“Sport is the continuation of war by other means” – Lofty ‘Carl’ Clausewitz, forcings-back legend.
You could be forgiven this week for thinking that Australian rugby was about to disappear up its own fundament, in a frenzy of spite. If the muck-raking mainstream media wasn’t bad enough, the internet (for those that dared go there) was a cesspool of disdain.
I’m not going to try to write about the facts of the Beale-Patston-McKenzie case, because I simply don’t know what those facts are.
What I do know is that Patston and McKenzie are gone, and that Beale might soon follow suit. I also know that Beale sent Patston inexcusable texts. Almost everything else is conjecture.
Nor am I interested in becoming angry. So much faux outrage has been expressed this week that it feels like no more words are left for the real thing. If I’m angry about anything, it’s about how the sport of rugby in Australia has been unnecessarily traduced. And I’m not really angry about that. After all, it’s only a sport.
What I’m more interested in is what this says about us as a community of sports fans, and what it might say about Australian society in general.
I watched the game this week – and wasn’t it a cracker? – with friends who consider themselves to be followers of politics. The conversation turned (as it inevitably does) to what the problem is. This is always a safe bet in pre-game political chat, because something is always wrong.
What we agreed, before the pints of Monkey’s Fist took hold, was that the problem is us. The combination of rolling 24-hour news and social media has made us all addicted to events. It has also blurred the boundaries between real information and the sound of our own voices. We’ve become empowered, but not in a good way.
And of course I must include myself in that assessment, because here I am, chattering away.
What does this have to do with sport?
First, the reality that sport is entertainment. This wasn’t always the case, or at least not as openly as it is now. The perception of the people who mattered was that the game itself had value, and that this was the most important thing. Financial matters like gate takings and TV rights were like dirty washing, rarely aired in public.
Nowadays, sports administrators openly treat sport as business. This means they need the media, and the media in turn needs us – the paying public.
And boy, don’t we know it!
It thus becomes a form of self-referential game. We start to measure the success of our sport in terms of gate takings and sponsorship deals, as though these were competitive elements, like tackles made and tries scored.
Then we start to bemoan the fact that our sport doesn’t attract the same sponsorship value as other sports. In one sense this is valid enough, because sponsorship pays for the grassroots of the game, but that isn’t why we’re fascinated by it. We’re fascinated because gate takings, and sponsorship deals, put us on centre stage.
It makes us players, and it makes the real players into commodities.
It’s the same kind of circular insanity as afflicts our politics, where activists measure the success of their political side’s policies by their electability, instead of by their content.
And perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, if only the inner monologue of society, as found on the internet, wasn’t so ugly.
This will be controversial, but I found quite a bit of the online debate about Kurtley Beale to contain barely-coded racism. Of course there was the usual paternalistic claptrap about ‘the kind of person he is’, but there was also some genuinely nasty stuff.
Why should I be surprised? It’s only the constraints of modernity that prevents it from bubbling to the surface. The internet is famously less constrained. Moderators may filter out the obvious keywords, but subtext passes them by.
Am I making a case that this brouhaha is about racism? Absolutely not. It’s about a particularly naive young man (and I don’t mean that in a paternalistic way) sending a woman offensive texts.
Without being remotely moralistic, now that this has become a media circus, and the credibility of the sport is at stake, Beale has to go. Which is a shame, because the ARU could have instead chosen mediation, in private, to everyone’s benefit. But that’s a side issue – Beale is unquestionably to blame.
But the torrent of offensive vitriol is inexplicable. Or perhaps, unfortunately, it isn’t.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.
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