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Apparently Andrew Fifita has been visiting a friend of his. Apparently that friend is in prison.
Apparently this drew a warning from the NSW Police that Fifita better not keep visiting his friend or he could end up in big trouble. Apparently if you’re a footballer, and you’ve got friends who are criminals, visiting them is a very bad thing to do.
The issue of who sportsmen consort with, and the impact that shady associates can have on the image of a sport, is a vexed and complex one. Indeed, when I look at all the different factors involved, I find it extremely difficult to put into words just how little I care.
Andrew Fifita has a friend, and maybe that friend is a terrible person. I mean he is in jail, and as we all know, only truly evil people end up there. But upon consulting my 1983 copy of A Child’s First Basic Logic Reader, I find that having a friend who is a criminal is not actually the same thing as being a criminal.
And in my view, if a professional sportsperson is not a criminal, I really couldn’t give less of a shit about what they do on their days off.(Click to Tweet)
I mean, it’s not that I’m not judgmental: I’m as willing as any red-blooded patriotic Australian to impugn a person’s character, and whenever a report reaches me of an athlete’s off-field behaviour, I speedily leap to firm conclusions about their upbringing and general moral fibre, and I am right to do so.
But judging is as far as I go: I don’t actually want anything to happen to them. If someone sends an abusive tweet or gets drunk in public or has sex in a toilet or calls the ANZACS a pack of bedwetting scaredy-cats, let ’em. If that someone happens to be employed by a major sporting organisation… let ’em anyway. I just don’t care that much, and frankly I’m in awe of anyone with so much spare energy that they do.
I mean, it’s not like it’s news to me that sometimes people suck. Hearing that Andrew Fifita visited a friend in prison hasn’t shattered my innocent illusion that nobody who breaks the law ever has friends, any more than learning that Todd Carney’s auto-rehydration efforts disabused me of the notion that men are never incredibly disgusting.
I know that people are awful for a large percentage of the time. Everyone knows that. Pretending that this ironclad rule only applies to people who aren’t good enough at sport to get paid for it is a more ludicrous fantasy than thinking that Nate Myles invented the practice of Doing A Nate Myles.
If the fact that insisting that sportsmen be held officially to account for being as dumb and gross and horrible as the rest of us is stupid and you’re stupid for doing it isn’t enough to convince you, please also consider: it’s also completely pointless. It’s a frustrating and ultimately fruitless endeavour trying to have sporting organisations sanction every one of their representatives who “bring the game into disrepute”, because they’re never going to do it properly, they’re always going to act in a wildly inconsistent and unfair manner, and their attempts only ever make things worse.
You can demand that the NRL, or the AFL or the FFA or CA or whatever combination of letters takes your fancy, take harsh action on those who you believe have misbehaved. But it will never achieve anything useful, because they’ll never apply their standards equally to players of different profiles and values to their sport; they’ll never act out of anything but a sense of self-preservation; they’ll never make any effort to “do the right thing” when the opportunity presents itself, but only when the question of adverse publicity enters the equation; and whatever they do won’t actually prevent the next incident anyway.
So how about this: when a sportsperson is accused of breaking the law, let the police investigate and determine whether charges should be filed, let the courts decide whether they’re guilty and let a judge calculate the appropriate punishment.
And when a sportsperson is not accused of breaking the law, let all of us decide for ourselves whether that sportsperson is an insufferable dickhead or not, and let’s all get on with our lives.
And for the love of God, let Andrew Fifita visit his bloody friends.