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Ever seen baseball players fight? It’s one-in-all-in; they tear in from everywhere, dozens, even hundreds of these people, a squalling, brawling flock of angry birds, all leaping on each other and forming a giant organism of sorts, a human scrum of flailing arms and legs and heads and feet.
And when baseball players win something big, it’s not much different.
Be it the World Series or a pennant or the American Division East, or whatever these people play for, when baseball players win a Big Thing it’s one-in-all-in again, and everyone’s leaping onto the person who ripped off the final play in a big happy fat scrum of arms and legs, and heads, all of them yowling in ecstasy – we won I can’t believe it yippee. And so forth.
You can see them doing it, can’t you? And you needn’t have seen that funny movie with Leslie Nielsen to be seeing it in your mind’s eye.
If you’ve watched Fox Sports or ESPN and caught the denouement of a baseball series or the angst-filled pregnant moments after a pitcher bops a baseball off the batter’s bonce, then you’ll have seen mass celebration/punch-up.
They ‘clear the dugouts’ and a big mob of dudes gets jiggy in a funny, big ruck, a dry-humping man-orgy. It’s almost choreographed.
Wouldn’t happen in rugby league?
Yes, it would. Because indeed it does.
Because golden point.
Yes, golden point, which like Mickey Ds and Happy Days and Dr Pepper (which never really caught on because it tastes like cough syrup for Komodo Dragons) has come from America and given us much ‘entertainment’ with a cut-throat, winner-takes-all ethos that declares there must be a winner. You can’t have a ‘tie’, you must have someone who wins and someone who loses, yin demands it as does yang.
What happened was this: one day some suits and boots of our dear little National Rugby League went on one of those ‘study trips’ (cough, junkets) to the brassy old United States of America and brought back cut-throat, winner-takes-all golden point.
And they were very pleased with themselves for a while because Golden Point was new and fun and there was much leaping about at the end of tied games.
And it was all funky and fun, and better than both teams shaking hands and trudging off to kiss their sister.
But that was then and this is now, and golden point has become unfair and old, and bad.
For a start, the celebrations by the victors are ever more like baseball’s. Whoever rips off the final golden play is mobbed by his teammates, who leap like trout upon him.
You can ‘see’ them doing it now – Cam Smith, Johnathan Thurston, the nuggety little speedboat that is Cooper Cronk – stabbing the ball onto their hot little feet and slotting a single point, and running around until they’re feverishly leapt on by all their boys.
“Yippee! Two premiership points!” they exclaim, and there is much rejoicing.
Meanwhile, the other mob, who’ve smashed themselves up for the 80 minutes today known as ‘regular time’, once just known as the length of the damned game, those people walk off with nothing.
All that effort, same as the other mob’s. Big fat duck egg.
And that’s not fair. It’s not an equitable return. The team bops heads with another and earns parity after 80 minutes of hard slog and grind, but walks away with nothing because they were unlucky to call wrong in two-up.
Because that’s what golden point is: two-up. Unless some drunken backpacker launches the coins out of the ring, two-up is a binary result. And NRL captains could as well toss a coin.
The play in those last feverish minutes is a microcosm of the worst of rugby league – five tackles and a kick.
These are the tactics:
1) Rumble down field with your big blokes filling the legislated ten-metre gap between play-the-ball and ruck, and getting quick play the ball
2) Work the ball to the middle of the field with further big rumblers, centres and ‘edge forwards’. Get quick play the ball
3) Sling it back from dummy-half to whoever’s going to have a pot
4) Have a pot
5) Either a) leap about like baseball players fighting-cheering, or b) prepare to repel borders as the other mob proceed through steps 1-5 above.
And repeat.
Yes, television and radio types from Fox Sports and Triple M and dear old Aunty ABC dig it because their commentators can ratchet up the octaves in a final, excited orgasmatron of mad man-action, and hold those big long vowels loudly. It’s good fun, and good times, without question.
For golden point is entertaining. And rugby league is part of the entertainment industry. And so it’s about money, what the late Kerry Packer broke down as “eyeballs on screens”. And money is the ultimate arbiter of everything.
But it’s still not fair.
The vanquished – as the vanquished have since time immemorial – get royally shafted, certainly disproportionately given they’ve earned parity with the other team over the legislated 80 minutes of the game, and won nothing through simple pot-luck.