Why do we expect our sportsmen and women to be saints? It’s idiotic. Australia’s professional athletes are under microscopic scrutiny day and night, and everything they say or do is judged against a standard that those doing judging – primarily journalists – could never hope to uphold. It’s hypocrisy on a grand scale. The media only holds athletes to ‘account’ because it’s an easy way to generate a story.
Club management, now stuffed full of ex-businessmen and bureaucrats instead of ex-players, are terrified of bad press, so they insist players toe the line set by these self-appointed moral arbiters. It was extremely refreshing when Mal Meninga, the Queensland State of Origin coach, shrugged his shoulders about getting kicked out of a hotel. “I had one drink at the pub. I made the mistake of going behind the bar to ask for a beer and that was it," he said.
Then there is the censorship. Players are not allowed to have an opinion unless the powers that be have vetted and approved it for broadcast or publication. Any player daring to express his feelings is subject to internal sanctions and media hysteria. Take the Australian cricketer David Warner, who dared to criticise a reporter via Twitter. The reporter Robert Craddock had a sook, Cricket Australia had a public relations meltdown, and the media generally got on its high horse about respectfulness. The result of this weird neo-wowserism is a country full of sportsmen who speak in sanitised clichés. The characters of yesteryear that made Australian sport so memorable and joyful are all but extinct.
Part of the problem is that sport is now run like a business. The most farcical example was when the (now former) Australian cricket coach Mickey Arthur dropped four test players for refusing to ‘do their homework’. (They were supposed to ‘submit three ideas to improve the team’.) When I first heard this I slapped my forehead… and then thought, “Can you imagine what would have happened if this bureaucrat had told Dennis Lillee or Jeff Thompson to do their homework?”
The great irony is that while the media and club officials are busy ensuring their charges behave like saints and “set a good example” for the kids who look up to them, they are quietly trampling sport’s greatest virtue into the dirt. I’m talking about being a good sport.
Thanks to technology – slow motion cameras in football, Hawkeye in tennis, Hotspot in cricket – bad sportsmanship has gradually become acceptable. This trend is especially odious in cricket, where not so long ago the umpire’s decision was sacrosanct. Players understood that it was a case of swings and roundabouts – if you were the victim of a bad decision in this game, it was balanced out by the wrong decision that saved your bacon in the next one. Now we have the icky ‘review’ system, which has essentially inculcated bad sportsmanship into what was once a game that embodied the opposite.
So if the media and their apparatchiks want to set a good example for the thousands of kids who idolise athletes, they can start by scrapping ‘reviews’ and ‘challenges’ and ‘third umpires’. They can tell the players that the umpire’s decision is final and to take it with good grace. That’s how a champion behaves.