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A lot of people laugh when I say I want to abolish all grand finals, which just shows how shallow and incapable of real human feeling those people are.
There is no greater source of human misery in Australia today than the grand final, and any decent government, any government that actually cared for the welfare of its citizens, would put its national security provisions on the backburner and seek to eliminate the emotional terrorism inflicted on the public every spring.
There are those who think I am speaking only of extraneous things, that my problem with grand finals stems, for example, from the hideousness of pre-game entertainment – whether it be the AFL’s insistence on finding its pre-game acts by searching ‘Bandstand 1965’ on YouTube, or the NRL’s habit of eliminating from consideration any performer who can be proven to have ever heard of rugby league.
There are those who think that if only the powers that be agreed to keep Mike Brady in a cold storage facility 365 days a year, instead of the current 364, I’d be mollified.
Then there are those who think my objection to grand finals is on the grounds of fairness, that I am simply saying that if players run their guts out for six months to win more games than anyone else, it can hardly be just to allow their season to evaporate because of one off day. That I wish nothing more than a meritocracy, an impossible dream as long as the scourge of finals is with us, that the best team in the competition is the one that wins most often, and anything else is marketing-driven injustice.
All these people are wrong. Yes, grand finals are inherently unfair, yes, football administrators have the page with ‘entertainment’ on it missing from their dictionaries. And yes, Mike Brady is less a human being than a biological weapon. But these are not the reasons grand finals need to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Grand finals must go because they are crushers of the human spirit.
This year’s AFL grand final devastated me. It left me feeling numb, as though I needed to ensure that I never loved again, lest I be hurt. I’ve spent the whole week singing ‘I am a rock’ mournfully to myself. For my team lost, and nothing now can come to any good.
Oh sure, they might have won. But would my happiness at their winning have been more intense than my sadness at their losing? I doubt it. In 2005, the Swans won and I was relieved. In 2006 they lost by a point and I began hurling rocks at the sky in an attempt to murder God. In 2012 they won and I was happy. In 2014 they lost and I told my children I regretted bringing them into this world.
In any case, if the Swans had won, all that would mean is thousands of Hawthorn supporters feeling the way I do now. Why is that a better outcome? I don’t wish depression on my fellow humans – no matter who wins a grand final, multitudes feel their souls squeezed to emptiness.
This weekend’s NRL grand final I look forward to with a light heart and a happy song on my lips, because even though I would prefer Souths to win, they’re not my team, and so Sunday night will not be spent howling in existential pain should they lose.
Sure, when Canterbury or Manly or St George wins a grand final, it is a little blow to my ideal universe, but it’s not agony. And what sort of twisted event is this grand final, that the more accomplished your team of choice is, the more agony is likely to come your way?
Fox Sports has been showing classic rugby league grand finals this week. It’s always great to watch old games from a time when not every player in the league was the same terrifying, rock-hard, Playstation-template shape. It’s good to remember that there was a time when forwards saw virtue in passing the ball and wingers were rake-thin and John Ferguson ran at the defence like he was playing Dance Dance Revolution and then went and smoked a pack of Winnie Blues on the bench. It is lovely to be reminded how much Chris Mortimer looked like Frankenstein’s monster.
But I watched the 1989 grand final between Balmain and Canberra, and 25 years later, it all came flooding back. That feeling of being a 10-year-old Tigers fan, who’d accepted the 1988 loss with philosophical equanimity, and felt sure this was our time, only to see it snatched away, by those dancing Ferguson feet and the most harrowing 20 minutes of extra time ever played.
Here in 2014 I was 10 again, and I felt tears prick my eyes. I saw the turning point of the game – Balmain up 12-2 when Bill Harrigan penalised Bruce McGuire for what I can only assume was a flagrant failure to not wait until the defence was onside before running. I’m not sure before or since has there been a team actually given a penalty as a reward for being offside, but that day Canberra was, and they scored a try from the ensuing set, and then, and then…
I felt the loss so keenly even 25 years later. I remembered to hate Bill Harrigan again, to wonder why Bob Fulton never followed through on his idea to run him over with a cement truck and spare all Tiger lovers the pain. I remembered to hate Mal Meninga, a legend of the game, for the vile sin of ankle-tapping Mick Neil five metres out from the line. I suddenly hated Laurie Daley, one of my favourite players of all time, because he threw the pass that gave Ferguson his last-gasp tying try. I hated Steve Jackson, who is probably a perfectly nice man. I hated Ricky Stuart’s cultured boot, I hated Gary Belcher’s wondrous grace, I hated Brad Clyde and what seemed to me to be his wilfully obnoxious hit-ups.
And moreover, I hated my heroes. I hated Wayne Pearce, as fine a man to ever wrap tape around his head, for his fumbling fingers at the worst possible time. I hated the man I still consider my all-time favourite, Benny Elias, for his drop-goal attempt not rising six inches higher into the air. I hated my own relation, Michael Pobjie, for the sin of being ordered onto the field to replace Paul Sironen at a time when Sirro would have been really quite valuable.
I hated the players, I hated the referee, I hated Warren Ryan, I hated Tim Sheens, I hated the crowd, I hated the streamers on the field, I hated the grass, I hated the stupid red in-goals, I hated Tina Turner.
I hated the world, all because I watched a recording of something that happened a quarter of a century ago, and in terms of geopolitical history, didn’t actually matter when it did.
And I realised how much more bitter, how much more cynical, how much more filled with hate and aimless fury I am because grand finals exist.
Who knows what sort of man I might be without grand finals? I might even be a good man. I can only dream of what might have been. It’s too late for me – in both NRL and AFL, grand finals have spoiled me as a human being.
Rabbitohs fans dreading the possibility of all their decades of waiting and longing coming to nought on Sunday night, remember: if there’d been no grand final in 1989, Souths would’ve been premiers, and you’d have been a hell of a lot more relaxed about life ever since.
For the love of God, end them now. Make 2014 the last year we are beholden to this annihilator of the human spirit. For the sake of all our humanity, abolish grand finals across the board.