I was nearly asleep when the news came on the radio about Michael Hurley’s hamstring, and it brought on a cold sweat and night terrors. It was devastating news to a Bombers supporter who was just this side of the abyss at the dark end of the twilight zone.
Luckily the reptilian bit of the brain that nods off last ran it through my processor again before I died in my sleep. Mick Hurley’s hamstring is in the news. I am an Essendon supporter. How concerned should I be? Should we don the gas masks now or wait for the sirens?
My inner lizard was perturbed. News is a serious business. They normally don’t air jokes during news bulletins, at least not when Syria and Iran are blowing raspberries at youse all and Rangoon is freeing its political prisoners. And Mick Hurley’s hamstring was in the news.
It was disorienting. I could still feel Christmas in my guts like it was just the other day and here we were pondering a soft tissue injury to an AFL players like it was, um, news. I was used to the Melbourne media going peculiar in September so obviously it was September already. Life really was like a dunny roll, I thought; the nearer you get to the end, the faster the years go round.
I got up to check the calendar because I was confused by the breaking news about Mick Hurley’s hammy when it was forty degrees and the bitumen was melting, and as I’d dared to hope it wasn’t September at all, or even March or February.
Indeed, my calendar, a freebie from the Happy Ending sports medicine clinic on Mount Road, said unequivocally that had Michael Hurley’s hamstring exploded into a million pieces this week or next week or even the one after that, he’d probably still be right for the start of the season because it was still only early bloody January, you morons – excuse the calendar’s French.
On that basis I decided I wouldn’t bother any more with the radio station that delivered me the Hurley news. I remember what I was doing when I heard about JFK, Martin Luther King, and Steve Irwin. And what was I doing when I heard about Hurley’s hammy? I was listening to a crap radio station – obviously.
The light seen and the dial tuned to a more intelligent number, I kicked back and prepared to be treated like a sensible man who didn’t give a toss about AFL footballer’s hamstring strains in the weeks after Christmas.
But no, over the next 48 hours, Hurley’s hammy strain was picked up by every news outlet in town including the ABC, which in turn spawned a series of deep and meaningful tabloid articles examining the enormous fuss surrounding Hurley’s hammy strain. What is the real truth behind Hurley’s hammy strain? Apparently it was just a pain in the bum. We all know how he feels.
How bad was it really, though? Well, I’ve looked into it and it’s a lot worse than we thought.
The Hurley hamstring story was a world exclusive that originated from the AFL media department. It was picked up by other news outlets because, well, it’s free and you just lift it, put your name on the byline and drop the boss an email letting her know you you are actually at work today despite all the evidence to the contrary cos you have in fact just filed a very big footy story. Yep.
Anyway, that was on Wednesday morning. By Thursday the networks were all giving it a spin and on Friday morning Hurley’s strained hamstring was still doing quick laps on the Fox Sports news ticker.
By Friday afternoon the fuss had died down to such a worrying degree the AFL media department hit the send button with some more, um, news: “Hurley’s hamstring on the mend.”
Rest, ice, compression and elevation apparently. Who’d have thought it? Even a Hurley hamstring strain can heal with some sophisticated sports science and a little time, and his career is not over after all. Down on your knees everyone, it’s a miracle.
Adding intellectual insult to abject inanity, the curious case of Hurley’s now-healing hammy also made it to the radio – just before I backed over it in the 4WD. Enough is enough. From now on, if we’re going to be listening to anything around here, it’s going to be me or it’s going to be vinyl.
But how will the AFL media department reach this household now? It’s not my problem. I already know how to get into my wallet. The AFL media department probably should have thought about that back in ’68 when Van the Man was doing ‘Astral Weeks’. There isn’t even a home-and-away fixture on the back of the lyric sheet, so there is every chance I will miss the season altogether because I won’t know when it’s on.
But that’s fine by me, it really is. Footy’s great but it’s not all that much fun as an onlooker having one’s intelligence downplayed ten times daily by the AFL’s proudly moronic media department and the inconsequential crap it churns out to a legion of shoddy, shortcutting so-called journalists who run the twaddle so they can get to pub earlier than yesterday to snigger at their readers’ famously lowbrow tastes and douse the burning frustration at the sports editor not giving them the Hemingway brief to write something of genuine substance for once.
That said, and that last sentence really was a Herculean effort – c’mon, be honest, you don’t see a lot of that kind of sentence around football since the Politburo took custody of the narrative to make it readable for every cretin and only cretins – I’ve gone and strained something in my buttock and I think it’s probably going to take a lot longer to heal that a strained hamstring.
As such, someone had better get on the blower and tell Demetriou it looks like I’ll be out for eight to ten hours. Ask him. One man’s bum pain is news well worth knowing. Pull him out of a meeting; wake him up from a deep sleep if you have to; whatever, just so long as he knows Dugald Massey is still around even when he’s trying to concentrate on other things.
Christ only knows why we’d be bothering him like that but do it anyway. Even if no one else gets the logic behind being irritating for the sake of it, he will. He’s shelling out a couple of million dollars a year of footy’s money to draw people’s attention to footy every two seconds even when there’s nothing whatsoever to see. He will understand.
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