Night Games Read online

  Guys, what you don’t understand – you think it’s funny, but there are gay kids in the suburbs who are killing themselves because they don’t know what to do about their sexuality. They kill themselves. This poor girl has spoken about suicide. This is not a joke anymore.

  *

  ‘I never got the sense it was gay,’ said Tony Wilson, a writer who was briefly drafted for Hawthorn Football Club in the early nineties. He recalled fellow players throughout his footy career stroking his chest in the locker room or faking anal sex whenever anyone bent over. ‘It was more attention-seeking and juvenile. It was fucking annoying.’

  It was footy players’ humour.

  Another former AFL player told me about a similar brand of comedy after his team had played a match. ‘I was laying on a bench being massaged by this big ugly brute of a guy, my eyes closed and mouth hanging open and ———, on his way to the shower, rammed his penis into my mouth, then ran away.’

  When I told some male friends about this ‘gag,’ a few responded angrily. ‘Those bastards,’ said one. ‘You know, all your school life, those footy jocks practically patrolled the yard and whether you were gay or not, you had to make sure you never slipped up, did something that could be seen as gay, otherwise these bastards would make your life hell. Then you hear something like this, I mean fuck them.’

  But I can’t help wondering – despite how it looks – if these kinds of pranks, jokes and even gangbangs are a form of surveillance in themselves.

  One of the reasons – I think – that so many people watch football is not just for the athleticism and the biffo, but also for the tenderness. The sheer unadulterated joy when someone scores, the meshing of happiness, the hugging, and players helping haul one another off the grass, sometimes roughing up a player’s hair once his feet are back on the ground. It is one of the most beautiful things about the game.

  But is there a price players feel they must pay for this unchecked joy in one another? A point they have to prove to one another over and over?

  CHAPTER 5

  Of the 800 AFL players, on average seventy-five are plucked from a draft of 1000 young men each year. At Collingwood Football Club annual general meetings, new draftees are introduced to the members. Eddie McGuire, a former CEO of the Nine Network and the Magpies’ president, reads out their names, followed by height, weight and sprint speed. Lined up like top-quality cattle, they are the club’s latest investments. Each has passed the closest thing to a quality assurance test to get there. An assortment of fitness tests, medical examinations, potential injury analyses, family background and psychology checks has occurred; their drop punt kicks have been filmed and studied in slow motion.

  A final touch for the draftees is a photograph. Each potential recruit is to stare in steely fashion into the camera lens. They are coaxed to flex their muscles. Often a player will grip a red leather ball with one hand (handspan is also measured). This photo is perhaps the first inkling that these players are entering into more than a contract to play ball. The flash of the camera is as searing as a brand. Some players, stars in their country towns and schoolyards, are already naturals at fielding this kind of attention. But if you look closely at these early images, you may still glimpse the ghost of a boy, not yet rendered invisible by pounds of meat and muscle.

  Although on the verge of adulthood, these footballers are about to enter a state of prolonged adolescence. For most of their peers, the social world is set to expand, but for these select few their already insular existence has just contracted. They will be expected to live, eat and train with their team, as if part of a single organism.

  Young draftees are subject to diets, curfews, lectures and punishments, all of which sit awkwardly alongside storytelling nights where footballers initiate them into a clique of in-jokes, nicknames, bets and dares, where humour and humiliation control the power dynamic and veterans wax lyrical about the debauched adventures of Thommo, Johnno and Stevo.

  Distil all that and transfer it into the body of a young man – this conflicting state of entitlement and responsibility – and you may well have a very confused soul.

  Recruiters have already scoured the draftees’ personal lives for distractions, hidden vices and interests that may later demand priority over the game. Supportive families are great, clingy ones not so good. In 1993, when the American professional footballer David Williams opted to miss a game after his wife went into labour with their first child, his club, the Houston Oilers, fined him and deducted over $100,000 from his pay. The club owner criticised him for his ‘misplaced priorities.’ Australian football codes demand a similar allegiance.

  The former player Brent Crosswell, who was recently inducted as an ‘icon’ in the Tasmanian Football Hall of Fame – ‘they’ve upgraded me from “legend” status,’ he told me, bemused – played much of his career under the highly respected coach Ron Barassi. ‘He didn’t like women getting in the way,’ Crosswell recalled. ‘Let’s face it, women could be a bit at odds with sending a man back out on the field with an injury.’

  ‘I remember one time, a fellow player’s wife came to watch him play, she was heavily pregnant, and Barassi slammed him later in the change room, saying he was under the thumb and that she was distracting.’

  In Kevin Sheedy and Carolyn Brown’s book Football’s Women: The Forgotten Heroes, they recount a footballer’s wife’s memory from the fifties of being hauled into her husband’s club after recently giving birth to their first child. The coach interrogated her concerning her husband’s feeble on-field performance, saying that he needed ‘uninterrupted sleep’ before games. Mortified, the wife promised the coach that her husband would not be disturbed by their baby.

  Another former AFL footballer, Tim Watson, once wrote in the Age defending a Carlton player’s decision to play footy instead of attending his brother’s wedding:

  You can say to your brother: ‘I will do my best to attend your wedding but if, by chance, we make the final of the Wizard Cup, my priority has to be to play for Carlton. I am a professional football player; it is an occupation I get well paid for and I have sworn an allegiance to the playing group that I am a part of whatever it is we do as a group.’

  The same player’s allegiance to his football ‘family’ was curiously reciprocated that year at the post-Brownlow Medal party at Crown Casino, where it was reported someone had slipped a Rohypnol into his long-term girlfriend’s drink. This, by all accounts, was a ‘prank’ played on the player through the medium of his girlfriend.

  *

  ‘The way to improve relations between men and women is to expose the codes that control relations among men,’ wrote John Stoltenberg, a feminist activist and author, in 1993. One such code among contact-heavy team sports is ‘sledging,’ or ‘just a bit of banter,’ as supporters like to refer to it. It involves getting in the ear of the opposition and baiting them – often sinking to you’re a faggot, a girl, a monkey, a black bastard – so as to make a player see red and stuff up their game.

  In 2008, an AFL footballer was sledged about his critically ill child, while the year before, two players exchanged punches after the West Coast Eagles’ Adam Selwood pointed to a tattoo on his opponent’s arm and reportedly said, ‘I fucked her last night … Yeah, she’s a slut.’ The tattoo was a portrait of the player’s six-year-old daughter. Selwood later told reporters that he didn’t realise the tattoo was an image of the player’s young daughter. ‘I just saw it was a female,’ he said.

  The AFL tribunal cleared Selwood of insulting language – largely because his remarks were based on a misunderstanding. In other words, he’d just thought the picture was of a female, so no harm intended.

  In the NRL, when Olsen Filipaina joined the Balmain Tigers in the eighties, he was one of the few Polynesians in the game.

  ‘The way people treated me was unbelievable,’ Filipaina told the Rugby League Week magazine
some twenty years later. He recalled his own teammates deliberately trying to put him out of action in training sessions. During games, beer cans were thrown at him. ‘I was called a black bastard, a nigger … it ruined rugby league for me.’

  Spectators like to join in the sledging, female fans included, calling players ‘girls’ and ‘poofters’ when they duck out of a headlong crash, making monkey sounds when a black player gets the ball, or in the case of former NRL player Hazem el Masri, a champion goal-kicker for the Bulldogs and a devout Muslim, yelling ‘fucking terrorist’ and ‘go home.’

  Until recently, this was seen as part of the game, the challenge being to play harder and rise above the sledge. But such slurs are now being reported in the media, pressuring the codes to condemn the practice, all of which is raising the hackles of old-school footy insiders, men who say get over it, princess. The challenge now for the AFL and NRL is getting players to report controversial taunts, thus uprooting the code of ‘what happens on the field stays on the field.’ In other words: ‘Don’t dob.’

  In the Age in 1986, Brent Crosswell recalled his club counselling him on what to say to the tribunal when his teammate was accused of making ‘some extremely unpleasant remarks’ to a goal umpire. Close by, Crosswell had heard what was said and was called on to give evidence.

  His club coached him on what to say. ‘Go away, you silly old moo,’ recited Crosswell when the jury asked him what his teammate had said. ‘The mouth of an ex-player on the tribunal dropped considerably,’ wrote Crosswell, ‘and the general assessment of the comment was not helped by some idiot chuckling in the press gallery.’

  But times are changing, albeit with the usual dragging of feet. In 2011, West Coast became the AFL’s first team to suspend one of its own players, Patrick McGinnity, after he told his opponent that he was going to rape his mother. The rival player, Ricky Petterd, reported the incident to the umpire, who then took it to the tribunal. The AFL applauded Petterd for speaking up, but McGinnity’s manager, David Sierakowski – a former player whose father was a premiership player in both Aussie Rules and rugby league – said Petterd was thin-skinned: ‘To have a Melbourne player come out and do this to him [McGinnity] is quite embarrassing.’

  Less than a year later, the Port Adelaide midfielder Danyle Pearce reported Will Minson, a Western Bulldogs player, for a similar sledge. According to Pearce, Minson’s comments implied raping his mother, including a line about pinning down her arms.

  Fined and suspended by his club, Minson apologised publicly, while Pearce’s family rallied around him, his father telling journalists he was pleased his son had made an official complaint, rather than leaving it on the field. ‘Someone has insulted his family and he’s standing his ground – I’m very proud of him,’ he said.

  Family was suddenly taking priority over the footballers’ code of silence.

  It was 1998 when the NRL first took action against racial vilification. Anthony Mundine reported Bulldogs forward Barry Ward for calling him a ‘black cunt.’ The league fined Ward, but it took eight years for another player to come forward with a similar report. Then the South Sydney Rabbitohs stripped Bryan Fletcher of his captaincy after he called Parramatta’s Dean Widders a ‘black cunt’ during a game. The club also took him off the playing list for a game and fined him $10,000.

  Later, speaking to the Australian Human Rights Commission, Widders saw taking a stand as essential to players understanding one another better.

  I remember being at a function where two players who had played in the same team for over ten years were part of a general discussion. The non-Aboriginal player turned to the Aboriginal player and said, ‘It’s like when I used to call you a black so-and-so. You knew it was a joke.’

  The Aboriginal player, who has accepted this for years, finally had the courage to say, ‘No, I didn’t.’

  The courage was contagious. In 2010, Timana Tahu – of Aboriginal and Maori heritage – walked out of the NSW State of Origin camp after the assistant coach, Andrew Johns, called an indigenous player on an opposing team a ‘black cunt’ at a team bonding session in a pub.

  ‘You must shut that black cunt down,’ Johns told the team’s centre.

  Tahu told relatives, ‘He [Johns] has been using this term since I was eighteen. I can no longer look him in the eye.’

  And despite an attempt to cover up the slur – team management had initially told officials that Tahu had left because of a hamstring complaint – anger from the public flared. Johns, a highly influential figure in the game, soon announced his resignation and days later was ‘spotted’ guest coaching an Under 15 boys rugby league team, a predominantly indigenous side.

  Curiously, even those on the sidelines are now being taken to task. In June last year, 43,000 people gathered to watch Collingwood and Gold Coast on Sunday afternoon. Two rival players were tussling over the ball in the pocket when it went out of bounds. They were about to make their way back to the game when a Collingwood spectator started making monkey sounds and hurling racist abuse at Joel Wilkinson, a Gold Coast player of Nigerian descent.

  Later on Nova radio, the other player, Collingwood’s Dale Thomas, recounted their reaction. ‘We were both a little bit shocked … We heard it and looked at each other, then I kind of looked back and shook my head at the area … where it came from.’

  After the game, Thomas approached Wilkinson and said he would support him in whatever action he wanted to take. From there, Thomas lodged an official complaint, prompting his club to take action against the racist fan. After much sleuthing, the fan was identified and the Collingwood Magpies tore up his twenty-year membership.

  It was a beautiful moment – a kindling of hope after what had seemed an endless round of bad media stories. Not only were two rival players not sledging each other, but they had taken a combined stand against a hateful spectator.

  And yet, on-field sledging has also taken an unforeseen turn. With the introduction of the new moral codes, players are now getting sledged about their falls from grace. In 2008 St Kilda’s Nick Riewoldt was overheard on an umpire’s microphone saying to the Essendon player Andrew Lovett, ‘You bash your fucking missus.’ Lovett had just been fined $500 after breaching a restraining order. Less than a year later, Lovett was traded to the Saints.

  Then there was Stephen Milne, one of the most notorious on-field sledgers. After the allegations of rape in 2004, many thought the serial pest got his comeuppance. Milne was called a rapist by rival players and booed by spectators. (Although, in a bizarre twist, some of his females fans started calling, ‘Rape me, Milney! Rape me!’) Even the highly respected Collingwood coach Mick Malthouse lost his cool and called Milne a ‘fucking rapist’ during a quarter-time break.

  Milne told the Age in 2011 that he uses the abuse as motivation: ‘It always happens and it always will. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop it. I love the sledge as well. There’s a line you cross. I’ve crossed it once or twice, but blokes who cross it regularly probably should look at stopping.’

  ‘Abuse as motivation’ – sadistic though it sounds, I can understand it. I play basketball, and in my league there is one team we dread playing. They’re okay players, above average in our grade, but it’s not that we’re worried about. It’s how they play – immediately getting in our ears, holding the backs of our tops, and slugging under the ribs when the refs aren’t looking. They make our blood boil, but even though I hate these games, I have to admit that I play some of my best basketball against them. I use the anger to drive over them with the ball, to lose them. There is no way, I think, I can let these bitches win. And for the most part, we don’t. At the end of a game, there’s relief when we’ve beaten them, as though we’ve won not just a game, but a battle against evil. But it’s not fun. There are no handshakes, just residual anger.

  In professional football, none of these creative spins on sledging the likes of Milne
appear to involve moral judgments – rather they simply target perceived weak spots. And often, when players are caught out, many claim that their verbal slip-up occurred in the ‘heat of the moment.’ As Gideon Haigh pointed out in the Age, such a defence often falls flat. Concerning the ‘I’ll rape your mother’ sledge, Haigh wrote:

  What was almost as repellent as the words that West Coast Eagle Patrick McGinnity used in trying to intimidate Melbourne’s Ricky Petterd at Etihad Stadium on Sunday was the expression on his face as he prolonged the exchange. Check the replay. He’s pleased with himself. He positively leers. Having provoked a reaction, he goes back for more.

  While it is tempting to take these sledges as instances of football’s unique sexism and racism, sledging is less about what’s said than a broader culture of bullying. Wrote Haigh:

  Confronted by the mentality of ‘whatever it takes’ … it’s hard not to feel a discomfiture about how players are encouraged to think of themselves and others.

  *

  Four years ago, seven North Melbourne footballers put together a four-minute video showing the adventures of Boris – a condom-clad rubber chicken who liked to penetrate a frozen chicken carcass. Posted on YouTube, the video quickly caused a ruckus, with the players made to stand in front of journalists and hang their heads in shame. The video saw Boris and his presumably female chicken acquaintance getting it on in the supermarket, on a staff member’s desk and in a player’s locker. In one clip the two characters visit the pub for a beer and white wine before fucking in the toilet.

  Two of the Kangaroos’ senior players took the blame for being ringleaders, thereby revealing a serious case of prolonged adolescence – one of them was married with three children. For the most part, the video was plain stupid. Neither Boris nor the frozen chicken came out looking particularly fresh.