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It is incredibly difficult to get people on board with a new sporting competition. The Big Bash League is just one example of this.
Not that the BBL is unpopular – it brings in big crowds, provides lots of fun for many Aussie families each summer, and is a crucial source of employment for trained dancers.
But it hasn’t really ignited the passions of the population the way that sport at its zenith does.
It hasn’t produced the heated arguments the morning after games, the tribal fury, the life-consuming commitment of the masses that the grand tradition of our gamesmen tend to generate.
The recently-announced National Rugby Championship will face similar problems in drumming up not just interest, but absolute, fiery passion in its contests. It will doubtless be an excellent nursery for local rugby talent and result in much high-quality football, but will it capture our imaginations? After all, we’ve tried this before and it didn’t exactly go off like a catherine wheel.
The reason it’s difficult for new sporting championships, whether big-budget T20 cricket leagues or domestic rugby tournaments, to dig deep into our sporting psyche is simple, and it can be demonstrated as easily as looking at this weekend’s AFL fixture.
On Friday, Richmond play Collingwood, and there will be huge crowds showing up to yell and scream and bellow profanity over the fence. The atmosphere will be electric, and despite being a Round 4 meeting between two teams in the bottom half of the ladder, it will be a tense and ferocious clash treated by everyone as a matter of life and death.
Because the magic ingredient that every sporting competition wants, but only the successful ones get, is hatred.
The AFL is by far the dominant sporting competition in this nation, and it wouldn’t have anywhere near that status if it weren’t for the complex and ancient rivulets of loathing that run through the footballing landscape. Football stakes its reputation on its blockbusters, and blockbusters are only possible when you can create large segments of the population who irrationally hate each other whenever clad in certain colours.
Thus, Richmond v Collingwood is massive, because the Tigers hate the Pies and the Pies hate the Tigers. Carlton v Collingwood is even bigger, because they hate each other even more. In fact, almost anyone playing Collingwood is a big game, because everyone hates Collingwood and Collingwood hates everyone. And Carlton’s not far behind – that’s why they’re so successful.
Look at the GWS Giants. Their future success depends not just on community engagement and on-field promise, but on cultivating the hatreds on which sport thrives. That’s why Lance Franklin heading to the Swans was such a godsend – in a burgeoning, still-weak rivalry, the huge jolt given to it by Buddy’s double-cross of the Giants in order to head across town was vital.
Now the westies hate the Swans for poaching the big fish, and the Swans hate the westies for trying to take over their turf, and everyone hates Buddy for being such a money-grubbing showpony, and the hate spreads across the land like a vast sea of hundred-dollar bills.
It’s not that hatred affects the quality of sport – a great game can be played just as easily without it. A great game can also be played in an empty stadium, but administrators are rarely all that chuffed with it.
In all the most successful sports, hatred is at the heart of the biggest moments and greatest moneyspinners. In the NRL, the game’s poetic savagery is most potently on display when, say, the Storm play Manly, in a recent but quite incendiary example of inter-club hatred. Parramatta v Manly stirs similar emotions, or will do, if Parramatta pulls its finger out sometime this century.
In fact, blood boils whenever Manly plays anyone, because it’s Manly, and unless you’re born with Sea Eagle in your blood, you’re born with a gene that causes you to froth at the mouth whenever you even glance at Geoff Toovey. The same goes for Canterbury, the working man’s Manly.
But of course rugby league has the greatest hatred of all in State of Origin. it is doubtful there has been a war in all recorded history that caused men to loathe other men with the intensity with which Queenslanders loathe anyone with a blue jersey at Origin time.
And though New South Welshfolk were a bit slower to board the hate train, by now we’re all heartily sick of the gloating northern bastards and when the series rolls around, all on both sides stand ready to shed blood at the slightest provocation and with no real clear idea of why we feel this way.
Rugby union has the Bledisloe, cricket has the Ashes, and a whole range of sports have anyone at all versus South Africa. It’s hatred that makes the wheels of sport spin so fast and furious, and without it the games we play just wouldn’t be the same.
So the National Rugby Championship, if it really wants to embed itself in our culture, had better move pretty quickly to make the University of Canberra hate NSW Country, or Brisbane City see red when they think of North Harbour.
Or else we, the great Australian hatred-loving public, just won’t pay attention.