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“It’s dangerous to confuse children with angels”, William H Macy is warned in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
The same can be said for athletes.
LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lance Franklin are only human beings within the most generously broad definitions of the term. Their strength, their speed and their agility appear to be alien. They are higher powers and we treat them as such.
Placing athletes on pedestals is embedded in us from the day we first see them on a television screen. There is something distinctly cinematic and novelistic about succeeding at sport which gives a person an aura that no doctor who demonstrates composure in a crisis can obtain as easily. Athletes can prove their economic and cultural worth without ever having to open their mouths (you should have taken heed of that, Jason Akermanis).
The beauty of sport is that it’s a platform for life. It’s hard to show courage, leadership and selflessness regularly in everyday life. But in football, to demonstrate those traits, all you need to do is put your head over the ball, pat a teammate on the back after he misses a goal, and look to pass before all else.
The problem, though, is that the rest of life often gets left behind.
Ben Cousins kicked a goal in the first quarter of Round 22 2007 that I won’t easily forget. It was James Hird’s last game, otherwise known as the ‘Scott Lucas game’, where Lucas kicked seven goals in the last quarter to almost drag Essendon to an unlikely victory over the highly favoured Eagles.
Cousins, six weeks back from his club-imposed suspension, had returned to his best. In the first term he streamed inside 50, tight up against the boundary line in the right pocket, the wrong one for his right foot, and thought about centring the ball. But then he took another look, focused, and kicked for goal from a non-existent angle. The ball sailed through the big sticks and Cousins jogged back to the centre square expressionless, fist-pumping teammates on the way back.
As he ran, drenched in sweat, biceps glistening under the Western sun, a crazed, adoring crowd as his backdrop, he looked less a 5’10 kid from Geelong, and more a towering Greek God. ‘Ben Cousins, is there anything he can’t do?’ the commentator yelled.
Sadly, it turned out, there was a fair bit that Cousins couldn’t do.
That game was Hird’s last as a player, Kevin Sheedy’s last as Essendon coach, but also Cousins’ last as an Eagle on Subiaco. The rest you already know.
Cousins was deified from the day he arrived in the AFL. How many breaks did he catch because he was ‘Ben Cousins’?
Stars are always given more leeway. Accountability is protocol, until you’ve got legendary acceleration, fearlessness and the best gut-running capacity in the game. Then the best thing for Ben’s health is to keep him focused by letting him do what he loves.
Ben Cousins failed football and football failed him. Football’s failure wasn’t just the fault of the West Coast Eagles or the AFL, though, it was symbolic of a fault in society. You tell a bloke he’s God enough times, look at him as such, treat him as such, and he might start to believe it. He might start to think that nothing is wrong.
When Cousins’ life started to fall apart on a public stage, the media delighted in his collapse. When it became clear that there was no romance in his descent, no rock-star corollaries, only a deep, heartbreaking sadness, interest was lost. We built the sandcastle of ‘Ben Cousins, superstar’ and then when it started to get washed out to sea there was nothing to do but watch things disintegrate with a sinking feeling in our stomachs.
Cousins thought he was untouchable because we cultivated his mystique. He is not blameless, but society is an accessory to the crime of his life’s destruction. We need to do a better job of remembering that sometimes our gods are just broken men.
***
I learned about the latest Cousins episode in a bar in Da Lat, a small rainy Vietnamese city seven hours east of Saigon. I was with an Australian couple and told them the news, which prompted some reminiscing.
“He was so sexy in his playing days. Shame that things fell apart for him,” the girl said, picking at the frayed label of her beer. Then her boyfriend added:
“He had the biggest arms in the league. It was him or Chris Tarrant, I reckon. Absolute superstar, too. I remember when he passed out outside Crown Casino, ha, what a legend! The bloke had a crack.” He smiled to himself, and then asked if we should get another round of drinks.