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“Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” – Don DeLillo, Underworld
The most striking thing about the American author Don DeLillo’s description of a famous baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers in 1951 isn’t how he describes the game, or the players, or even the “old rust-hulk of a structure” that was Yankee Stadium back in the day.
Nor is it his casual detailing of a crowd that includes Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, J Edgar Hoover, a contingent of late-arriving lesser celebrities and brilliantined supper club types, shift-workers still in their service gear, girls in woolly sweaters, guys picking lint off their sleeves and a loose assembly of “black kids and white kids up from the subways or off the local Harlem streets, lean shadows, bandidos, fifteen in all” waiting for their moment to jump the turnstiles and outrun the stadium cops.
The striking thing is how pulse-perfect he gets the mysterious force of attraction that brings the broad church of a large citizenry to a sporting event. We can make too much of what an event means and too little of what it is – anything that involves longing, history, sport and sweeping egalitarian appeal is likely to inspire rhapsodies of great passion and unreliable insight, as a rule.
DeLillo is no mid-Atlantic romantic. He’s simply observing the force and reach of a large attraction, the routine thing that transcends routine life.
It’s an all-points phenomena, local and universal, parochial and overarching. “Anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river… They bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations… Men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, going to a game.”
Admittedly you don’t see a lot of sailors on shore leave at AFL matches these days, although you do see a few AFL players behaving like them afterwards. But it’s close enough to the unofficial fan experience familiar to many of us who go to the football every week, the routine of chores and rituals, the bottlenecks in the carpark and the pedestrian hordes merging on the bridge, the minor chords that build to a pitch, or don’t.
Football was a force of attraction before it was an institution, and it was both before it was a market, a brand, a corporation, an industry or a story. The true nature of the constituency eludes the collective nouns used to capture it, including the big happy family of supporters, players, clubs, sponsors and broadcast partners that Gillon MacLachlan welcomed at last week’s 2016 season launch.
But fair play to him – the AFL boss gave it a decent tilt, catch-all wise. The industry was making serious progress toward achieving its broader strategic goals, he said. Football was now played by almost as many women as men. The AFL was committed to making it a game for all Australians, regardless of gender or background – hence the investment in the National Women’s Competition, club academies, and multicultural and indigenous programs.
Moreover, the “top line metrics” were sound, the CEO reported. Profitability and competitiveness were tracking in the right direction. Crowds, ratings and participation numbers were strong. He likened the $2.5 billion broadcast windfall to a lottery win, but was adamant it wouldn’t be squandered like one. It would be “invested for generational returns… Not just for six years, but 20.”
In a take-home nutshell: “Our game is in great shape.”
Well, maybe. It’s hard to argue with top-line metrics, but booms create their own large vacuums. The alternative view is that the football ‘industry’ has expanded at a rate that exceeds its capacity to deal with the implications of its expansion, or even grasp them. This interpretation is not without merit.
In half a generation, the AFL has evolved into an entity that better resembles a semi-autonomous state than an industry. It generates numerical immensities that read like the national accounts. It occupies a position of state-like centrality in the national life, as though to formalise the place it has always held in the national imagination.
It assumes responsibilities well beyond the boundaries of sport, lending its weight to mainstream causes from breast cancer to gender equality, campaigning for necessary social change, leading the fight against racism, homophobia, domestic violence and more.
It has fashioned itself into a force for the larger good, in short. This is not conceited, or tokenistic. It is sincere and appropriate to the scale of the vast influence it wields, which in some ways reaches further into Australian life than governments can, and is felt more quickly. And it makes a difference.
The problem is with the expanded orbit of the industry’s core business. If football is going to function like a quasi-state, its needs to have the attributes of a state – enough of them, anyway.
The football industry isn’t constituted like that. It doesn’t have the institutional knowhow to operate in its new expanded environment. It lacks the internal corpus of a state instrumentality, let alone a state. It doesn’t have the accumulated competence to navigate a world where authority is not simply a matter of market power.
The AFL’s governing body appears to have difficulty even at the lower end of statelike complexity. It struggles to explain or clarify its adjudications, or the delays in making them. It takes routine questions on notice. What Brent Prismall is permitted to do at the Western Bulldogs as a player under doping suspension is pretty straightforward – practically nothing. It’s not a question that should test the mettle of a governing body (or a club president used to running law firms, for that matter). It wasn’t exactly unforseeable.
The heads of the AFL state may be conversant with the road-tested principles that should always guide judgment in issues of large general consequence. But there’s not much evidence of it.
The CEO speaks in scripted vernacular and corporate shorthand. The chairman says little for the public record, and what he does say isn’t always fit for the public record.
The operations manager wanders in and out football tribunal hearings, conferring with the independent panel members and generally keeping an eye on things, much as the Commonwealth Attorney-General does at High Court hearings – or probably doesn’t.
Its Anti-Doping Tribunal doesn’t have the authority to force key witnesses to give evidence. It lacks the basic legal standing of a domestic or state arbitral tribunal and yet now finds itself part of an international hierarchy of courts, which has its headquarters in Lausanne, and is subject to Swiss domestic law.
The appeal isn’t an appeal at all, but a whole new hearing from which there is no appeal. This is almost unheard of in Australian sovereign law. It may be a necessary or lesser evil. But you’d want to be confident the governing body knows what it’s doing before it hitches its employees to that vast machinery. I’m not sure the players knew what rights they were signing away when they signed their standard AFL contracts.
The new reality for the AFL may seem paradoxical: in assuming the dimensions of a quasi-state, it is now bound to and by the regulatory machinery of the actual state, as it never has been before. Its codes of conduct coexist uneasily with the common and statute law. Some of the obligations imposed by its contracts are there to ensure that players observe community standards of behaviour when they’re out and about in the community. Yet they carry sanctions that don’t apply to the rest of the community.
It’s not overly cynical to suppose the interests of the community are probably less of a priority for the AFL than the protection of its brand. And brand integrity is a limited basis for regulating conduct in the world beyond football.
Some of the rights players surrender with a swish of the pen are the reasonable cost of playing AFL football. Others probably aren’t. But it’s likely that more provisions of the standard player contract will be challenged from now on.
Power is not authority. If the AFL wants to avoid more seasons in court it needs to realise it’s not a state unto itself but a state within a state. That means it can’t be a law unto itself, even for such a worthy cause as protecting its brand.
The AFL has always struggled with the concept of proper limits, and still does. The harsh justice dealt to Essendon by the AFL Commission in August 2013 was a travesty of a process that produced the right outcome. It exposed itself to plausible attack and allowed the guilty parties to assume the moral highground, in their own minds at least.
The alleged threat of violence against a woman by a man in a Chapel Street restaurant on a Saturday night last December was a matter for Victoria Police to investigate, end of story. Why football authorities imagine they have any jurisdiction there is a mystery the three-line press statement didn’t entirely clarify, I’m afraid. So don’t blame the public for assuming the worst.
The latter example is one of those periodic taps on the shoulder we make a point of ignoring. In larger or lesser part, football is still a subculture in the middle of the mainstream – unsavoury recent tendencies in crowd behaviour offer a further reminder.
Of course, it’s a lot more beyond and besides. Pollsters say electorates are as good as unreadable these days. Certainly the football state is a broader church than it used to be.
But the nation-state is a larger congregation again. One of them needs to learn its place.
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