Sports

In the wake of another season gone begging for many, it is stabilising and somewhat corrective to immerse oneself in the wisdom of some of Australian Rules’s greatest exponents, as collected here by Ben Collins. These men, mostly ex-players, have obviously thought deeply about the game since they left it, and have examined their lives for what it truly meant to them. What emerges is a catalogue of dedication, sacrifice, perseverance and gratefulness, a testimony to the power of passion. Legend after legend offers a glimpse of the possibilities that committing to a dream can awaken, a lesson that is not confined to aspiring footballers. Having said that, there are many pearls here for young men entering the game, the demographic that will probably benefit most from reading The Champions.

Like most professional sports men and women, Steve Waugh and his brother Mark were supported enthusiastically from the start by their parents. To begin with, enthusiasm was about all that Bev and Roger Waugh brought to the cricketing aspirations of their twin sons, with the result that their ‘very first official game of cricket [for Panania-East Hills Under 10s] was in many ways a disaster’. Mark and Stephen having made first and second ball ducks respectively, ‘wearing our only pad on the wrong leg and the placement (by our parents) of our protectors on our kneecaps’, was an embarrassment that was much harder to disown than zeros in the scorebook.

In his spirited foreword, well-known football writer Martin Flanagan notes that ‘More Than a Game is in the best traditions of Australian football writing. It is unauthorised, a necessary virtue given the blurring of the Australian media with the corporate interests behind football.’ Flanagan also knows that writing about football in Australia has become a dignified and scholarly pursuit. Still, football as representing the verities of life is a powerful and relatively new symbol. As the editors and contributors amply demonstrate, Australian Rules history has been measured out in tribal rivalries and violence. These two themes, along with many contemporary evaluations, are explored in detail.

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

In 1936, at the Nazi Olympics, Jesse Owens won four gold medals and the hearts of the German people, but when he returned to the US his main aim was to turn Olympic gold into real gold. At Mexico City in 1968, Tommy Smith and John Carlos threw away their own careers by appearing on the victory podium barefoot and gesturing with the Black Power salute in protest against the treatment of their ‘brothers’ in the US and elsewhere. Television sent the Smith–Carlos message around the world, but earned the two athletes more opprobrium than praise in Western nations that were still coming to terms with the cultural revolution of the 1960s. This was before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, when the democracies could still convince themselves that sport and politics were worlds apart and should never mix.

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.

I have always been puzzled by society’s readiness to send their young men into battle, and that the young men go, and then tell such lies when they get home about what they saw when they looked on the face of battle. I hadn’t wondered about women, except to be glad that they were exempt from combat. Now comes Mischa Merz’s Bruising, which is about fear, aggression, and courage, and written out of her experience of one-to-one combat in the boxing ring.

One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.