A fight breaks out when Adam Blair and Glenn Stewart are sent off. AAP Image/Action Photographics, Renee McKay
Craig Bellamy and Des Hasler got together this week to try to understand the minds of Adam Blair and Glenn Stewart. Sitting in front of them were two large pickling jars containing the brains of their favourite back rowers.
“Blairy, why oh why!” moaned Bellamy at the cerebral cortex of Blair. “We’ve already lost Kingy and Wolfman, what were you thinking Stewie?” hollered Hasler at Stewart’s frontal lobes.
A good question, that.
What were such experienced players like Blair and Stewart thinking when they came together on that fateful Friday night, sparking an all-in brawl that has ended the former’s season and threatened both their teams’ tilt at the premiership?
Were they even thinking, or was it just a ‘moment of madness’?
Are they actually insane? A leading neuroscientist described the autopsy of Texas mass murdering gunman Charles Whitman: –
“He [Whitman] requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had. Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault.”
A tumour not much larger than a five cent piece was found impinging on his brain, adversely affecting his feelings, attitudes and behaviour.
Blair and Stewart appear to be normal enough chaps off the field so I suppose we can discount the possibility that they have brain diseases, or brains the size of five cent pieces.
Being told that Blair waddled up to the initial melee and landed a couple of upper cuts was like hearing the news that John Cleese had written two self-help books and married an American. Unbelievable!
Brawls like the one we witnessed at Brookvale usually involve forwards. Being large they spend a lot of time smashing through walls of similar sized players, or getting flattened attempting to do so.
This is not good for the head.
Those jutting brows of accumulated scar tissue are physical evidence of this. So perhaps Stewart and Blair are showing the first signs of brain damage sustained from years of head on collisions.
The front of the brain contains the frontal lobes which are responsible for “SELF CONTROL and the ABILITY TO RECOGNISE FUTURE CONSEQUENCES RESULTING FROM CURRENT ACTIONS”….oops.
Gordon Tallis, who had a jutting brow before he started playing, was a different prospect.
Wayne Bennett said of him: “No way would you tell him to go out there and do a job on someone. That would have been like giving a gangster a machine gun and telling him not to kill anybody”.
Perhaps Tallis’ problem was testosterone overload.
Testosterone is produced in the testicles and because forwards have bigger testicles they have more of the hormone.
Admittedly, this doesn’t explain the small man syndrome exhibited by feisty halves, or why women, who have no testicles and ten times less testosterone, can bite, scratch, punch and throw lamps with the best of them.
Still, I think Hasler would be regretting not swapping Stewart’s plums for Daly Cherry-Evans cherries.
Discounting biological explanations for the brawl, we are left with tribal attitudes such as bashing someone is ok, and enjoyable, if it’s done to defend a teammate.
Young Darcy Lussick, the only player to get some decent punches in, has played only seven games and so is unlikely to be brain-damaged.
Referring to the events described by some old war horses as “sickening” Lussick gushed, “That was the best day of my life, to do that with my mates. We loved it out there”. I wonder if missing out on a grand final will turn out to be the worst day of his life?
The general consensus is that the low point of the night wasn’t the lame boxing exhibition by the two back rowers but rather the high speed blind-siding of Blair by Brett Stewart – an act of brotherly love though it was – and the subsequent five-on-one lasagne with Blair as the base, the Stewart brothers, Lussick, Foran, and Roberston as the pasta sheets and bolognese, topped off with a bechamel sauce of Storm interchange players.
Ryan Hinchliffe’s elbow has also been mentioned.
We now know that Blair’s season is over. Strangely, he got two weeks for hitting, and three for missing. And Stewart won’t be playing again unless Manly reach the grand final.
Bellamy and Hasler value aggression.
But if it could be proven that Blair and Stewart have cost their teams the premiership the coaches would gladly go to work on them with a bone saw and a pickle jar.
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