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Like any human pursuit worth blood, sweat and tears, sport has always been the whole world writ small. We find in it all the shades of good and evil, nobility and pettiness, generosity and selfishness.
Above all, we find all that is true and real, and all that is false and illusory.
As in life, in sport we exercise our authentic being alongside our avoidances and self-deception.
Perhaps, with the death of Michael Chamberlain and our current understanding of the whole sorry saga of the Azaria affair, we may be reminded that sometimes microcosms enact the tragic and the sordid to devastating effect. How chance circumstance, naivete, self-indulgence, self-importance, cowardice, malice, and the full gamut of human folly can leave few, if any, with no need for self-reflection and at least a small mea culpa. A whole nation baited.
Similar is the case with the Essendon doping affair. And here, sport and the recurring dramas of human existence are clearly one.
As with the Chamberlains, too many of us acted as if we knew for certain what happened. Too many succumbed to our baser selves, especially the desire to cast stones and bring down tall poppies or shine forever tarnished heroic medallions. Too many involved the cast themselves as superior beings, authorised to inflate themselves by their role in the broad game, aka ‘industry’.
Vested emotional interests stretched from political ambitions and expediency to perverted tribal emotions. Who has not found some stain within during the long living of this tale?
I am ready to say that, because their self-knowledge was insufficient, most knew not what they did. Most of us knew not what we were being either. We can be so wrapped around with self-evasion and self-protective illusions that we are hardly conscious. We can be so invested in unreal images we have of ourselves and others, and of the nature and point of life itself, that we do things we might later see more clearly.
Yet, do them we did, and that defines at least a part of what we are to our dying day. I am the one who felt or did or said …
It is humbling and best to find the way to accept these kinds of actions and to respond accordingly, in the way that becomes quickly and blindingly obvious.
Some knew far better than others that the pact with the devil was near at hand, if not already made. Few of us have real and certain knowledge who they were. Some of them probably don’t care, or pretend to themselves they don’t. But I don’t write here about them.
Perhaps I recognise myself in the way James Hird expressed his sense of responsibility. Or, my own naivete in his boys’ own view of the unalloyed nobility of the game. Or my own vested psychological interest in trusting unwisely.
I tend to wake up far too late and find myself with a cost to pay. And what have I cost others? I find shadows active where I have sleepwalked my way, and there is no denying, this I have done.
I do not know what has taken James to where he is today, but if I were in his shoes, I would have been shocked to find that an honest and even courageous mea culpa did not make it all better. I would have woken from my witch’s sleep to see the deep, inescapable darkness in the nature of the human, how it implacably dogs even our best steps, and been shocked to my core.
Dante has a sign over the gate to Hell: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’. There are few who can gaze on that gate and not lose hope (abandon doesn’t come into it) for a moment or two.
There but for the grace of God.
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