Recent events at St Kilda have caused many pundits to highlight a ‘culture problem’ within the club, many quick to point out that young men running around doing stupid things is a reflection of the problems of the club, rather than a reflection of the age group of the offenders.
You walk into any nightclub, party, sports club or any other place where 18-25s congregate and get on the booze, you’ll hear unsavoury language and see ordinary behaviour and immaturity.
These issues are not restricted to footy clubs.
Young men getting on the booze and finding trouble is something that has been going on forever and will go on forever into the future as long as we have youth and alcohol.
The difference between Nick Riewoldt and former wild-child centre half forward, Paul Van Der Haar, is that in Van Der Haar’s day, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, and no patrons at the pub who had a mobile phones equipped with a camera to capture any juicy moments.
These moments make the media for two reasons.
The first being the fact the acts perpetrated are usually of gross stupidity, the second being the fact the perpetrators’ have a public profile.
If Facebook and Twitter was around when Julia Gillard, Ted Baillieu or Simon Overland (chief commissioner of Victoria Police) were in their late teens there is a chance they would face the same issues our current batch of young sports stars face today.
The fact remains that young people (and some older) do stupid things. It does not make them any lesser or people or unfit to be a role model. It makes them human, it’s part of learning, growing and developing as a person.
I’m not condoning poor behaviour. These acts deserve a rap on the knuckles and the people carrying them out need to be read the riot act as I was when I was 18, as my father was when he was 18 and so on.
The behavioural problems are a culture of youth, not of sporting clubs. Does Swimming Australia have a bad culture because Stephanie Rice unwittingly wrote homophobic remarks on her Twitter page? Her lack of life experience meant she had no real idea the connotations of the word she used had.
When today’s crop of players hit their 40s and retire away from the media spotlight, the people of their generation with the public profiles will be our politicians, police commissioners and leaders of business and industry.
I would love to bet money that many of them will come a cropper for a Facebook photo that has been sitting there on the net for 20 years. It’s not a story today because these people are yet to gain a public profile.
Will we blame the culture of the organisation then or will we accept that this behaviour is a product of youth and the fact we were all young and stupid once upon a time?
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