball”, to use the old New Guinea pidgin term.

Football (Australian rules) at my Melbourne school was the undoubted origin of my now well-advanced moral decay. My parents had brought me up to tell the truth, a value as a little kid I wholly accepted. Football taught me to lie. I hated “turning out” for practice on freezing winter days, to be bruised and bumped into the mud by bigger and stupider boys. Left to myself I would have been rambling along the (then) wilds of Gardiner’s Creek, reading books, or working with the horses at the Toorak Road riding school. (This last occupation would also have earned me an honest quid to supplement my exiguous pocket-money.)

Extravagant lies, heavily embroidered with elaborately contrived details, were my refuge. Some of my fabrications—for example, grandma’s death and funeral—had but a one-time use. On the other hand, imaginary dental appointments could, with caution, be recycled. So could the recurrence of a “badly strained” wrist, for which purpose I carried always in my schoolbag one of those large calico triangular St John first-aid bandages, so my “wonky arm” could go into a sling at short notice.

It was a rare winter afternoon indeed that found me actually shivering out at practice. I concluded that low cunning had carried the day, and that the sports master had given up, beaten. Looking back, it seems more likely that he realised how useless this snivelling little bastard would be for his manly purposes, and was happy for me just not to be there.

To my father I must have been a sad disappointment. He himself had played Australian rules football for St Kilda and for Richmond, and unquestionably relished the prospect of raising a new champion right there in the family. From tender years he would take me to the Saturday match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground; I was interested only in the pie and sauce at half-time. He bought me an expensive football, the envy of all the other kids; it simply deflated itself sadly in a cupboard.

I am speaking at this point chiefly of the years which saw the Great Depression and the Second World War. Football in its various disguises (“codes”) was madly popular, and its star players were public heroes. The media (no television then) lavished acres of newsprint and endless hours of radio time on hyperbole which inflated a mere game to a matter almost of weekly life and death. But the footy then stood within some realistic human touch with its devotees. That youngster playing his first game for Melbourne would become a top judge of the Supreme Court; when one paid one’s premium at the Colonial Mutual Life at the corner of Collins and Elizabeth streets, the neat figure in business suit and necktie across the counter might be (and often was) the captain of Collingwood; going home for tea that night, the man in the next seat on the train might be South Melbourne’s champion goal-kicker.

The game was comparatively honest: was or was not John Wren slipping a secret extra fiver per game to Collingwood players? Entry tickets to the grounds were cheap, as were the obligatory nourishments of meat pies and saveloys. In a genuine sense it was the people’s game, and it truly belonged to them. In times of unemployment, and in the grim years of war which followed, the footy was a wholesome and comforting diversion from darker thoughts.

One small fact suffices to convey a sense of the now-vanished tone and cachet which once attached to Australian rules: Professor Baldwin Spencer, pre-eminent Australian scientist, pioneer anthropologist, friend of the amazing artistic and literary family of Lindsays, patron of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, was for many years president of the Victorian Football League. Today, it lies beyond imagination that Spencer would touch football, even with a pair of laboratory tongs.

“Big Football” still offers entertainment of a kind to millions of followers, but the main object of its existence is to feed (among others) media moguls, casino caliphs and other gambling entrepreneurs, the liquor trade and the advertising industry. It is tainted in sundry ways by politics and politicians. “Transparency”—that latest public desideratum—often shades off into something rather more like “opacity”.

On the very day I write these words (January 27) the Age reports shopping-centre squillionaire Frank Lowy as having stated (“under significant media pressure”) that the federal government had donated $962,000 to the privately owned Football Federation of Australia, of which Lowy is chairman. The funds were to support Australia’s soon-to-be contemptuously rejected bid to host the World Cup. Now, says the Age, in the light of further figures obtained under Freedom of Information laws, another $11.4 million is “missing”. Such a sum is no doubt mere petty cash in those circles, but it is taxpayers’ money. (Correction: it used to be taxpayers’ money.)

But the ravaged and degenerate face of today’s football may now be best surveyed in what ought to be its showcase: the worth of its players as citizens, and the height of public esteem they command. And a dubious example indeed it is that they set for young people. 

A quick turning over of the pages of the newspapers of the last couple of months yields the following, some of it from the front pages: 

• violent criminal assaults by drugged or drunken footballers
• offences against young women, ranging from sexual self-exposure to rape
• the entire bookful of transgressions of the drugs, alcohol and driving laws
• images of well-known footballers cavorting nude, widely distributed on the internet
• group sex with teenagers, and gang-bangs said to be organised by the clubs as “bonding exercises to improve team performance”.(Performance at what?) 
• pictures showing the penis of St Kilda captain Riewoldt, so generously available that television star Ruby Rose announced that “she didn’t want to see it again”. (Defending Riewoldt, the League’s CEO Andrew Demetriou called him “an upstanding citizen”—an ambiguous turn of phrase?)

From reams of such readily available material, one might go on and on, and I promise not to, simply concluding that here one may see not only the face of football, but its other end as well: one player who had been suspended for poking his finger up the bottoms of the opposing side, reached the sound conclusion that he was handier with his fists than with his feet, and switched to professional boxing.

Pathetic bleats from the official world of football protest that “players are entitled to their privacy like other citizens”. Yes, and are similarly entitled to keep their pants on in public. Such discipline and sanctions as are imposed on footballers are ludicrously ineffectual; players pile up fines and suspensions with little sign of seriously reforming their behaviour. A man eventually vomited forth from one club may be swiftly snapped up by another. 

Any distinction you can find between a footballer and a bikie gets narrower by the day. Soon we may have to conclude that a footballer is the one without a beard or a motorcycle.

And yet … there may be hope. Cultural supremo Donald McDonald assures us that the total numbers attending art exhibitions (such as the Archibald Prize) vastly dwarf the football crowds. And praise be for the Anti-Football League, founded in 1967 by the valiant author and journalist Keith Dunstan. It still boasts a vigorous membership in all states, and its secretary now is Keith’s grandson, Jack Dunstan. Members, says Jack, live in lively dread “of the cooler months when the game halves the nation’s IQ the instant the season’s opening siren wails”. His website is well worth a visit.

Meanwhile, I have a modest suggestion: all new contracts offered by clubs to players should provide that any team member guilty of even a single breach of laws or etiquette covering decency and civility, shall wear for the rest of that season one of those electronic security anklets fastened to persons on temporary release from prison. That way we could at least keep a finger on the louts while they are off the playing field. Some hope!