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How to punish Richmond footballer Dustin Martin? That question has exercised a few good minds over the past two weeks, and more than a few other kinds as well.
The consensus among the golfing classes was that the punishment had to be swift and severe, as though further deliberation was tantamount to a failure of resolve, or a betrayal of women. Send a message, they chorused. Let it ring out like an air raid siren over Sheffield.
The advice from Victoria Police on Tuesday that no charges would result from Martin’s drunken confrontation with a woman earlier this month is unlikely to cut much ice with the law enforcement specialists in the football punditry. That the details of the incident were at best sketchy and unconfirmed did little to dampen their punitive ardour the first time around, after all.
And it’s still beyond dispute that Martin’s conduct and generally inebriated state fell some way short of the missionary standards required of today’s AFL footballer, especially when venturing into the built-up areas where normal citizens congregate. So it’s hardly surprising that the same experts are urging the same maximum wrath.
Former Geelong premiership player Cam Mooney said on Wednesday that if Martin had been a lower-ranked player on Richmond’s list he’d have been sent packing long ago – hardly an original observation. Mooney’s recommendation? Get rid of him.
Maybe it is as simple as coming down hard, sending a strong message, drawing a line in the sand and dealing in other such vague and powerful figures of speech. But more likely it isn’t.
The vexations of formal punishment are as old as organised society, which is possibly why some guiding principles have evolved along the way. One of them is proportionality, and that’s a problem for AFL boss Gillon McLachlan and his integrity unit, who will likely have the final say in any sanction.
Why? Because the one thing you should never expect in anything concerning AFL football is a sense of proportion. The one thing you should always expect, on the other hand, is the exact opposite.
Most of the hanging judges are former AFL players now working in the media, or veteran sports journalists now operating in the capacity of opinion-leaders. By and large, they are males of a certain age for whom sport is a consuming lifetime passion and the durable scourge of violence against women a fairly recent preoccupation.
Like most late-arrivers, they’re in a rush to make up for lost time.
Former Melbourne star David “The Ox” Schwarz was adamant about the options facing the Tigers, or rather the lack of them. “This is going to be the end for Dustin Martin at Richmond, or it’s condoning violence against women,” Schwarz said on SEN radio on the Tuesday after the incident.
The Ox may not the best person to be offering advice on how to deal with errant footballers, given the gambling addiction that shadowed the contours of his own playing career, and the patience it demanded of his long-suffering club.
God knows where he’d be now had the Dees cut him loose at the height of his vice-riddled “challenges”. He mightn’t be the celebrated advocate for responsible gambling with the day job at a sports radio station where gambling ads run on a continuous loop, and Sexyland vouchers are snapped up by lucky competition winners.
Schwarz’s hard line was a sharp u-turn from the ‘I kid you not, chopsticks!’ chortlefest he and his co-jock Mark Allen had run with the previous afternoon, when they’d reported the breaking news. Of course, by then they had some catching up to do.
Earlier in the day their SEN colleague, Kevin Bartlett, had called for Martin to be suspended for 12 months and made to pay $50,000 to an appropriate women’s cause.
Bartlett is arguably Richmond’s greatest player since the war, and unarguably its greatest booster in the media. His punchy daily editorials (“I’m Kevin Bartlett. That’s my take”) are mostly designed to provoke a response from listeners rather than withstand scrutiny. But on that Tuesday KB was in deadly earnest.
Enough is enough, he fumed. How much more educating do these players need? Grizzled doyens of the print era and KB regulars, Patrick Smith and Greg Denham, departed from their customary roles as cartoon contrarians to register their furious agreement.
The SEN phone poll was running overwhelmingly with KB too. No matter that the facts of whatever happened were still unclear. I expect this is why Barrie Cassidy says capital punishment should never be put to a popular vote.
Jon Ralph, the fresh-faced veteran of every media platform in modern sport, was worried the Players Association might exercise some sort of veto if it deemed the penalty excessive, as though it were a permanent member of the Security Council. (It isn’t and it can’t.) Ralph wanted a lengthy ban but not a year.
It’s interesting that Caroline Wilson, the chief football writer at Fairfax Media, regarded a four-match suspension as both severe and appropriate. Wilson is no fan of Martin and no soft touch in the punitive stakes, to say the least.
Enquiring of people (all-too) familiar with Martin’s disorderly present ways as well as his unstable backstory, she was told he had no history of violent behaviour, even if his life skills and social habits still left plenty of room for improvement.
Bartlett wants football clubs to stop throwing good money after bad. It’s always the same, he said. The true cost of all the attention spent on a high-maintenance few was the neglect of the majority who toe the line, he said. “And you know what? They always let you down in the end, the trouble-makers.”
Few can match KB for football experience, so his observations of that world count. The more general perversity of human behaviour is sometimes beyond the insight of football people, however. And not only football people. We’re told Martin had an upbringing (or “formative profile”) that virtually predicted difficulty in the tran-sition to adult responsibilities – as for that matter did Schwarz, by his own account.
But plenty of kids come from a long a way back and don’t get the support, guidance and second (third, fourth) chances available to those lucky enough to be on an AFL list. Some difference in taxable incomes, too.
Dusty will want to outgrow his attraction to outlaw chic pretty quick or he’ll lose the option. Patience can’t last forever. A 12-month moratorium on the tatts wouldn’t hurt his cause, either.
Still, 24 doesn’t seem that old to me to be closing the file on him. Maybe a few of us are slow to change the bad habits we prefer not to dwell on.
It was football’s failure to honour its commitments to the social good that rankled most with Bartlett. Wasn’t Rosie Batty made Australian of the Year for shining a light on family violence, he asked?
Isn’t Richmond the only AFL club with a female president (Peggy O’Neil)? Hasn’t McLachlan refused to attend Carbine Club lunches until it scraps its odious all-male policy? Isn’t Tiger CEO Brendan Gale a member of Male Champions for Change? What about Respect and Responsibility? Doesn’t football have a responsibility to do more than pretend to respect (a) women and (b) community sentiment?
Of course it does. If AFL football wants to regard itself as a hallowed institution, a force for good in the community, its response will have to reflect the community’s proper contempt for certain behaviours. The social momentum for overdue change must have its effect.
But the punishment has to be about more than the ‘optics’, to use a word McLachlan is apparently fond of. It has to fit the offence. You can’t punish person for the sins of others, in addition to his own.
For Mooney, KB and The Ox the punishment would be the same whether the behaviour was a criminal offence, a modest misdemeanour or whatever Dusty did.
And beyond a few seconds of grainy vision and a few scraps of information in heavy circulation, they don’t know. If that’s not the reflex of ignoramuses, nothing is.
Football may also have to acknowledge the limits to its expertise in social policy – restaurants and nightclubs are not the primary site of family violence, after all. If you want to make an example of someone for a larger cause, you need to make sure you pick the right example.
McLachlan and his retinue of advisers should be less concerned about sending a message and more concerned about getting it right.
How to punish Dusty Martin? Not sure. But I know whose counsel I wouldn’t be seeking.
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