Night Games Read online

  There is gender imbalance and there is power imbalance. And without fixing the latter, the former will continue to stink of servitude.

  *

  In 1993, Beverly Knight became the first woman to be appointed to an AFL club board. She was also the longest-serving female director, only stepping down from her role at Essendon seventeen years later. ‘It wasn’t easy,’ Knight said, as we sat in her art gallery in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, huge indigenous works lighting up the walls around us. ‘It was a real shock, I’d gone to a girls’ school, I was my own boss.’ For the first three years, Knight had to push herself constantly, often waking up with dread on the morning of a meeting.

  ‘There were times I just didn’t want to go to meetings or events, didn’t want to face the snubs or the silences.’ At events, Knight often found men turning their backs to her or relegating her to ‘wife’ status. She smiled: ‘And another thing I had to deal with was that everyone was so tall.’

  One of the most difficult doors to unlock in the football realm has been that to the boardroom – which is not surprising considering how much it resembles the rest of corporate Australia. Nominations to boards have traditionally relied on old boys’ networks. One might assume this is because the clubs were running perfectly well – no need to fix something that isn’t broken – but when Knight arrived at Essendon, the club was in dire financial straits.

  ‘They were still running it like a local footy club,’ she recalled, ‘and I discovered they didn’t have a members’ department. It was crazy. They saw members as complainers rather than a cash cow.’ In the first year of Knight’s placement, she oversaw a jump in membership numbers from 10,000 to 25,000. Soon other clubs began to take an interest in what Essendon was doing, and Knight began to meet with them to discuss the importance of members.

  Being a woman also saw Knight having to bring up the most ridiculous issues. When the MCG, Melbourne’s main sports stadium, underwent a massive multi-million-dollar redevelopment, the new change-room sections were built without female toilets. ‘Female staff had to share the disabled toilet,’ Knight recalled wryly. ‘When you’re bringing it up, you sound absolutely pathetic in a roomful of men.’

  And what about the locker room, I asked.

  She sighed, shrugging in resignation, as if she had started out with one conviction but had to yield to another. ‘I didn’t go to the change rooms for the first six years and my advice to any female newcomer would be to go there immediately. It’s the inner sanctum. But at the same time, I believe the players need privacy, not only from women, but from men. In those days so many men just hung around them all the time.’

  Knight’s main interest was promoting indigenous issues in the club and the league. Before her arrival on the board she was already sponsoring, among others, Michael Long, a young Essendon recruit who was soon to become one of the game’s best and most influential players.

  Smiling, Knight recalled a conversation with Long after she was nominated to Essendon’s board. ‘When I became the first female director, Michael telephoned me and said, “You’re about to find out what it is like to be Aboriginal.”’

  Knight pushed hard for club selectors to consider more indigenous players, discovering that many were being dismissed, not because they weren’t good enough, far from it, but because their situation, background and isolation from mainstream society were thought to be too hard to navigate. Across the code, Knight actively promoted indigenous players and fought stereotypes that Aboriginal players would muck up and drink too much, and that their families would humbug for money.

  Today, both the AFL and Essendon Football Club are incredibly proud of their connection to indigenous Australia – and rightfully so. You could say that Beverly Knight, the first woman allowed into the code’s engine room, was a key person behind one of the proudest achievements of the AFL and Essendon.

  Yet Knight’s contribution to the game didn’t seem to register at her final board meeting. She proposed a quota system for women on the board, beginning at 30 per cent in a voluntary capacity over three to four years, and then to be mandated. ‘I got stonewalled.’ Knight shook her head, recalling how some members had said her proposal was no more than tokenism. Knight looked at me, her shoulders dropping, as if to say, ‘What, there are no worthy women? Only tokens?’

  *

  In the past decade, the two football codes have made a concerted effort to have women directors and commissioners. In 2005, both the AFL and NRL appointed the first women to their governing bodies. Katie Page, the CEO of retail giant Harvey Norman, joined rugby league’s executive board, while the former IAG Group executive Sam Mostyn joined the AFL’s commission. Then in 2008, Linda Dessau, a family court judge, joined Mostyn at the AFL.

  What about the clubs? When the high-powered business-woman Lynn Ralph was appointed to the board of the Sydney Swans in 2007, she noted drily: ‘I was the first woman. It was pretty embarrassing that there we were in the twenty-first century with no females on the board, and 40 per cent of the members were female.’

  Today the AFL has eighteen female club directors, occupying close to 15 per cent of the board seats. The NRL has ten women on club boards. But despite it being the twenty-first century, as Ralph pointed out, many men still yearn for the good old days.

  In 2003, the then vice-president of Melbourne Football Club, Beverley O’Connor, was told not to attend the club’s annual Past & Present Players function. O’Connor, who had been in her role at the club for five years, was reported to have taken the snub with ‘good grace,’ while the invitation promised the 250 male attendees a ‘good old-fashioned pie night just like the ones we used to have.’

  In some quarters the presence of women in powerful positions has strengthened resentment, especially when they actually speak up. One former board member told me of enquiries she had made into confusing balance sheets. When she asked about the hefty amount of cash under the tag ‘Maintenance,’ she received ‘opaque’ and ‘aggressive’ responses from the male directors.

  ‘What kind of maintenance costs this much, I wanted to know,’ she told me, raising her eyebrow.

  ‘Hush money?’ I asked.

  She raised her eyebrow a little higher and smiled. ‘Well, I put an end to that kind of budget-keeping.’

  ‘They serve very little purpose at board level,’ said Sam Newman on The Footy Show, after five female club directors had written to complain about the 2008 episode that humiliated journalist Caroline Wilson. ‘What do they do? I’m not knocking women [but] for very little input they demand a lot of clout.’

  Speaking on radio earlier in the day, Newman had let fly. ‘I love women. Been married to two or three of them … [But] tell me what they’ve ever done in football or for football … I’m talking about the people on football clubs. I’m talking about women in football who use football as a vehicle to do whatever else they wish to do that’s got nothing to do with football … they have an agenda.’

  He continued, ‘The AFL does not need shrieking, hysterical, desperate women trying to bob up with causes that they just get their excitement out of, or some self-fulfilling gratification out of, very minor and trivial issues.’

  The Western Bulldogs director Dr Susan Alberti, one of the signatories to the Wilson letter, told the Age that there was no hidden agenda: ‘I thought long and hard about putting my name to this … my only agenda is to make sure women are given the respect they deserve.’

  Newman and his co-host Garry Lyon then hit back at Alberti, with Newman implying she was a hypocrite because she had bought front-row tables to a Footy Show filming after Newman’s controversial stunt (the purchase was later revealed to be part of a donation to a charity fundraiser). The female directors were branded ‘liars and hypocrites’ because they had included Collingwood’s first female board member, Sally Capp, as a signatory to the letter, with Lyon claiming she did not wan
t to be part of it.

  Alberti, a prominent businesswoman who had been involved in football for over fifty years, decided to sue both Channel 9 and the two TV personalities for defamation. Eighteen months later, she was awarded a $220,000 settlement from the network. Both Newman and Lyon refused to participate in Channel 9’s apology to Dr Alberti, who is now vice-president of the Bulldogs. Outside the Supreme Court, Sam Newman sarcastically joked that he was going to spend his entire summer thinking long and hard about speaking ‘carefully.’

  *

  It is largely believed that the days of hush money are behind football – and with the increasing number of women at board level, this could well be true. Yet cultures of complicity persist. Even for fans in the stands, supporting the game is not as straightforward as it once might have seemed. The notion of looking after ‘your’ team has been increasingly warped. Instead of going towards the game, club members’ money and taxpayer subsidies may end up paying for court trials, settlements, even private detectives to interview witnesses and follow an alleged rape victim in order to build up a dossier. And this complicity, it seems, is not contained; rather, it can seep into other worlds. Over the past ten years, a number of disturbing revelations have emerged alleging special treatment of footballers by police.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘She’s just one of these footy sluts that runs around looking for footballers to fuck,’ an officer allegedly said to Senior Detective Scott Gladman, before urging him to drop the case against St Kilda’s Stephen Milne.

  Six years later, in 2010, the Milne case (in which his teammate Leigh Montagna was also implicated) resurfaced despite the two players being cleared. The detective and sergeant leading the investigation had since left the force and decided to break their silence about the case to Channel 9.

  Gladman said other police had seriously hindered the investigation and that the alleged victim’s statement was leaked to the club. Unauthorised photocopies of transcripts were made, a missing page being found on a police copier. Recordings of the players’ interviews vanished from Gladman’s desk for up to seven hours.

  ‘We were told that if things went well, consider yourself a Saints person for life,’ Gladman told Channel 9. The former cop’s claims were supported by another Victoria Police officer, Mike Smith, who had also worked on the case in 2004. The allegations triggered an Office of Police Integrity investigation. ‘They wanted to be seen to be more important in their eyes to the club,’ Smith said of some local police. ‘Anything they could do to help the club they would do.’

  Then, in July 2010, a freedom of information request filed by Australian Associated Press came through. The document was largely blacked out, but the gist was clear: it was a memorandum of understanding struck between Victoria Police and the AFL, a contract which formalised the sharing of files, photos, videos and evidence on people involved in the AFL. The police were required to let the AFL know of any investigations into the league’s players and staff, and would contact it before making any public comment. The formality of this intimacy between police and football looked plain ugly to outsiders. It was one thing to hear about individual police officers undermining investigations, but an official document such as this reeked of conspiracy.

  *

  A similar type of ‘football adulation’ was discovered after an allegation of rape was reported to police in New South Wales in November 2004. This time, the woman involved was obviously not ‘looking for a footy player to fuck’ – a tourist from Finland, she could only identify one of the three men involved as the ‘surfer guy.’ It was the police who recognised Bryan Fletcher, then the captain of the South Sydney rugby league team, sitting alongside the ‘surfer guy’ in a photo the woman had taken with her disposable camera of the men she had met at a bar before returning home with them. Her night, she reported, slanted sideways, suddenly menacing, when she started having sex with the ‘surfer guy’ and the others entered the bedroom. She told police she tried to get up, but the surfer guy hadn’t finished. He held her down, she said, slapped her and raped her while another guy stuck his dick in her mouth. Much later, when it was light outside and the house was quiet, she crept out of the bed, finding her clothes and handbag – but not her red shoes. Barefoot, she tiptoed past one of the guys, out cold and snoring on the couch. Once on the street, she said, she started running. It was Bondi, she told police, describing the house to them. The police executed two search warrants that day – the first house was the wrong one, but inside the second they found her red shoes.

  The woman was taken to the hospital to give samples for a sexual assault kit and a team was put together to investigate the complaint. In February 2005 the case was suspended when police decided there was not enough evidence, while the complainant, having returned to Finland, was reluctant to pursue the charges. The case, however, was revisited three years later when a NSW Police Integrity Commission inquiry unveiled Operation Mallard, an investigation into the alleged cover-up of sexual assault allegations involving Bryan Fletcher.

  At the time of the Finnish tourist’s allegations, Superintendent Adam ‘Gus’ Purcell was acting commander of the area in charge of the investigation. Although not part of the actual team investigating her claims, Purcell soon inserted himself into the proceedings once Fletcher was recognised in the photograph.

  The inquiry discovered that when Purcell became aware the investigating officers were planning to go around to Fletcher’s house, he told them not to. ‘He’s just been married,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t fingered him yet.’ Then Purcell rang Ricky Stuart, who had recently been announced as coach of the 2005 NSW State of Origin team and then of the Sydney Roosters – Fletcher’s former team. To the commission Purcell claimed he wanted Fletcher’s contact details but didn’t feel ‘comfortable speaking about it over the phone,’ so organised to meet the revered coach in Rushcutters Bay.

  According to Purcell, the meeting was brief and cursory. He asked for Fletcher’s mobile phone number and told Stuart he could not tell him what it was about. Stuart recalled the meeting differently. Interviewed by the commission, Stuart said Purcell mentioned that:

  Bryan could be in some trouble … It was basically, like, a girl had reported that she had been raped. That she was with a couple of blokes from Bondi in a cab going home and she was drunk and/or, you know, forgotten what the circumstances were, what happened, and there’s, you know, every opportunity that Bryan could have been involved and … Could have been involved as in being he was there. Did, did actually … mention to me that they had some photos … and Bryan was in the cab and that they, they picked his picture out, which was the reason why he wanted to come to me, to talk to Bryan.

  After meeting with Purcell, the coach rang Fletcher. The captain was pre-warned. Then Purcell called him and arranged a private meeting at Bondi police station in the superintendent’s office. It was not recorded. In a later bugged conversation with a colleague, Purcell said he had told Fletcher about the photograph – vital information that could have been used by the investigating police to catch Fletcher out if he tried to provide a false alibi. In the same bugged conversation, Purcell described how he had arranged the meeting:

  Now I went to school with Bryan’s brother but there was about fucking thirty years’ difference. Dave and I were good mates. That was it. We haven’t kept in contact since. So I said, ‘Mate, I’m a good mate of Dave’s. Can you come in and see me? I’m the Commander of, of … Eastern Suburbs.’

  In the weeks and months following the complaint, the superintendent’s phone records show that Fletcher made over twenty-five calls to Purcell. When queried about a text message sent at 1 a.m., he said, ‘It may have been a congratulations after he had a win.’ Purcell even spoke to Fletcher’s wife after the captain asked him to reassure her that Fletcher had nothing to do with the rape allegations, and discussed the status of the police investigation with South Sydney’s CEO. Less than three
months after their first meeting, Fletcher gave Purcell free tickets to a rugby game.

  *

  On reading the transcripts of the Operation Mallard report, it’s not hard to detect the obvious adrenaline and kick Purcell got out of getting close to, and being needed by, some of rugby league’s most influential figures. An amateur rugby player himself, Purcell also coached several teams in the police league. Now here he was, talking to – no, advising – professional players on the phone. He was receiving text messages from an A-league player, not to mention his personal meeting with a famous coach.

  Then, four months after the assault allegations, less than a month after the case was dropped, Purcell was appointed assistant manager to the Blues, the NSW State of Origin team. His role was to ‘help change the culture of rugby league’ due to the league’s plague of scandals and sexual assault allegations.

  Ultimately, the Police Integrity Commission found Purcell ‘unfit’ to remain a police officer and, as it wound up its report, it included the transcript of a bugged conversation he had in 2006. He had phoned Sergeant Alison Brazel, a colleague who had worked on the case, to tell her the ‘goss.’

  Purcell: I’ll tell you this for free. I’ve heard, ah, now it jogs the memory. When I was down in Melbourne last year for the last Origin game.

  Brazel: Yeah, yeah.

  Purcell: I, ah, met, who was the guy that you did the search warrant on, who was the main protagonist?

  Brazel: ———

  Purcell: So I went to a couple of functions and ———’s there. Anyway he came up to me and said, you don’t remember me. I said, I don’t have a clue who you are. He said I’m, ah ——— or whatever his name is, you’re Adam Purcell, thank you very much. I said, mate, no need to thank me, we didn’t do any–, I didn’t do anything to help ya. And I, I saw him at a couple of other things later on and I said, ah, fuck it, I had a few beers in me one night. I said, mate, what did happen that night, will you tell me?