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On February 7, 2013 Bill Pulver said in a press conference: “While being quite proud of our record it would be naïve of the ARU to think [drugs are] not an issue that spans all Australian sports”.
While that press conference was convened to focus more on performance enhancing drugs, it was backed by a report that indicated both performance enhancing and illicit drugs were infiltrating the culture of Australian sport, at many levels.
Karmichael Hunt now faces Southport Magistrates Court on March 5 over four counts of suppling cocaine.
Before I address the main issues I want to get to in this piece, let me say this: people who assumed the ASADA investigations were all that would happen and showed the crime commission report was flawed were short-sighted. Short-sighted because we are trained to be; by our own hubris that we know better, by the short media cycle, by people who got too close to the stars and have protected them.
Now, back on track. Come with me as I play connect the dots.
***
Last time the blackest day in Australian sport was thrust upon us, I wasn’t particularly surprised and neither am I about drugs in sport now. Clyde Rathbone penned a piece for Fairfax this week that was labelled as ‘naïve’ online. But I think we need to stare ourselves in the face over this issue of drugs; don’t blink and go back to the games quite yet. So I defended the article, because the nitty gritty of this single case isn’t the point he, or I, want to make when discussing the culture of sport.
Players being charged with a drug offences was reported as heavily as if our prime minister was about to face another spill. And rightly so, because the public sure was crazy about it. Going about my daily non-sports reporting rounds the Queensland Crime Commission’s work has been brought up at least three times, unprompted, by people I’ve spoken to this week.
But why? Why the surprise? Why the urgency? Why the rush to say this was another example of rugby investing in the “fools gold” of a rugby league talent? What “definitive action” could the ARU take to fix this? They stood Hunt down, stripped his vice-captaincy, they’ve stopped him training with the team – like he’s going to infect someone else with his illicit drug disease. Is anything else likely to fix the atrocity more than waiting for a legal conviction?
***
You’ve played an incredibly violent game, you go out with mates, you feel rubbish, you’re sore, your legs are dead, and you take something to pep you up.
It’s the off season, you haven’t felt the rush of winning in months – the very thing your life is structured around, the one thing you really understand. So you snort a line at a party.
To think a portion of highly-paid young men, with lots of spare time and a career that has extreme highs and lows overlaid with the constant annihilation of their own body, aren’t using illicit drugs recreationally is naïve.
I’m not condoning it, but it’s naïve to think drug-taking wouldn’t happen. I believe sports are a microcosm of society at large. If something happens in the general population, there will be carry over into the sporting population. Drugs are no different. In fact, the heightened nature of the professional sport makes it more like a petri dish – growing bacteria at a faster rate so we can see the results sooner.
Cocaine was – and probably still is – a hugely popular white collar drug. People would ferry it into the buildings of the most powerful bankers and asset managers in the world.
Young highly paid bankers trying to become the masters of the universe, they think they’re the masters of the universe. Now, they want to feel like the masters of the universe, so they sniff a line in a cubicle. They’re still at work and it’s 8pm on a Friday after all, and they do earn a lot of money after all.
Again, I’m not condoning illegal drug taking. Lock em up if they’re caught. But let’s slow down and think.
***
What expectations of sports people are unrealistic?
The notion that athletes are paid well to be role models is a start. Or that players are heroes and the evidence of such is the marketing endorsements provided by large multi-national corporations that bestow some sort of sainthood upon the athlete.
That second one’s pretty easy to debunk, so let’s not kid ourselves; athletes are paid by companies as mules. Mules that take that Suisse multivitamin and dangle it in front of your eyes until you find yourself pulling out the wallet. Mules that keep kicking you with their Adidas boot until you buy one. Mules that film themselves on a Samsung phone so many times you want to film them on that Samsung phone.
Power to them – that’s how the market works, I hope they enjoy the big house with a pool and more walk-in robes than they know what to do with. But it’s a market force, not sainthood.
The first one, about athletes being role models is harder to debunk. And interesting to consider. Here’s what I consider the easiest way to answer that one: the evidence says they aren’t. Simple as that.
Too many athletes aren’t role models in any sense of the word. So they just shouldn’t be considered as such. I know we want them to be role models, badly, deeply. But they aren’t. They are interesting, absolutely, and some of them lead lives worth emulating, but there’s just too much evidence to prove we shouldn’t hold sports people up as role models. We’re setting ourselves up for failure.
This will expose my age, therefore exposing me to ridicule at trying to address some of these issues in my relative youth and inexperience – but one of the first times I wrestled with this problem was when Mark Waugh was caught up in that match-fixing scandal. I loved M Waugh. The languid style. The easy runs. I can still remember being at a school swimming carnival when a teacher talked me through the evidence. Waugh was flawed and I was devastated.
For about two days. Then I realised Ricky Ponting was the future anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I still fondly remember Mark Waugh’s playing days, and somewhat enjoy his punditry. But even from a younger sports-viewing age, from our outside vantage-point, players are a commodity.
The only way athletes could really be role models is if we somehow knew more about them – which I wish was possible in our sports-media bubble, but somehow just isn’t. But even then if we were truthful we’d be operating in shades of grey, at best.
Some athletes may well be worthy of being role models, but that’s not why they’re paid. They’re paid because they possess a valuable skill.
***
Back to rugby. A while ago I wrote that rugby struggled to guide, promote and maintain superstars, and while I still think that point holds it probably needs to be expanded into a wider philosophy. Rugby’s star problems are a professional athlete reality.
We live in a world where big name athletes are being paid at a younger age and that has accelerated for rugby, a sport which only became openly professional 20 years ago this year. The petri dish has grown, and the results are the same as in every other sport.
Rugby is no longer a sport where doctors, lawyers, university students and generally people that might have once aimed for a knighthood make up the totality of the playing group.
We have more mercenary athletes than ever before. And the game is played to a higher standard for it. But the reality is that young people will get paid lots of money, have lots of free time and spend it finding young-man ways of occupying themselves.
Simon Poidevin, long into retirement, reclines in a leather chair in his Sydney high-rise office while speaking with Bret Harris, but not all players in the game now are on that same trajectory.
David Pocock will probably become prime minister one day, Clyde Rathbone is developing a media presence, and Al Baxter is an architect now. But many of our players didn’t start in the same place rugby players once did, so finishing in the same place will be more difficult.
I don’t say that as some sort of fait accompli either, it’s something that can, and should, be addressed. Rugby needs to manage its superstars better, but it also needs to adjust to the professional sports world better than it has.
***
I know some of these ideas don’t fully line up one after another as easily as some other articles. I’m not smart or articulate enough to distill our culture into a hastily-written weekly column. I’m tired tonight and I’ve gone on too long. I just wanted to get this out there while the time is still right.
Why don’t we chill out for a few hours, ignore the ‘plight’ of professional clubs for a minute and talk about us? What sort of culture do we want? Rest assured, the games will still be there waiting for us to watch this weekend.
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.