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It’s something we teach our kids, as long as we aren’t savage footy dads or rampant soccer mums. Lose well.
Geoff Lemon’s excellent Roar article last week brought such things to mind.
How we’re taught that at the end of the game, win or lose, you shake hands.
How you don’t blame the umpire for his bad calls, you get on with play. How it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.
In a nation that has built its national myth on an absolute drubbing in a war zone, it’s not surprising that at the core of our national psyche was the ability to lose well.
One of the other quirks of a nation built on blood is that we are no longer militaristic. The loss of two generations in world wars, then the futility of subsequent wars in Asia, sat us outside the warmongering of the world around us.
During this period we saw an Olympic Games that bore no gold medals. We made movies and music that were quintessentially Australian, liked overseas only as quirky products of Down Under, but rightly appreciated now as classics.
We had cricket teams that featured names like Thompson, Lillee, Marsh, Jones, Border, Boon and Healey, but they were also the worst in our history: we lost more than we won.
Australia knew its place. We were the insignificant dot in the ocean at Keating’s arse end of the world, a country largely ignored that occasionally popped up to do something bizarre, like our totem kangaroo.
We lost well. We lost and kept out heads high. We were players, not winners. We had integrity. We fought our battles on ovals, grounds, tracks or pitches, not in trenches or on the beaches (unless it was a surf event).
Sport was Australia’s great war, and we lost it as well as we had lost our foundation myth at Çanakkale.
Sport in Australia is an experience of passion. It is food to the Italians, music to the Germans, latex bondage kits hidden in a box in the cupboard to the English. Sport fires up Australian emotion like nothing else, except perhaps hooning and racism, but sport is a force for good.
Then came John Howard and the ra-ra marching band of nationalism, to talk us into heading off to a war about nothing for someone giving us nothing in return. The same year saw us sell out our beef farmers and intellectual property producers in the US-Australia free trade agreement.
Into this milieu we threw Steve Waugh’s Invincibles. We had become a nation so obsessed with the idea of former glory that we couldn’t come up with an original name for our most successful ever cricket side.
We began to get infected with our larger ally’s penchant for self-aggrandisement.
Ricky Ponting was next: a gambler and a drinker with a foul mouth and questionable connections who became the captain of the Australian cricket team.
He wasn’t a good man. He didn’t have integrity. He wasn’t a role model. These things didn’t matter. He was a winner. And this is what being Australian in the dawn days of the 21st century had come to mean.
Win at all costs.
Australians are now poor losers because we spent most of the last 20 years being the world’s worst winners. From the 1990s to the mid-2000s we dominated sport like never before.
Unbeatable swim teams, athletics gold medals, World Cup round of 16, F1 winners, tennis champions, Steven Bradbury, the epic medal haul at our home Olympics, and an era of cricket dominance to rival that of the great West Indies sides.
Sport itself used to be the Australian birthright, losing gracefully part of our character. Now winning became the birthright, and we became boorish in its pursuit.
These days, we no longer cut down the tall poppy and cheer the modest champion. We expect our sportspeople to be superheroes, and pay some of them accordingly. A win is now taken as a given, a loss the desecration of a religious ideal.
I’m glad that Australia has started losing. And not just at the cricket. We’re being roundly flogged on every court, pitch, track and lane.
I’m glad that we’re ruthlessly over-analysing the situation, because the more we analyse it, the more the answers are coming out that there is a “cultural problem”.
It bloody well is a cultural problem, but not in the way these sporting bodies understand. It’s not an Essendon problem, it’s not a Cricket Australia problem, it’s not an AIS problem, it’s not a Swimming Federation problem, it’s not a Cronulla Sharks problem.
It’s an Australian problem.
We created this zeitgeist. We allowed our politicians to sway us with blind nationalism. We collectively ignored cheats and people with questionable integrity who were good at football. Despite the good athletes, we rewarded the bad with captaincies, massive pay packets and unchecked adulation.
If athletes don’t want to be role models, they should stay in the amateurs. We may want to be loyal to our club or nation, but we have to stop going to games and buying memberships when we see poor behaviour. Otherwise we condone it.
We as a nation have to get over our inflated sense of entitlement and go back to understanding our true place in the world: hiding down under, unrecognised and unknown, living in paradise while the rest of the world goes to hell in a handbasket.
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