It’s hard to fathom what compels healthy young people, fortunate enough to be engaged in competitive recreational pursuits, to commit deliberate acts of brutality.
If the presence of police, security and extensive surveillance networks cannot stop stupidity on the streets, then it’s naïve to believe sport can totally rid itself of the same.
Athletes operate and abide within, but also in a make-believe realm that runs parallel with everyday life. A mental disorder germinating in childhood or imbedded in the DNA can serve as a loaded gun.
So too can drugs, personal financial or relationship pressures or performance anxieties, especially as age diminishes capacity and frustration leads to anger.
But rather than ignore the root causes, administer punitive action or push unhinged players out of a club structure and onto the streets, if there was a better response to valid mental concerns, it would seem to be a positive development for both the afflicted and potential victims.
The genetically and biologically derived Intermittent Explosive Disorder is characterized by extreme expressions of anger disproportionate to the situation at hand, often to the point of uncontrollable rage.
Occasionally mistaken for bipolar, impulsive violent acts are frequently accompanied by a sense of relief, and in some cases, pleasure. Treatment is achieved through behavioural therapy and medication.
Sceptics suggest IED is simply a made-up disorder to benefit the pharmaceutical industry, but according to Melbourne sport psychologist and university lecturer Dr Jacqui Louder, IED is a likely explanation for the red mist that regularly envelopes someone like Barry Hall. Combine a pugilist’s pedigree and physique and the potential for life threatening damage is real.
After one too many scary meltdowns at the Swans, now ‘Festival’ Hall is suiting up again, the Bulldogs even urging him to maintain the rage. So much for the mental health evaluation and counselling one might have expected.
“At the higher levels, players get some assistance but not necessarily from the right people, and mostly it’s reactive. Clubs think a few weeks off will fix things. It’s OK to seem nice and calm but how will they react when they’re under pressure again?” contends Dr Louder.
So much hand wringing still centres around the highest level, yet it’s the local paddocks where competitions struggle to impart the same level of authority and control, that recreational thugs masquerading as footballers are condoned, even lauded.
Apart from an endemic booze culture, where testing is financially prohibitive, performance enhancing drugs with violent side-effects have become a local scourge. The tribal sense of belonging on which clubs thrive also has an inbred cousin known as mob mentality.
It hardly helps that so many games are officiated by inexperienced teenagers or mature aged refs past their used by date. Every so often the unpleasant escalates to something more sinister. An all in brawl, a spear tackle or king hit behind play, and as per local games in Melbourne this year, knives and mallets after the siren.
Dr Louder believes not enough is done to instruct parents and coaches, whose roles go beyond teaching the game. She considers our 21st Century lifestyles are a major part of the problem.
“The stress levels of society, where we work longer hours and there’s no down-time, see people going to sport all wound up.”
Collingwood conducts a range of psychometric testing as part of profiling potential recruits.
“It doesn’t mean we won’t take them based on the results, but at least we go into it with eyes wide open and we know what we’re dealing with”, says Simon Lloyd, former club psychologist and high performance coach.
A harsher penalty alone, which for many fails as a deterrent or reform measure, is a simplistic response.
Both Dr Louder and Lloyd concur that an incentive system, where less than X incidents per year (on and off-field) equates to say a registration fee rebate and equivalent donation to a relevant awareness program, could promote the cause and do more to encourage clubs, especially at grassroots level, to take a more holistic view.
Perhaps a more effective punishment might include stints observing the physically and psychologically traumatised, and their families, in casualty and rehab.
Maybe then the hero of the cheap shot might twig that putting a player out of a game might have greater implications than fleeting sporting glory or personal gratification.
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